To be exceedingly successful as a professional focused on the affluent, you need to effectively implement four sets of behaviors.
Deliver high-quality services and products to clients. Few professionals will ever admit to being less than very competent. In a survey of 611 financial advisors, for instance, 96.2 percent reported—not surprisingly—that they were exceptionally adept at their specialties.
Because of the nature sourcing affluent clients and the need to often maintain these relationships, being able to deliver high-caliber solutions is indeed critical.
Manage your practice profitably. Consider a financial advisor doing about $1.8 million in production. That’s an attractive number. The only complication is that it costs him a little more than $2.1 million a year to run his practice. About four out of five financial advisors—81.7 percent—report that they recognize the need to do a better job managing their practices.
A lack of business savvy tends to be a drag on a professional’s abilities to make his practice as profitable as it could be. To be successful, advisors or their staff need to be attuned to the numbers and use them to make informed business decisions.
Ensure there’s chemistry between you and the affluent. Chemistry is the rapport you have with wealthy prospects and clients. While there are all sorts of behavior modification strategies and techniques that professionals can use to enhance chemistry, in many instances professionals either click with high-net-worth prospects or they don’t.
Source high-caliber affluent prospects on a preferential basis. You’re not in business unless you have good clients. And you don’t have good clients unless you can find high-caliber prospects and motivate them to work with you. This means you have to be able to source excellent prospects who fit your expertise.
Sourcing high-caliber prospects with great regularity tops the list as far as difficulty is concerned as well as the number one activity that translates into business success. On the one hand, being able to access high-caliber prospects is habitually cited as the foremost factor in building a viable and lucrative practice.
While professionals tend to be very confident in their abilities with respect to the other three factors, sourcing high-caliber prospects (i.e., the wealthy) is often the big stumbling block to a more valuable and rewarding business. It seems not to matter whether professionals are fabulously well connected or less so; they all tend to want more and better clients.
Many professionals can significantly enhance their own wealth by becoming more adept at each of these four best practices.
