Three Essentials to Lead Generation Success

Lead generation is a science with principles that anyone can apply. It is not an art. Let’s look at the basic elements of a successful lead generation system for a financial advisor.

To generate leads successfully for any product or service requires that you have three aspects consistently aligned:

1. the benefits provided by your product or service
2. the emotional desires and wants of your prospects
3. a communication which ties together items one and two

The obvious  of a winning lead generation system is often overlooked. If your prospects don’t have an emotional desire for the benefits that your products and services offer, your lead generation system nor your sales efforts will be successful. If your prospects desire conservative investments that pay 6% and you’re a stockbroker offering aggressive growth stocks, there is no lead generation system that will work for you. So you either need to make sure you have products and services that match the desires of your target market, choose a different target market or choose different products and services to offer. While this is obvious, it is no trivial matter and this misalignment or product benefits and prospect desired is probably the reason for 50% of all lead generation systems failing.

Once you are sure that your offerings have benefits which will satisfy your prospects emotional desires, you need the message that bridges the two. The challenge of crafting the right message is that your orientation is different from your prospects. For example, if you’re a financial planner desiring to find prospects for fee-based money management services, you will fail. That’s because no prospect goes seeking “fee-based money management services.” These are words and terminology used by members of the profession, not by consumers. Consumers go looking for solutions for their investments that sound as follows:

• consistent growth with not a lot of volatility
• enough so that I can retire comfortably
• an honest and conscientious financial advisor
• a way to protect my money from a big drop
• guidance on how to invest in a volatile world

So let’s assume that you decide to use public seminars as your lead generation system to gather financial leads. You send out via US mail invitations attracting people to your seminar, hoping to have a crowd of 50 people attend your luncheon and hear your presentation. To be successful, your invitation cannot talk about fee-based money management services because your prospects don’t even know what that is. Your successful lead generation invitation needs to read something like:

• How wealthy investors find honest and conscientious financial advisors
• How to invest safely in an upside down world
• How to build a growth portfolio that won’t get decimated in the next downturn
• How to invest systematically and remove constant uncertainty
• Secrets of professional investors and disciplines they use for consistent returns

As you see, the wording on the invitation meshes with the emotional desires and concerns of the prospects. It just so happens that your product or service of fee-based money management is the tool which will fulfill those concerns and desires. But in order to have a successful lead generation system, the communication bridge must be focused on your prospects and not on the features and benefits of the tools you use.