Leads Fall Through the Cracks Without This

Intro Welcome to the seven Figure Advisor Podcast,

Speaker 3 the show for financial advisors ready to scale their business to seven figures and beyond. Each week you'll get proven growth strategies, leadership insights, and best practices. From someone that's helped countless advisors break past the million dollar milestone.

Intro Here's your host, Nick Davies.

Nick Ever wonder why things fall through the cracks, or you feel like they fall through the cracks? It's not 'cause you're lazy, it's not 'cause you're busy even, it's because you haven't got a system for follow-up. This is something I see all the time with advisors for themselves, for their team, people doing joint work.

Nick It's a lot of time in the messy middle. You know, when it's all established and you've got all the people in the team, you've got the right people, you've got some superstars that are doing all your follow-up for you, doing your service work, doing your new applications, lovely. But it's that in-between [00:01:00] stage where you're having to do some of the stuff, you're training new people, perhaps they're not all full-time.

Nick So having a system around this is really, really important, and then the cadence philosophy in order to continue to follow up. So I must give this to you today, something which you can apply everywhere in your business immediately, and something I want to come back to. And I'm a big fan of keeping things really simple.

Nick Just the basics. Ja- basics, jab, cross. Even world champions win the belt, take a couple days off, back to the gym, first thing they're doing, jab, cross. That's it. We want to come back to the basics, and we can use this over and over, and you almost want to get bored with this stuff before we can move on to any sort of automation, so you can understand, like, the power of it.

Nick And it's so important. We want to move to more automation, we want to move to people in the team to do this stuff, but you've really got to feel it and own it, and know the importance of it before you're going to hand it off. And that's also true for people in the team as well. So really simple. Think about it from this perspective.

Nick I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen here. You've got to know who your clients are, or your prospects, in order to be following up with them. And so this is something you can use on and off, [00:02:00] uh, over and over and over, and there's just one or two things here which really allow us to completely follow through on this.

Nick Okay. So down the left-hand side here, we see the client's name. That could also be, there could also be a prospect, of course. You can see that in the next column here. We've got prospects, clients, center of influence. It doesn't matter who it is, this is a follow-up sheet. Yes, there's lots of great CRMs out there that you might have access to.

Nick I would really encourage everyone to start at this point in order to build it out and feel what the cadence is like in order to... and when this is really rocking and rolling. So really simple. Let's say, okay, number one, this is a prospect. So John One is a prospect. Last update. That's gonna be the date at which you last contacted them or worked any- or anything on this, uh, on this client or prospect at all.

Nick today is the 16th, of February. 16th of February is the last up- last date. And so from this point, you can put the date in there as well, and then I'll recommend putting in the notes. So we're gonna put in the [00:03:00] notes, what a- what actually we did here. So we called,no answer. Okay? Real simple.

Nick Called, no answer. So now you gotta decide, okay, what do I do with that? Now you can have some more complexities, and we'll come back to that afterwards in terms of, like, how many times would you follow up for any given prospect. I follow up, I send-- Let's say I call them one day, I leave it, in twenty-four hours, I call them again.

Nick I leave it forty-eight hours, then I send them a text or, or an email, and then I leave it another forty-eight hours, send another email, and then after that, I leave it three months before I come back. So you have a system in that, but we'll get to that. That will add in as we grow in complexity here. But for the point of this, just wanna be really, really simple between, column C and column D, last update and next update.

Nick The reason why I've got column D here, shaded in is because it's the most important area. Really, really simple. This is what allows you to create the system to come back to it. So next update really is, if we're [00:04:00] gonna say that example here, we're just gonna call them the next day, two seventeen twenty-six.

Nick We're gonna call them the next day. And we could put a status in there or not. If the-- There's basically nothing here with this prospect. We just gotta call them again. And we're gonna go through the same way. Let's say you call this a client. Last update was here. And for this client, uh, we booked,we booked a review meeting.

Nick Booked review meeting. Okay, that's it. And the review meeting, let's call that a few days out. Sort of, let's say they call it the review meeting is on the twenty-fourth, so a week or so time. now that's gonna be in your calendar, so won't wanna use it. But I would suggest that having the day before here as the next update is really important to get to, because when you start to use this, you go, "Okay, twenty-third, I need to make sure that I'm prepped for this as well."

