How much time do you spend with wealthy, potential clients explaining what you do? How much effort do you put into detailing your processes? Your background? Your services and how you deliver them? When in the sales efforts are you doing all this explaining?
A cornerstone for professionals seeking to build a meaningful practice focused on the affluent is their ability to communicate their expertise. By conveying that they are indeed authorities in their respective fields, advisors are significantly more likely to win over affluent prospects. This has prompted many professionals to put an awful lot of time and effort into explaining what they do for the affluent as well as how they do it. But such an approach is counterproductive and may drive away wealthy prospects.
SInce professionals are often referred to affluent prospects, these wealthy individuals generally know their capabilities. Affluent individuals know what you do and why you’re meeting with them. Unless you're asked to do so, explaining your expertise in detail can demonstrate a lack of sensitivity and respect. Yet it’s quite common for professionals to take the conversation in this direction.
Let’s keep in mind that there is an abundance of investment advisors, private client lawyers, accountants, life insurance producers and so forth and so on. At the same time, the affluent are intensely sought after by these professionals, all pretty much claiming to be brilliant and very intent on letting prospects know this in the first meeting.
But the wealthy prefer not to be cajoled and made subject to the peddling of services and products. That's why most successful professionals will briefly iintroduce themselves and their services, then switch gears and seek to learn about their affluent prospects.
The affluent typically don’t want to know about you, your services and even your credentials past the rudiments until they know you care. The wealthy want to work with high-caliber professionals who are concerned about them. Only then can they feel confident that they’ll get the services that make sense and that they’ll be treated responsively and well.
While this perspective and approach is fundamental and understood by most professionals, it’s rarely embraced the way it should be. Professionals, by and large, retreat to their comfort zones—talking about themselves.
If you want to be exceedingly successful cultivating the affluent, have enough confidence in your talents, skills and insights that you don’t need to address them. Instead, put all your efforts into learning about your affluent prospects. In a nutshell, don’t sell, care.
