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Some financial producers use prospecting methods that produce the wrong prospects. I define a wrong prospect as someone who is not really interested, not qualified or hard to deal with. In essence, someone who wastes your precious time and if they do become a client, they consume so much of your time that you wish they weren't a client.
You generate these prospects by using unfocused mass marketing models. For example, if you call a list of people over age 65 attempting to obtain long term care appointments, you are generating the wrong prospects. You have no idea if these people are interested or qualified. So you waste a lot of time cold calling and then meeting people who are not qualified or interested. Wouldn't it be smarter if you only met with the interested qualified people?
Rather than call this list, send a well written mailer (you can find my previous article on Direct Mail That Works at ). Even if you get a 1% response to 1000 mailed, that's 10 interested people who took action. When you call them, you qualify them and eliminate half. You get 5 appointments. These are the same 5 appointments you would have gotten with the cold calling, but look how much easier this was. Instead of talking with 1000 people, you talked to 10 people. Instead of meeting with 10 people, you met with 5. You saved maybe 25 hours of your time and spent $500 on postage and mailing. (In other words, had you cold called, you valued your time at $20 an hour for the mailing cost you saved--is that all you're worth?).
Or what if you ran an advertisement in the local senior magazine "Avoid Mistakes in Buying Long Term Care--Free Guide Available." You then have a few people to call who are interested and motivated. You have saved your time and limited the prospects you deal with to those who take initiative. These are the types of people who want as clients. You do not want people who must always be convinced, which is the type of prospect that is generated with unfocused, mass marketing.
Or what about inserting a flyer in the daily newspaper for your next LTC seminar "90% of Seniors Have Inadequate Health Protection." In our tests, 10,000 inserted flyers (for about $500) generates about 25 people to a seminar. You give a presentation to 25 motivated people at one time and then have individual appointments. Seminars make super efficient use of your time (you give the same presentation at once to 25 or more people) and super effective use of your time (you are speaking to motivated prospects).
If you've been tired of prospecting, burned out and feel that good prospects are scarce, shift your prospecting methods to produce qualified prospects and renew your career.
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