That'll never happen to me! (But what if it does?)
David Brown
Specialist in developing people, leaders, and businesses. I engage in bespoke fixed-term assignments, which gives my customers maximum impact.
As an insurance broker or financial adviser, I bet you wish you'd had a pound for every time a customer uttered the immortal words "I don't need that, that'll never happen to me"!
And I bet I can probably guess, as a professional adviser, what your response might have been. But we'll come back to that.
Let’s consider another question for a moment… Whether your business is growing or not; whether you believe it’s achieving its potential or not;?do you have a plan or strategy in place for business development?
Some of you may be thinking “Strategy, that’s a big word, what does he mean by that?”
Well if you've followed any of my content previously, you'll already know I like to keep things simple. Let’s be honest, our industry has, on the odd occasion, made things more complicated than they need to be. For me, straightforward is best. So when I talk about a strategy or a plan, all I really mean is?‘do you regularly put time and effort into winning new customers and growing your business?’
When I talk to brokers and financial planning firms that are growing, I often hear about the numbers being up 10, 20, 30% year on year. When I ask the same people where they get their growth from, more often than not I hear about the strength of their reputation and the quality of their service being the reason 'customers just come’ to them. Or about referrals and recommendations from existing clients. Or word of mouth. To sum up, it’s usually some form of organic or inbound activity. Most people admit to not having a ‘strategy’ in place to develop business – or if they do, they’re often short of time to implement it.
Let’s consider another, bigger question: what if that organic inbound growth dried up??What might be the consequences? And what might that mean for your business?
This could be the point at which you say “that’ll never happen to us”, and you might well be right. You know your business far better than I do.?But what if the worst does happen?
In our line of work, we preach about the importance of assessing, managing and mitigating risk. So to me it makes sense not to leave that to chance – by being on the front foot and having a business development plan in place.
领英推荐
What might this plan or strategy involve?
Like I said, let’s keep it simple:
You can tell by now I’m an advocate of being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to business development. Sorry about me.
So as I start to wrap up this bedtime story, I’ll leave you with one further question. And please be honest with yourself when you answer…?On a scale of 1-10, 10 being high, how satisfied are you with your business development activity and plans?
If your honest answer is anything less than a 10, hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that it’s time to do something about that.
Oh, wait, I almost forgot…!
Here’s my guess on how you respond when a customer tells you it’ll never happen to them… I imagine you’d say something along the lines of?“but what if it does?”
Was I close?