Nick And so you're gonna carry on going here. Prospect, last update was today. And then I'm gonna, was, Same thing here, called no [00:05:00] answer. Right, we're gonna say, okay, this person perhaps like we already, already talked to them a little bit, so maybe that's gonna go out to my team, something like that.

Nick And you're gonna end up with this as well, where you're gonna have somewhere, okay, here's the last time you did it, and next update to it is today. So you're gonna end up with this column, next update date being the most important one. Because as you stack this on, let's just say you hand this off to someone, a junior advisor in your team that you're doing some joint work with, and you say, "Okay, here's 30 clients I want you to call on for me.

Nick And, we're gonna do an experiment, and it's gonna be a two-week experiment. And here's 30 clients, and you're gonna do-- you're gonna be able to reach out to all of those clients through that time." And you say, "I've got five... Like, I've got space to reach out to five a day." Okay. Five a day we're gonna reach out to, we're gonna do that, and then in that two weeks we're gonna do a couple of rotations and come back.

Nick The key piece for them to make sure is having the next update. Because as we add on, to this, right? This-- in ex-example here, there's ten, but let's say that there was a whole bunch more than ten, right? Let's just say there [00:06:00] was, a page worth of stuff, right? Immediately it starts to get out of hand. You can't really work on the spreadsheet in the way that you want to.

Nick And so the key is having the next update date. Let's just say we've got all of these different dates together here as well, all of these different areas. And then so any given day, today being the sixteenth, you can just filter and go today's date, and that is the work that you have to do that day That is the work you have to do that day, and that is what cuts through the noise when you've got so much stuff in your spreadsheet.

Nick And the key here is just all you've got to do to make sure that you've went in here on a day-to-day basis is update column D. You've got to know where that next date update is coming from. And not only that, you can know what success is. At the end of the day, you can know what a good day looks like when you've got all your next update columns.

Nick So this, this column should never be blank unless the, the-- it's a brand new contact for you. In which case you might say, "Okay, h-here I've got twenty new contacts this day. Okay, I'm [00:07:00] planning, the next update is gonna be, uh, I've got a big call day coming, so like this is gonna be the, the eighteenth that I'm gonna go and update all these, so that's the next update date."

Nick Right? And if it's blank, we know that we haven't got there yet. That's all. And that's what we should work from. So whether you're a super established advisor and really you're not thinking about reaching out, you're having your team do the reach outs for you. It's, it's based on your A clients, you've only got a certain amount of meetings.

Nick Or you're really f-like first starting off, and you have an opportunity to do some joint work with another advisor. How cool it would be to be able to have this in this, in this way, have this system to give back to them and say, "This is where I am, this is the structure that we're working on," and they really know with certainty and trust you in order to continue to follow up.

Nick And here's the beautiful part. Anytime you talk to a client or a prospect using this system, you can say, "Okay, I'm gonna call back." If they say, "Okay, you know, let's talk next week. It sounds like a good idea," and y-you're, you're immediately trying to book the next call, uh, on the call with them, but for some reason they don't want to do it and you don't want to push them too hard, you can say, "Okay.

Nick Okay, client," [00:08:00] okay prospect, "I'm gonna call you back on the nineteenth. I'm gonna call you back in three days' time at around two o'clock." And you can put that in there in terms of notes as well. Call, let's say, asked-- told him I'd call back at two PM. You can literally tell that prospect or that client, "I will call you back at two PM on the nineteenth and just see where you are, see if it still makes sense," or whatever it is you talk to them about.

Nick It's a great opportunity to build trust. If you don't have this system in place, you're gonna feel like things are, are slipping through the cracks, even if they're not. But with this, it builds trust, it builds conviction for you, the people in your team, and it shows your clients and shows your prospects you really know what you're doing.

Nick Because they can trust you to follow up. They can trust you, uh, with their wealth and their future and their finances. Take forward, make sure you've got the system, make sure you know what that update date is.

Nick Gotta be a seven-figure advisor

Speaker 4 [00:09:00] Thanks for listening to today's episode. Hit the Follow button to be notified of new episodes and visit seven dash figure advisor.com for more resources and to connect directly with Nick. See you next time.