The typical day in the life of an elite advisor may be chock-full of appointments with clients, strategic alliance partners, staff members and speaking engagements with your target groups. With so many things to do and such little time to get them accomplished, advisors often overlook business-building measures like prompt referral follow-ups and maintenance tasks like contacting clients for birthdays and anniversaries.
Leading advisors are spending less than 2% of their time prospecting, according to Advisor Impact, a leading research firm. So how do you handle the need to fight off the competition, find new affluent clients and balance an overcrowded schedule?
The answer doesn’t involve being cloned or increasing your staff, but adding action plans into your daily routine. Yes, action plans! Our military is considered the most elite in the world because of their deliberate and consistent planning for the inevitable. Adding trackable action plans for new clients, seminar registration, age 70 ฝ and many more items can help you manage all of your tasks and most importantly, they give you more time for prospecting, converting leads to clients and keeping current clients satisfied.
To help you infuse action plans into your practice, here are three simple steps that you can implement today!
Step One – Map out all the steps
When you make your marketing plans you include things like seminars, client appreciation events, direct mail campaigns and client communication programs. Each of these projects involves several steps. You need to list those steps out. For instance, you shouldn’t do a client appreciation event without a location, date, invitations, refreshments or entertainment.
Step Two – Put the steps in the right sequence
When you bake a cake you have to pre-heat the oven and mix the ingredients before you put the batter in the cake pan and the cake pan in the oven. The same thing is true for each marketing effort. So now go back to your list of tasks and put them in the right sequence.
It would help to put a time line on the tasks. For instance, if you are going to mail client newsletters at the end of every month, you need to get the newsletter put together and send it to the printer. You need to take into account the time the printer will need to complete printing. Then the newsletters need to get mailed, which also takes some time. All of this means, you might need to finalize the content by the 10th of the month in order to get the job back from the printer and mailed by the 25th of the month.
Step Three – Delegate and automate the tasks
What you created in step one and two were action plans. Now, you need to delegate them in a trackable format. Automating your action plans and marketing campaigns is the best way to manage your busy schedule. Furthermore, it’s more reliable, cost-effective and time-saving. It will allow you to designate a group within your database like all clients. It will allow you to schedule that group to receive a customized newsletter or email on a specific date and then record in the database that the client was sent the newsletter, greeting card or email.
Building a marketing campaign or client communication plan is just a series of action plans that are linked together. For example, let’s say you are hosting your client appreciation event. That action plan could be built to send a reminder to yourself and your staff when the deadline arrives for choosing a location. Another reminder goes to you to finalize the invitations. The action plan can then send the invitations to the group of clients that you pre-selected. It can send a reminder to you and your staff to call and confirm the RSVPs on the day before the event. It can send a follow-up ‘thanks for attending’ card to those who attended and a ‘sorry we missed you’ card to those who didn’t. And it can record all of this in your database.
Over the span of a year, you might combine newsletter mailings, client events, annual client review appointments and even regularly scheduled phone calls into your client communication plans.
For your marketing campaigns, you might create a series of “drip marketing” contacts to follow-up on seminar attendees. These could be personalized post cards or letters that are mailed automatically over a two- or three-week period. The concept of marketing a campaign to a targeted audience using a pre-defined series of contacts is another type of action plan.
If you are seeking to learn more about using action plans to better manage your business and to allow more time for prospecting, client conversions and up selling to existing clients, visit BuildYourMarket.com (http://www.buildyourmarket.com/). You will find fully-automated, pre-packaged action plans for just about every imaginable event.
Reprinted with permission from the Ezine: AdvisorMarketingNews.com- "Delivering Today’s Trends the Advisor Professional" (http://www.advisormarketingnews.com/)
[tags]Financial Advisor, web-based, on-line marketing tools, BuildYourMarket.com, CRM, Drip Marketing,[/tags]
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