Congratulations for reaching the end of the year!
It’s the end of December. Time to fill out your Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up.
Are you ready for next year?!?
Wondering what the heck a Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up is? Read the first Monthly Sales Funnel Check-up blog post that kicked it all off!
Friends,
It’s the time of year when I reflect on the past 12 months and think about what’s in store for the next 12 months.
I’ve had an amazing year and am so thankful for you.
For my clients, thank you for entrusting me with a critical part of your business. I’m thrilled to have been able to write for some pretty great people.
For my friends, followers, and community, I have benefited immeasurably from your insight. I hope to have given back even a small portion of what you’ve given me.
You’re not going to hear much from me this week because I’m wrapping up some end-of-year projects for clients, I’m planning for next year, and I’m relaxing with family and friends. I hope you take some time to recharge your batteries as well.
I’ll be back with a vengeance in 2012 and I hope you will be, too.
Let’s work together this coming year to take your financial or real estate business to a higher level than you thought possible!
Have a fun, relaxing, happy, and safe holiday season.
Sincerely,
Aaron Hoos
Early in my career as an investment representative, I had booked an appointment with someone who seemed quite eager to learn more about how I could help them with their portfolio, but when I showed up at their house, they weren’t as enthusiastic. They weren’t cold but they didn’t immediately hand over their cash to have me invest it for them.
I learned a hard lesson about selling to clients: “Yes” and “No” don’t always mean “Yes” and “No”.
Selling your financial or real estate services to a prospective client might result in a positive or negative response when we first talk about what we do. And a positive response from the prospective client might inspire us to blaze full steam ahead while a negative response from the prospective client might cause us to slam on the brakes. We tend to think of “yes” and “no” as being binary responses – either a fully positive yes or a fully negative no.
But what successful financial and real estate professional know is: There are many levels of “Yes” and “No” when selling… they aren’t two responses; they represent a spectrum of responses.
To show you what I mean, I’ve mapped out a few points between the most resounding yes (the bullet at the top of the list) and the most resounding no (the bullet at the bottom of the list)… and then I listed some of the shades in between.
(The “Yes” side of the spectrum)
(The “No” side of the spectrum)
Obviously it’s impossible to capture all of the degrees between yes and no but I’ve listed enough to give you an idea of what I’m talking about — yes and no aren’t binary; they’re two points on a much larger spectrum.
So, when you’re selling and you hear “yes” or “no”, keep investigating.
You might discover that the “yes” isn’t as eager as you were hoping for. You might need to increase the sense of urgency once you’ve sold them initially on the concept of you helping them… to turn a “Yes, later” into a “Yes, now!”
Or, you might discover that the “no” isn’t as much of a rejection as you thought it was. Perhaps they have objections that they can’t formulate in their mind. You might need to ask questions to help turn a “No, I’m not convinced” into a “Yes, now!”
No matter what you hear the customer saying, that’s not the final word… you need to go deeper to find out what they really mean.
Even though you likely serve a local clientele, that doesn’t mean you can’t excel online. You can grow your local practice using ebooks, or you can broaden your client base by selling some of these ebooks.
In the list below, I’ll use “Springfield” as an example of how to use local-specific content in some of your ebooks. Obviously you’ll want to exchange “Springfield” for the name of the area you serve.
Also, I’ve used the words “accountant” but you will probably want to only include the title that best describes you.
I’m living in the weird purgatory of continuing regular projects for clients and wrapping up year-end projects… but knowing that a lot of people are not even thinking about starting new projects until the New Year.
It’s the calm before the storm because my 2012 work calendar is filling up FAST. So if you want to start a project with me in the New Year, you might want to shoot me a quick email now just to briefly let me know.
And this week, I’m….
“Aaron is a great guy and I would strongly recommend him to anyone! He prepared something from scratch with poor and unreliable instructions fro myself! Nevertheless, he did it! Thanks so much Aaron.”
-S. Reiffer
Most financial and real estate professionals perform a service for their clients (for example: investing in stocks, selling life insurance, searching for a home to buy, or listing a home to sell). This is “active income” because it requires you to be present and spend some of your time and talent to deliver the service.
Unfortunately, you only have 24 hours in a day so there is a potential cap on the amount of money you can make by providing services to clients. And in some cases, if you have multiple service offerings (as is the case of a financial advisor who also sells insurance, for example), you can end up overloaded with so much service-offering that you don’t have time to grow your business any more.
That’s where the passive income model comes in and it can help you to grow your income and it can give you a little more freedom to reduce your face-to-face time with clients, if you want. I also like the idea of passive income for financial and real estate clients because these industries can be boom/bust industries so passive income provides another revenue stream to help smooth out the peaks and valleys.
Passive income is another type of business model. It’s a revenue stream where you don’t have to spend the time delivering a service. Instead, you sell something else that is complementary to the services you deliver (I’ll tell you some of the options later in this blog post).
For that reason, there is less of a “cap” on your income potential because whether you sell one or one hundred, you still spend the same amount of time.
The name “passive income” is a bit of a misnomer because there is still work involved. (Side note: If you look around the web at passive income possibilities, you are going to find a lot of opportunities that requires some effort even if they promise no effort at all, and you are going to find a lot of failed entrepreneurs who didn’t realize that their passive income required some effort to be successful). Some of the work involved might include marketing and advertising, emailing, accounting, and team management.
But don’t get scared off! What makes passive income so attractive is that you can put in some effort but get a much larger, ongoing result than you would by working one-on-one with clients.
You can continue working one-on-one with clients but the passive income part of your business allows you to generate additional revenue and grow your business to the point where you can dial back on some of your face-to-face time-intensive services.
For financial and real estate professionals, there are many different passive income opportunities. Here are a few that are popular:
These are some possibilities that I’m really excited about and have seen many of my clients succeed with. (Plus the following two blog posts give you some ideas to turn your existing financial or real estate business into a more passive income business: How to be a lazy serial entrepreneur part 1 and How to be a lazy entrepreneur part 2).
It never hurts to broaden your options. Make it a goal in the next few months to create one more income stream. It doesn’t have to be big, comprehensive, or perfect. But get something together and put it out there and build from there. In the short term, you won’t retire from a flood of unexpected cash. But it will give you more credibility and more opportunity.
My name is Aaron Hoos and I'm a business, finance, and real estate writer.
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