Imagine pulling up your calendar for tomorrow morning.
You have a meeting scheduled with a prospective client.
Not just any prospective client.
It is THE ideal client for your business.
The type of client who immediately goes to the top of your “A-List.”
The type of client you wish your entire book of business was made up of.
With that meeting in mind, answer these four questions on a scale from 1-10.
How confident are you that…
- Your meeting will have the potential of leaving a strong impression, with prospects feeling inspired and possibly saying to their spouse, “That was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had around money.”
- Your meetings have the potential to move the “trust dial” to the point that they trust you more than any Advisor they’ve ever met with.
- Your meeting can help clarify their most deeply held values and closely held goals.
- Your meeting can create an emotional connection beyond the numbers that turn a prospect into a life-long client.
You’re not alone if you answered less than “10” on all four questions.
And it’s certainly not your fault.
If you’re like most Advisors, you’ve probably looked up “the best questions to ask prospects in a first meeting.”
You’ve picked up some ideas of what to ask by listening to podcasts with other Advisors explaining how they conduct their meetings.
You’ve implemented the tips you gathered from talking with fellow Advisors.
But it still feels like something is missing.
It has yet to quite click.
To help explain why that’s the case, think about your favorite sports team, comedian, or musician. Do they show up a few minutes before the event, walk out, and expect to perform at their best? Of course not!
They dedicate significant time to planning and preparation beforehand, making sure they’re in the right mindset to perform effectively. Afterward, they take time to debrief, decompress, and recover
Just like sports teams recognize that success involves more than showing up and playing the game.
As artists and comedians know, success requires more than simply showing up and performing.
Delivering and conducting the ultimate discovery meeting requires more than focusing on just the meeting itself, the questions you ask, the data you gather, etc.
There are four pillars for delivering and conducting the ultimate discovery meeting:
- Mindset
- Pre-Meeting
- Meeting
- Post-Meeting
Let’s walk through each one.
Mindset: Winning The Mental Battle
Mindset is the least “sexy” but the most important.
Until you master your mindset, you’ll never deliver the experience you want or achieve the outcomes you desire. Have a routine before meetings that shifts you into the right mindset.
Here are two key mindsets you have to master:
- You’re not the hero. You’re the guide.
It’s not your meeting. It’s the clients’ meeting. And the prospect/client is the expert on themselves.
Thus, the purpose of the meeting is to guide them through a conversation where you learn about them.
- Detach From the Outcome
Focus on delivering a meaningful and impactful experience for each individual, regardless of whether they become clients.
The quality of your meeting hinges on calibrating your mindset.
Pre-Meeting: Prepping The Prospect for Success
There is a lot of uncertainty (and even anxiety) around meeting with a Financial Advisor.
And that uncertainty, anxiety, or stress often goes unaddressed and is the main culprit keeping your meetings from being great.
Thus, you must aim to reduce stress and anxiety to increase connection and quality.
The brain needs a roadmap to alleviate uncertainty. In other words, the more clarity a person has about what to expect, the more at ease they feel.
Be intentional about setting the scene for what to expect using:
- Pre-Meeting Emails: Send at least one email leading up to the meeting laying out precisely what they should expect
- Agendas: Once you’re in the meeting, show them the agenda. That’s the exact type of roadmap the brain needs.
The Meeting: Build Trust & Uncover What’s Important
Make no mistake, the key to delivering the ultimate discovery meeting requires focusing on more than just the meeting itself; this part is still absolutely crucial.
It could be an entire article on its own.
But there are three critical components of nailing the actual meeting:
- “The Trust Zone”
The Trust Zone occurs in the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting. How you navigate this window dictates the rest of the conversation (and relationship.) Focus on getting the person into a conversational flow by asking easy, exciting, and emotional questions. It’s imperative that you formulate those questions before the meeting.
- Why > What
Focus less on what the person wants to accomplish and more on why they want to accomplish it. For example, someone may say they want to retire at age 65. That’s WHAT they want. But to take the meeting and relationship to another level, find out WHY they want to retire at 65.
- Vague Goals to Vivid Visions
One problem with goals is the need for more clarity. Most goals are vague, such as “we want to spend more time with family.” Research shows that clarity is a powerful force for cultivating emotion and inspiration. Ask follow-up questions that turn the vague goal into a vivid vision, like, “We want to host our grandkid’s birthday parties on our back deck, where we’ll eat and laugh while they play games in the yard.”
Post-Meeting: Weaving It All Together
This pillar is commonly often overlooked and under-executed.
Think back to the last time you went on a first date. And it went AMAZING.
The number one thing you want to know is: What happens from here?
It’s the same concept with this meeting. It’s not about how you start but how you finish.
You’ve just had a transformative meeting and an eye-opening conversation. Now, it’s time to weave it all together.
Two things you should do after every meeting:
- Recap Email
In the 24–48-hour window after the meeting, send an email recapping the important things you talked about. That doesn’t mean including only the financial data. Include their “why” and their vivid vision. It inevitably makes the person feel heard and understood. (You might even get emails back saying just that!)
- Capture Emotional Data
Advisors have access to tools that can help them efficiently locate a client’s financial data, often within seconds. Advisors have a system for capturing and tracking every single data point. However, very few have a system for capturing, organizing, and tracking emotional data. Make sure you have a template in your CRM to capture emotional data. It’s not the kind of data you want to forget!
The Ultimate Discovery Meeting Ratio
Lastly, if you want an easy way to guide the flow of your discovery meetings, here’s a ratio to keep you on track.
80/10/10
80% – Client’s Life
10% – Money
10% – You
Using this ratio can help keep your meetings focused and productive.
Nail these four pillars, and you might hear your client say, “That was one of the best conversations I’ve had around money.”
