By David Batchelor, CFP, Dip PFS
During my first eight years in practice, I had amassed a significant number of clients. At that stage, I didn’t understand the difference between a client and a customer, and while I had a client segmentation structure to avoid spending time with people who, frankly, didn’t need my help anymore, I still had too many existing clients to see.
In fact, I was using most of my time servicing 243 existing clients who needed me, with time left to see a maximum of 39 new people each year. And that’s if everything goes according to plan; appointments get canceled or clients get ill or need three appointments to close, often making it difficult to hit the goal of 39 new sales per year. Plus, I wasn’t interested in getting significantly bigger clients because I liked working with the type of client I had. I just wanted them to be a little bigger, and to have more of them, but I didn’t know how to find them.
So what to do about it?
Well, I was lucky enough to be attending a coaching session where I had an epiphany. The epiphany was this: “If you see people one at a time, you will sell people one at a time.”
Hear how Batchelor used group events to find and sell new clients while servicing existing clients in the March episode of MDRT Presents:
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Batchelor is a 21-year MDRT member from Thame, England.
This is incredibly useful information as I continue to grow my practice significantly in my first year and plan to reach MDRT in the next 9 months. I anticipate there will be plateaus and hurdles to break through as growing pains and am thrilled to have discovered this blog with input from experienced professionals like yourself. Thank you very much for your thoughts and sharing your epiphany David!