How to Build Your Book of Business… Don’t Cold Call Me, was one of my most popular posts. It seems as if many financial advisors  and other service professionals, spend afternoons and evenings dialing for dollars, hoping they can reach someone interested in buying a muni-bond or some other product..

Cold Calling – Blast from my past.

I remember when I was in the insurance business. Every night from 6pm until as late as 10pm, I was cold  calling prospects from a cold call list, hoping to talk to someone.

Once in a blue moon, I'd get a live person on the phone, a person  that was willing to  listen to what I had to say and sometimes I lucked up and that person would actually buy from me.

But I realized the cold calling hope is NOT a business strategy!!

Just think,  I was dialing for dollars, but that was 25 years ago and people had land-lines at home and at least I had a chance of talking to someone.

But today th world is vastly different, many people today don't have land lines and they have all kinds of ways to prevent from getting cold calls including the "Do not call list:".

As more and more people move to cells phones and don't have home phones it seems almost ludicrious to spend night after night, interuppting folks dinner or kids bed time,  hoping that they you will get someone on the phone and sometimes even get a hit.

A Better Strategy Become an Expert and Attract Prospects to Your

A few years ago, after I lost all of my money in a franchise I bought, I was helping turn a friends business around. He was losing about $100k on a $1.5 million dollar computer business. Things were bad and he didn;t have the tools to fix the problem. I came in to be the GM and help out. 

We didn't have a marketing budget to speak of, so we decided to be a expert in the network managed service business. We had to identify the challenges our prospects faced and educate them about how managed services could help fix their challenge and ask them to do business with us because we where the expert in the field.

We converted his business from a hope we find prospects business to a expert service business with more clients than capacity. 

We Even Turned OFF the Lead Flow for a while.

Since we had no marketing budget, we decided the best strategy was to create content that helped potential clients understand the advantages to having a managed service contract and paying for the service in advance. Long story short, we became experts.

Beginning of an Inbound Marketing Expert. 

That was my introduction to Inbound Marketing. Helping solve customers problems by creating and promoting content. Valuable, interesting content that helps or educates a client about how to fix something or do something better and then making an offer.

That is part of what Inbound Marketing is,  creating optimized content, promoting thaqt content on every web channel and tracking the results. That's the gist of Inbound Marketing. 

By creating valuable content, when our client looks  to solve a probem using a search engine like Google, they find  your content everywhere in every format, audio, video qnd text and that multitude of content makes your business look  like the expert your are.

So start to think about using Inbound Marketing in your financial  practice. Start thinking about how your services can help solve a clients problem, if your an FA, your clients may want to;

• Grow their investments with little risk
• Protect their savings from inflation and erosion
• Save for Kids college

These are just some of the problems and in my next post, I 'll talk more about what I mean and show examples. 

So, start thinking about becoming an expert that solves your clients problems, create valuable content  and Don't Cold Call Me.

Next post, How to create valuable content, some examples and more..