You are a top financial advisor and attend MDRT meetings. Your company also holds conferences that you attend as well as other regional professional meetings. These are often high-energy events where you meet interesting financial advisors. Do you keep in touch though?
Let us look at five reasons why you should make the effort to transform these acquaintances into new friends.
- You are both successful and share commonalities. You each did enough business to qualify for event attendance. Like you, the financial advisors you meet also run into business challenges. How did they overcome them? They have a target market, and so do you. How did they choose their market? You both use social media for marketing. What are their strategies? You are sharing advice from a give-to-get perspective.
- You are not direct competitors. It has been said when some celebrity chefs do a demo on TV, they seem to leave something out, such as an exact measurement or timing because they want you to buy their cookbook for the complete recipe. If a top advisor presents in your shared home city, many people think, “They don’t give away all their secrets because we’re competitors.” Your friends across the country or around the globe can freely share because you are in different markets.
- Everyone has down days. You are prospecting, yet there are days that are tougher than others. It could be that two clients called and yelled at you, or your assistant is out today, so you need to answer the phone. You feel stressed. You have a friend in another office you can call to vent a bit. They complain a bit. You laugh together and cheer each other up and then get back to work.
- What are people buying today? Your prospecting efforts have hit a slow patch. It seems like people are not buying what you’re selling. You need a brilliant idea. You reach out to your friend who lives in a different area. They share their perspective, explaining about clients who have voiced various needs. They show you a product the clients like that addresses their needs. If your friend lives in a different country, they can help you prepare for what may be coming to your market in the future. You bring those different perspectives home to inspire you.
- You have an incentive to qualify for MDRT next year so you can attend the MDRT Annual Meeting. You met and had a great time, so you’d like to see each other in person again. You may even consider forming a study group with the people you meet at the MDRT Annual Meeting. This motivates you to “hit your numbers” so you qualify.
Working as a financial advisor can be a lonely business, so there are many advantages to knowing people in other parts of the country or world who are doing the same job as you.
Bryce Sanders is president of Perceptive Business Solutions Inc. His book, “Captivating the Wealthy Investor,” is available on Amazon. Read more from Sanders about the value of attending MDRT meetings.
