Professional Connections: Panacea or Problem

Using Your Professional Connections As A Distribution Strategy

This week I focus the spotlight on finding enough of the right type of clients. You can be the best adviser on the planet, but just being good at what you do is no longer enough. You may still struggle to earn a respectable income, let alone earn what you are truly worth. This makes marketing yourself and securing a steady flow of leads vitally important. I like to call this your distribution strategy.

Professional Connections Of The Time Wasting Kind

Professional connections are often touted as a panacea to fix the distribution problem. However, the problem is they can be fraught with long lead times and poor results if you don’t have an effective process for sorting through the dross. Accountants and solicitors who never seem to do business with you, despite what they say to you publicly, are an example of these types of time-wasting connections. Yet, despite the challenges (and there are many), some financial planning firms have little option but to court professional connections because they’re the gatekeepers to their target market.

Finding Your Niche & Making The Right Professional Connections

Finding your niche is essential because it’s important to make the right connections. Advisers working with owner-managed businesses or SMEs, for example, must acknowledge that accountants can be the key to getting access to your ideal client. It’s not that you can’t find them yourself (and you should never stop doing that), but building a professional connection with an accounting firm who have an abundance of your type of client is invaluable. Build a strong relationship with them and there’s your distribution for the next few years. Other specialist niches, like divorce or trustee cases, require strong professional links with solicitors and the same factors as above apply.

If done well, professional connections can be a vital factor in your distribution strategy. When done badly, it’s like a rainbow promising a pot of gold, but never quite delivering.

For most advisory firms, being able to develop this distribution source as one aspect of new client lead generation is a breakthrough in getting maximum performance from your business.

If you are successful in building your professional connections, you get to manage one key relationship which sends you pre-qualified leads on a regular basis. This keeps you busy, whilst reducing your marketing time and costs. Perfection!

By Brett Davidson
Google

A good professional connections distribution strategy can be like a map leading to the buried treasure.

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