Course Description
Top Gun Prospecting for Financial Professionals outlines Wall Street executive and author D. Scott Kimball’s methods for contact management systems, lists, advertising, cold calling, direct mail, networking, seminars, referrals, the Internet, attitude, and time management.
The volume is filled with stories of real-life brokers who have succeeded in structuring their businesses for maximum prospecting efficiency.
REVIEWThink you've got reasonable excuses for not meeting your production goals? Bad markets. Bad leads. Bad branch office. Bad health. Bad time of year. Or the classic underachiever's mantra, "I've already got enough clients. I can get by." Think again.
In Top Gun Prospecting for Financial Professionals, D. Scott Kimball dismisses any rationale for failure or mediocrity. He places the blame for lack of success and the responsibility for achievement squarely on you. Which is simultaneously good news and bad.
The good news is that you control your own fate. The bad news is there's no one to blame for failure. Kimball, who built a $350 million advisory practice during a bear market applying his "Top Gun" principles, gives would-be top producers the ammunition and motivation to conquer their business-building hurdles, starting by owning their own success.
A follow-up to Top Gun Financial Sales: How to Double or Triple Your Results While Reducing Your Book, the sequel draws further on principles and strategies Kimball says were first developed by the Navy's Advanced Fighter Weapons Training School, the Navy SEALS, and Wharton Business School.
Kimball does a pretty good drill-sergeant-on-espresso imitation, passionately firing off many of the key points he made in his first book, while digging more deeply into the mindset and methodology of top prospectors.
He starts by reiterating his number-one Top Gun principle: Make a decision not to be average. "Who aspires to be average?" Kimball barks. "Who wants to do business with an average person? Who goes to an average doctor or uses an average lawyer? Come on!"
You can almost see Kimball sneering at the masses of financial advisors who aspire for anything less than the top 10% of their office production. "If you can achieve it consistently, the firm will always want you in your seat," Kimball prods. "The firm wants high productivity. They want profitable people in their seats. If you're in the top 10 percent of the producers and have a cost structure in the bottom 20 percent of all the firm's brokers, you will always be wanted."
Kimball debunks a few prospecting myths along the way. Contrary to popular notions, he says:
- Top prospectors don't rely exclusively on referrals – they still make cold-calls and talk to hundreds of people they don't know. That's what keeps them sharp.
- It's not all a numbers game, otherwise everyone (including computer dialing programs) would get the same results for an equal number of dials. Strategy and rehearsal play a huge role in success and can tilt the numbers in your favor.
You might think Kimball is all about salesmanship, but he makes a strong case for offering the best investment advice possible to clients and prospects. "You need to know more than the competition," he urges. "If you are entering into a conversation about retirement planning, you need to know the rules and regulations cold. Learn about the various methods of portfolio management. Bring a higher level of thinking to your clients."
While Kimball's mindset and methods definitely will pay dividends for rookies, he also directs his pep talk and strategies to veterans who may have hit a production plateau and settled into a comfort zone. "Never, never, never stop prospecting," he counsels.
He offers real top-gun prospecting stories at the end of his book. And, not surprisingly, the seemingly random rewards came to those who did their prospecting push-ups each day: made the top-gun level of outbound calls, and broke free from their natural fear of rejection.
Author: D. Scott Kimball
Description: Hard Cover, 189 Pages