But Won’t They Think I’m Being Pushy?
Introduction
At the tail-end of Covid we started working with a wealth management firm that had a number of offices across the UK. The firm believed that lockdown and working from home had impacted the quality, and quantity, of new business opportunities the team of financial advisers and investment managers had generated for themselves.
Challenge:
The wealth planners and investment managers all had existing books of clients, often inherited from former colleagues who had retired or moved to different firms. The team were perfectly happy working with their existing clients, tweaking portfolios or updating financial plans and dealing with the clients’ new business opportunities if they arose. They were delighted to receive an unsolicited referral for a client, rightly feeling that this was a reward for the great service they delivered.
But unfortunately, many of the team just didn’t feel comfortable asking their existing clients for introductions to their friends, family or work colleagues. Their reluctance was based on the things they were telling themselves about asking for referrals. “I’m not sure I know what to say”, “My clients wouldn’t like it if I did that”, or “They'll think I’m being pushy”. This is a common belief held by most relationship mangers across most industry sectors.
The result of this unwillingness to ask had left a gap in the firm’s revenue and income. Was there a way we could change their mindset around asking for referrals, build their confidence, and share a successful approach and process to help the team ask for and win more referrals?
Solution:
We met with each member of the team to learn more about them, their client banks, and their experience of sales. Based on this information we then designed a series of workshops to build their confidence, change their mindset and highlight specific ways of creating referral opportunities. We also agreed our client could hold us accountable to a set of objectives that included an agreed number of new opportunities entering in to the firm’s new business pipeline.
Outcome:
This learning was then supported with regular coaching sessions with each wealth planner and investment manager to answer their questions, role play scenarios and, importantly, hold them to account on asking their clients for introductions. The good news was that a significant number of ‘asks’ were made and just over half of those resulted in genuine new business opportunities.
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