Lesson 2 | The Initial Conversation with Prospective Clients Recap (2:14 minutes)

Now, the first of the five best practices that we talked about was the initial meeting that you have with prospective clients. Very important for you to talk with your new prospects, your new prospective clients about collaboration. Even though you're not hired, you still want to bring that up. Now, in this meeting, remember, we said you're going to follow your normal initial consultation or approach. There's not a lot different in this meeting than you would normally do, except that you want to ask them few additional questions related to collaboration.

For example, you want to find out a little more about their other advisors, who they are, how long they've worked together and so forth. You want to ask by saying, "Who do you consult before you make a major financial decision?" Those people will come out in that conversation. Now, Todd has talked a little bit about using a team profile tool. This is not necessarily the place to use that tool. Although it could be if you have a great meeting. Generally, the team profile tool would be used after you get engaged. Once you learn who these other key advisors are, you're going to ask the question, "When was the last time that all key advisors got in a room together, without you present, just to talk about your affairs, each bringing the best of their own disciplines, their knowledge of you, their creative ideas, to come up with the best planning ideas for you? When was the last time that happened?" Of course, the clients probably going to say, "Well, that's never happened".

That's just a great opportunity for you to say, "Well, that's interesting. I think that would be a really good thing. I think you would really benefit from that," and so forth. The purpose of that question and that little engagement is to differentiate yourself from everybody else that the client's ever talked to. Because the client is likely to think that you're different. You've got a vision. You've got some leadership. You understand how this should be working and that's going to lead the client to believe that you really need to be on that planning team. Remember, the goal of this initial consultation is you want to get hired and that's the next thing that you need to make sure happens before you go on to the next stage of collaboration.