Sales professionals perform only professional activities and no clerical or administrative activities. In the financial advising business, there are three professional activities:
a) Communicate with prospects about having them become clients;
i) You should not be doing the work of prospecting.You are to get involved with
a prospect only when a prospect has indicated interest and the financial
resources to work with you. Big producers do not waste time like most advisors
do– identifying prospects from the sea of suspects. They have an
assistant or a system to do that. More on this later in the chapter on
marketing.
b) Communicate with clients to retain them, or about doing additional business; studies show that the larger producers have more contacts a year with clients while smaller producers have fewer contacts
c) Design procedures for others to follow. You’re the business owner, so it will always be your job to tell others what to do and lay out their work for them.
Think through these above3 three activities carefully and you will see that everything else you do during the day is unimportant and can be delegated. If you see that, you’re on your way to being a million dollar producer.
If you have been in McDonald’s recently, you may have noticed that they are the employer of last resort. They seem to hire the people that no other employer wants—people who cannot think and cannot listen. I order a Big Mac with no cheese and two seconds later the cashier asks, “do you want cheese with that?” Brain Dead. Yet, no matter where you go in the world, the McDonald’s product is amazingly consistent. That’s because McDonald’s has systematized and documented everything. There is an entire manual on how to make fries. The genius behind McDonald’s is that the company has taken something as simple as making fries and removed every ambiguity.
Here is what you and I see to making fries:
Open the bag
Dump the fries into the bin
Put it in oil for 2 minutes
Dump it out
Sprinkle with salt
But these instructions are totally inadequate. Look how many questions are unanswered:
Where do I get the bag of fries?
Do I tear it open or use a scissors?
Do I dump the entire bag into the bin at one time or just part?
How do I know when it’s been 2 minutes—I don’t own a watch
Does the oil ever need to be changed?
How will I know?Etc, etc.
If you want to be a million dollar producer and have a business that runs on auto-pilot you will need to document every little process in your office so that someone other than you can do it. You need to think about every little question or exception that can arise and document the handling of that issue just like in the McDonald’s example above.
This has tremendous benefits:
1. It is the first step to becoming a million dollar producer without needing to work more than six hours a day
2. When an assistant quits, you’re business does not come to a halt as everything for the new person is documented
3. You have a way to make continual incremental improvements to your business by knowing the current procedure to compare to a potential new procedure
Before we proceed, let’s take a look at your local doctor’s office so you can see these three activities in action. When you call your doctor’s office, does the doctor answer the phone? No, he has a receptionist (in the financial services business, we call this person a service assistant).
When you arrive for the appointment, does your doctor take your temperature and blood pressure? No, he has a nurse do that (in the financial services, we call this person as ales assistant).
The doctor sees you ONLY when it’s time to generate revenue. He gets involved in none of the non-revenue-generating activities of his practice (as you do in yours). As a result, he earns a lot more than you do. He is a professional, he is a million dollar producer because he pays someone else to do the non-professional activities.
And do you see the doctor’s staff constantly asking him questions or do they seem to know exactly what to do? They each have their procedures and they do their business efficiently thereby allowing the doctor to generate income
Why would any rational person (you?) not hire some one for $20 per hour when your time is worth $200 an hour?The next time you are about to make some crack about the financial knowledge of physicians, think twice, since it seems they know a lot more than you do about making money, hiring help, systematizing their business and being a million dollar producer.
This post contributed by Javelin Marketing
