9 strategies for building your prospect pipeline

Not every financial advisor and life insurance agent despises prospecting. Many years ago, I met a financial advisor who truly enjoyed the process. He was the only person like that I have ever come across. For as much as most of us don’t enjoy prospecting, when you stop, you’re not adding new clients to the pipeline and eventually the pipeline will run dry.

How then do you keep the pipeline filled without too much pain and suffering? Let’s look at these nine ideas:

1. Create both long-term and short-term strategies. Your long-term strategy might be growing through referrals or social prospecting, but you need something that you can do during business hours, every day you choose. That short-term strategy might be calling potential prospects (within the U.S. National Do Not Call Registry [DNC] rules or your local regulations), building seminar audiences or prospecting on social media.
2. Make your short-term strategy scalable. Imagine you decided you would only build your business through referrals. If you needed to do a year-end push to hit your numbers, you cannot lean on people around the holidays to send referrals without alienating them. You can, though, spend more time building seminar audiences or do more social media marketing.
3. Prospect every day. This is the opposite of something you stop doing once you get some experience. Ideally, you prospect at least an hour every day. Get it done early in the morning when your prospects are fresh and nothing has happened to ruin their day. Also, the task you might try to avoid is out of the way.
4. Keep records. You think you will remember to send that person the item you promised, but you may forget. You think you will remember to call them in a week or when their time deposit matures. You won’t. This is why your firm has invested in a CRM system.
5. Follow up diligently. Few people buy on the conversation. They might be interested, but they are not ready. When will they be ready? This is an area where many agents and advisors fall down. Business falls through the cracks.
6. Always ask for referrals. You reached a person who is interested, which is great news! They really like what you have suggested. Who else do they know who might be interested? If they have a problem, chances are they know someone in their social circle with the same problem. How are you going to get in touch with them?
7. Have a process. I’ve heard this described as A to B or A to Z. At the beginning, you have a name, a “suspect,” or someone with the potential to become a client. At the end, you have a person who signed papers, sent money and became a client. What needs to happen in the middle steps? What are those steps? This is important because the plan is to steadily move prospects along through the process. If they get stuck at one step and won’t move any further, you need to move on too. They are no longer a prospect, at least not now.
8. Jump on leads. Your firm spends good money on lead generation. They might run ads or have a social media presence. Someone expresses interest, and that name comes to you. This is a hot lead! Do not let the lead cool off through inactivity.
9. Give the unsuccessful prospects one more try. There will be people who fell away from the process. There will be people who ghosted you. Some prospects are interested up until the time they say, “I have gone in a different direction.” After a cooling off period, give them one more try. (This must be consistent within the DNC rules or other local regulations.) Something might have changed. They might have told everyone they were headed in a different direction and didn’t go anywhere.

Each of these points addresses a different aspect of keeping the prospecting pipeline filled. Some you are already doing, or others might be new. What is your strategy for keeping the prospecting pipeline filled?

Bryce Sanders is president of Perceptive Business Solutions Inc. His book “Captivating the Wealthy Investor” is available on Amazon.

For more prospecting ideas:

• Watch “The 3 Rs to quickly build rapport” (Available in eight languages)
• Watch “How partnering with specialists on difficult cases is a win-win” (MDRT member exclusive content)
• Read “Prospecting mistakes to avoid to propel your business forward”