He’s full of big ideas with practical applications. That’s not the norm with consultants — most are really good at generating ideas but implementation?
That’s someone else’s job.
Dan Waldschmidt’s not like that. He’s a strategist who works with large, multinationals to differentiate themselves — to increase sales to real people by developing real relationships.
Dan joined me and a select group of financial professionals this week on a Google Hangout (if you want to know about this, you definitely should sign up for my email list or my free 7 day email bootcamp to jumpstart your marketing).
Our event?
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Why Your Marketing is a #Fail: New Ideas for Big Growth for Financial Firms
Here’s Dan Waldschmidt’s 4 steps to big growth.
1) Define your ideal customer
Dan said this is hard to do for many advisors. Focusing on a defined set of customers frightens them — why give up sales? why forgo revenues?
Well, without focus, you’re not driving your sales process. You’re not building a lasting pipeline. You are being opportunistic, not strategic.
You need to define your ideal customer.
Action points: Build out an ideal customer spreadsheet
- Take an Excel spreadsheet and write down 8-10 qualities that your ideal customer should embody (like, what type of investment strategy, net worth, proximity to your office/home, age, etc.)
- under each quality, create a best case scenario and a minimum (so, if I’m targeting 55 year olds, best case is 55 and worst case may be a young, smart-ass 35 year old client). This defines a target client range for you to work in between.
2) Majorly research your ideal customer
Dan’s consulting firm pays $25k-$30k to get access to people databases like CapitalIQ, Infoworld, and Lexis Nexis. That’s where they fill up their sales pipelines.
Instead of hiring Dan for $500k to develop a marketing and sales strategy for your firm, go to your public library. Do the work.
Many public libraries offer access to these databases for free. These tools will help you dial-in on your audience and generate lists of people that fit your ideal client profile (Step 1).
Action point: Make a list of ideal-client prospects
- Dan recommended InsideView which has a free and $99/month version that gives you access to some of these same databases. Start defining your ideal customers and building lists of ’em.
3) Compile your ideal customer prospect list
- Dan recommended connectedhq.com — it takes all your connections on all social networks and pulls them together into 1 unified address book.
- Connect with people, go online, find your prospects, bookmark them, add them to you master target list, add them to your address book
4) Make contact with your contacts, strike up relationships
- Create a sequence of emails: Dan recommends creating a sequence of 10-11 emails that you can use to initiate contact with your prospects.
- Focus on prospect — it’s not about you: It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, these emails are not about you. It’s about the prospect — always start with the word ‘you’.
- 1st email: gently get your name in front of your prospect. That’s the only goal of your first contact. Find some overlap with your prospect — I noticed you’re involved with the YMCA or a local school…
- Length of email: 4-5 sentences maximum
- End of email: Always end an email with 1 question. It could be something as simple as ‘OK?’.
- Frequency of emails: Send 1 email every 8-11 days so that within 90 days, your prospect will have received 10 emails or so from you.
- Personalization: Don’t use email software like aweber or MailChimp to send these types of emails. There is opt-out language (if you no longer want to be subscribed to this email, click here!). Real people don’t talk that way. Send these emails from your emailer in your voice.
- hockey-stick sales pitch: your first emails shouldn’t push any of your services. You’re getting to know your prospects and building rapport. But as you approach the end of you 10 email sequence, you’re going to ramp your sales pitch.
- What to do when a prospect doesn’t respond: You should only have one hyperlink in every email you send (to your blog, website, services, about us page — wherever you want the prospect to go), so clear out any extraneous links. Now, if you’re using a more powerful marketing platform (like Infusionsoft or my favorite, OfficeAutopilot), you can begin tracking the activity of the prospect on your website. Maybe she’s not responding to your emails but she’s reading the emails and spending time on your website. Send a non-creepy email after tracking such activity with a tie-in to the type of content she’s looking at on the website (hey, have you seen my recent blog piece on X?). You know where to send your prospects because they’ve shown you exactly what they’re interested in.
- Do’s and Don’ts: Don’t autoplay any video, no creepy people walking around on your website, talking (sorry, Ric Edelman). Also, 40% of emails are read on mobile devices, so don’t make them overly long or complicated.
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Case Study: Large Wealth Manager
Dan implemented these same steps for a large wealth manager. Normally, advisors were getting a 1% response to their emails — only 1% of the emails the advisor was sending were getting opened. After making these changes, Dan said 50% of the people emailed responded to the email sequences.
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[notify_box font_size=”13px” style=”yellow”]Go check out more marketing goodness at DanWaldschmidt.com. While you’re at it, sign up for my free financial services bootcamp if you’re serious about taking your business to the next level.[/notify_box]