Written by: Todd Colbeck
Don’t wait until December to make your end of year push, start now.
The worst feeling is narrowly missing your end of year business goals when you know it was just because you lost focus. The best feeling is hitting them earlier than expected. In this article I will introduce you to 3 quarterly campaigns that can ignite your 4th quarter results so you can coast into December and not struggle.
The 3 campaigns are:
The thing with campaigns is it helps you focus and focus is the key element in having a good result in any quarter or year. Let’s start with the Low Hanging Fruit campaign.
As a financial professional, you likely have clients that have not implemented all of your recommendations. If you do financial planning it his highly likely some of those (all of those?) plans have not been fully implemented. If you don’t do financial planning just get a list of prospects you met that you didn’t convert and clients that have not implemented all of your recommendations. Collectively I call this low hanging fruit because these are ideas that clients may already be familiar with and at the time you just did not implement.
The 4th quarter is the time to revisit those clients. After you make a list of people with unimplemented strategies next start scheduling appointments. Ideally schedule those appointments before December. Then meet with the clients and start by reviewing what has been going well in their account. Ask them how they feel and then remind them that they could be doing better by implementing whatever strategy you identified as needing to revisit. Present the strategy and implement and you are well on your way to having a great 4th quester.
The next campaign is a lot of fun; I call it the Good News campaign. The good news campaign focuses on meeting with clients that are happy working with you and the results they are getting and then getting referrals. It is very fun and you just need to begin by reviewing your accounts and looking for what has worked well this year. The better the result the more fun the campaign. For example, do you have any stock positions that had good moves? Any type of good news announcements related to an investment? You really want to find one of your recommendations that you can showcase.
Next make a list of clients that got good results because of that recommendation. Then pick up the phone and start calling. Begin by sharing the good news about their account or investment and then ask their opinion about it. Hopefully they like the experience and that is great. All you need to do next is remind them that they might know someone who would appreciate a courtesy call so you can let them know what is going on in regards to your future recommendations. Remember, this is just a courtesy call and people can decide for themselves what they want to do. If they are happy why wouldn’t they want to let their friends know right?
Finally, there is one thing we all dread about the 4th quarter, procrastination. How many times do we hear the phrase “After the Holidays” when trying to do business in December? That’s what brings us to the “After the Holidays” campaign.
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You already know that December is generally a month for people to put things off until after the New Year. To begin this campaign, schedule the bulk of your meetings for October and November in advance. You already know there is a December roadblock so try to “drive” around it rather than straight into it. If you must meet in December, you need a way to remove procrastination before it even comes up. Let people know that you MUST meet before the New Year and this is why you are scheduling the appointment. Certain financial strategies need to be implemented in this calendar year in order to benefit from them such as tax loss harvesting. Let them know the importance of implementing before the New Year to help remove that typical December lethargy.
So in review, we I have discussed three 4th quarter campaigns to help you focus early and close the year strong. The Low Hanging Fruit campaign focuses on driving sales and reducing risk for clients who have not implemented your strategies, the Good News campaign focuses on growing client loyalty and generating referrals, the After the Holidays campaign focuses on removing procrastination as an obstacle to meeting with clients/ Choose the one that best suits your needs and run with it.