How to Sell More Services to Your Clients (Part 1)

When the pandemic hit in 2020, it suddenly became harder, if not impossible, to meet with people in person. Our headquarters is in southern California, and although we continued business in the office, almost everything else shut down. People were just scared to meet in person with anyone. Of course, we quickly adopted Zoom meetings, but it took some time to master that sell process.

We used this time to focus on our sales process, and brainstormed ideas on how we could sell more to our clients.

Most advisors don’t want to be “that person” who is always thinking about what else they could sell. I get it. It sounds like a car-salesman mentality, trying to sell a warranty and various service plans.

We prefer to think about it as how else can we serve our clients? I believe that is a much better question.

While we were brainstorming, it did help us to start with first asking “what else can we sell them?”. We then followed that up with, “how does this serve our clients?”.

Here are some of the ideas we came up with:

• • • Annuities (but only if we can get outside money from clients)
    • Life insurance
    • Alternative investments such as 1031 exchange to DST, private placements, and more (but only if we can get outside money from clients)
    • Long-term care
    • Personal and commercial lines of insurance (we decided against this one quickly. We didn’t want to lose a million-dollar client because they were unhappy with their car insurance!)
    • Medicare (There’s very little money in Medicare and it’s lot of work, but it does keeps your client “sticky.”)
    • Estate Planning
    • Tax Planning
      
      Creating the list was easy. Figuring out how to get our clients to be more open about assets outside of what they already have with us is the tricky part.

Here are the ideas that we used to sell more services to our clients:

• • • Product specific webinars
      Every month we created a webinar about specific topics such as:
      • 1031 exchanges to DST
      • Income annuities
      • Life lnsurance to solve specific needs
      • Accumulation annuities
      • Long-term careIn each of the webinars, we were clear that we were discussing money outside of what they had with us, and how what we were pitching could be a better opportunity for them then what they are currently doing.
    • Client Events
      • Have wholesalers pitch their products.
    • Tax Planning
      • We offered tax return reviews using an online tool that allows you to upload client tax returns and receive insights about whether they got all the money back they were due.
      • We offered this service specifically to discover any assets our clients had outside of our management.
    • Life Insurance
      • We told all our clients we were offering life insurance reviews.
      • We determined who did or did not have a policy so that we could sell to those who did not
      • We reviewed policies that could be updated, so we could sell them a new policy

We found other successful ways for our team to better serve our clients by selling more products and services. In the end, you know your clients. Now ask yourself:

How can I better serve them?

What else do they need?

What kind of solution can I offer?

Its cheaper to market to your clients then to prospects…so start with your clients.