Financial Planner Marketing, Prospecting, Sales, and Closing Tools to Help Keep Your Sales Funnel Full of Leads, Suspects, Prospects, and Clients

These industry-specific sales tools are mostly for commission-based financial planners working in Broker Dealer mode (AKA selling loaded mutual funds and life insurance company products ). There’s a little value for fee-only advisors too.

These are not for consumers, unless you need inexpensive help with basic sales skills, more core motivation, or you just like sales tips in sound bite form.

They’re designed to help you increase your sales funnel ratios, and are old, basic, and primitive compared to other professional database-driven tracking, CRM, and marketing systems. But they also don’t cost an arm and a leg and there’s still plenty of value, especially for the price.

These Products are Comprised of:

• A few cold calling phone scripts used back in the good ‘ol days, before the advent of the government’s Do Not Call list. They’re designed as lame teasers to get people to agree to either let you come into their homes and/or get them to come into your office for the first free complementary introductory meeting.

• Several generic letters for sending to leads, suspects, prospects, and clients, as they progress through your sales funnel. Most are designed as pre-appointment letters to help convert suspects into prospects, to help ensure you don’t screw up, and to help make it so they’ll actually show up for appointments. They tell what to bring with them, give homework assignments, and in general help move them glitch-free through your sales funnel ASAP.

• Sample investment newsletters so you can get an idea of what to do here. Most financial advisors or money managers send out quarterly newsletters both to let their people know what’s going on with the firm, to keep them interested, and of course to drum up new business and referrals.

So it’s a natural way of course to include a piece that comments on the economy, markets, and what happened to both everyone’s portfolios as a whole, then comment on what happened on an individual client basis.

Since most custodians are too lame to send out quarterly investment portfolio reports these days, most investment advisers spend time and money on actual portfolio management software on their own, so they can send paying clients the actual quarterly reports they expect and deserve.

• Mundane checklists to follow before you dial the phone and/or get ready / pack up to go out on an appointment.

• A simple referral getting tool that actually works.

• Over two dozen pages in Word docx form (which is about 75 pages of hard copy book) of Motivational Ramblings. tips, how to handle common objections, and miscellaneous sales tips for the financial services salesperson.

Many financial sales books were read from ’88 to ’91 when I was in sales learning the ropes. Then I distilled most everything of value into this piece that was read weekly, to motivate me. BTW: Some of the best sales books on the subject were published in the last century by the late Zig Ziglar. one of the best whole life insurance salesmen of all time.

Most everything is just generic, FYI, or a template and is not in a form where you can just pick it up and use it. So you’ll need to edit most everything to fit your practice model.

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The following images are examples of sales funnels that are apropos to financial planning marketing.

The most important concept to note is that not everyone you get to enter it (at the top) will come out of the bottom (the goal is to get as many people as possible to come out at the bottom).

For example, in the first image, 1,000 leads went in, and only five turned into paying clients. This is close to a typical ratio in the commission-based BD financial planning business (between 0.5% and 5%).