How to Build Loyalty - and Business - with your Pandemic Outreach Calls

News of the pandemic is shifting hour by hour and clients are rattled. The strain of isolation coupled with financial uncertainties is dialing up anxiety levels to an uncomfortable degree. And everything your clients are facing is impacting your life and business as well.

This means that, as much as you are motivated from your heart to serve, you also feel a pressure to bring in new business. These two priorities can create enough inner conflict to make it challenging to pick up the phone.

How do you add value? How do you find business? How do you get beyond just ‘checking in’, and become essential to your clients?

Here is a key strategy to employ to help you serve with integrity and build loyalty while uncovering additional sales opportunities:

Demonstrate to your clients that you are thinking several steps ahead and can help them plan through the life cycle of the pandemic.

You can actively guide them through three stages: Respond, Stabilize and Rebuild.

During the initial shock period as the world reacted, you were part of your Clients’ crisis response team, helping them perform financial triage. What must be done right away? What can wait and for how long? You helped them Respond – to take action to protect themselves and manage their immediate survival needs.

Now, we are past the shock stage and into a longer period of endurance. Clients need to Stabilize their finances. This period will feature mini-shocks as people lose or regain employment, deal with health scares or devastating loss, manage the burden of caring for others or the loneliness of complete isolation, along with many other day-to-day challenges. There will also be sporadic good news as governments experiment with additional freedoms, and everyone scans for word of progress on a vaccine.

Notice just how much significant change each of these challenges will force into a life. What are the financial implications of each one?

Many advisors have felt frustrated because ‘there’s nothing to sell right now. My clients don’t want to spend money on insurance. They aren’t investing. They aren’t planning for retirement. I can’t help them with anything.’

There are two mindset problems here. First, this line of thinking is defeatist. Believing there is no opportunity will sap you of energy and stop your outreach activity because you’ve decided it’s pointless.

Second, you are using the wrong lens! You are starting from ‘what products can I sell?’, which is narrow, instead of looking wide-angle from the client’s perspective: ‘What are they going through? What financial implications do these challenges present? What advice or guidance can I give? What potential

solutions can I offer?’ Unless you really explore these questions, you will miss out on opportunities. And the only way to get a complete picture is to ask your client! So, there is plenty to do.

During this period, your clients need you to provide essential guidance to help them Stabilize their finances. The more intimately aware you are of what they are grappling with, the more effectively you can anticipate the financial decisions they will have to make.

This knowledge allows you to position yourself as an essential service in their lives; to be THE trusted financial advisor to help them navigate their way back to wholeness and growth.

Question: How much do you know about what each of your clients is going through?

The final phase of the pandemic we are all eager to reach is the Rebuild stage. At this stage, the world will have developed successful treatments and proven vaccines. Manufacturing of billions of doses will be underway, and immunization will begin. People will be called back to work in great numbers, stock markets will shoot up and the economy will rebound.

Clients will begin to hope and plan for their future again. They will want to rebuild and grow.

If you have been actively present in their lives during this dark time, helping them minimize the downside, make good decisions, and invest where possible, you will have earned enduring loyalty and all the financial business they have to give.

Question: How present are you in your clients’ lives right now?

Task: Take back your power and get busy!

Choose three clients you contacted during the Respond stage. Plot out what you know of their family and business situation and the challenges you forsee for each of them. Based on what you know so far, list the financial decisions they will have to make in the coming months.

Prepare a few open questions to help your clients evaluate their current and future needs. Prepare some recommendations but don’t be attached to them. Prepare to listen well and stay present and flexible.

You are now ready to pick up the phone and add value beyond just ‘checking in’.

Hey, you’re human. If you have reduced yourself to trolling for sales and feeling crappy about it, that’s okay. We are all under enormous and unrelenting stress. Cut yourself a break. And then…

Shake it off!

Regardless of where you’re at, remember that you are an expert in your field. Your knowledge, your brains, your heart, your experience, and your guidance are what make you valuable, not your products! Your clients really do need your help.

Make a plan for each call and focus on serving with heart and the wholeness of your expertise. The sales will follow.

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