6 questions to ask to connect with your niche

It is no secret that there is value in working within a niche market. You focus your clientele, they perceive you as an expert and refer you to others enough that, as Benjamin Yin, MBA, said during his MDRT EDGE presentation Friday, “the fish are jumping into the boat.”

How has the seven-year MDRT member from Norcross, Georgia, solidified his presence working with physicians? It partially boils down to knowing the answers to a set of questions Yin calls “the sweet 6”:

  1. Who’s your audience? Yin did not always specialize in working with physicians, but once he was working with a few dozen of them and recognized the potential to establish himself with this market, he made these clients the focus of his practice. They now make up 85 percent of his clientele.
  2. What are their pain points? This includes liability, asset protection and disability coverage. Yin encourages constant education and closeness with clients to understand what they are going through and how to help.
  3. How can you minimize their pain? Aside from the basics of identifying challenges and solving problems, Yin also creates great-looking, self-made and self-edited videos that both humanize him and tap into what clients may be thinking about. In one video, he films himself at the pool of an Airbnb house that he and his family have rented in South Florida, using the liability of the pool to address asset protection and how clients can benefit from not paying off their mortgage too quickly.
  4. What are the emotional reasons they buy from you? Yin makes sure that all prospects and clients begin their relationship with him by watching a video that shares his personal story, so they know where he is coming from and why he does what he does. The video explains how Yin’s father, an avid skydiver without life insurance, was killed in a plane crash when he was very young. It motivated Yin’s mother, now a widowed mother of two, to become an advisor herself. She wanted to ensure no other families faced the financial hardships that she did, which is what led Yin to enter the profession himself. “Even a bunch of years later,” he says in his video of his father’s passing, “it’s still very raw.”
  5. What is your competition doing? Yin recognized that when he failed to close a sale, it was often because of what the client had read on a blog written by an emergency room physician, who offers financial advice despite not being licensed in the financial services profession. Rather than lament the situation, Yin took the doctor’s course to better understand his position and communicate better with clients when they cite this blog.
  6. Minimum expectation vs. differentiation? Yin explained this with an example about air travel: Airlines don’t promote not crashing as a perk of what they offer. Not crashing is the minimum expectation for passengers. Instead, an airline like Southwest promotes that it does not charge bag fees or change fees, which differentiates it from other airlines. Similarly, Yin created a second website for his practice highlighting his work with physicians to show his work in this niche. He also hosts client appreciation events (such as taking physicians to go axe throwing, encouraging them to bring a friend/referral) and further connects with clients by, in one case, sending a snow cone truck to their office on a hot day.

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Written by Matt Pais, MDRT Content Specialist

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