In today’s economy, leading with qualification creates a huge blind spot and prevents your business from growing. While you think you’re qualifying them, in their mind, they’re being interrogated by you.

In the rush to secure a new client, many advisors instinctively push for momentum during the sales conversation, often feeling the pressure to keep things moving forward.

Displaying your expertise is an attempt to prove your value, and it’s how the industry has always taught advisors to win new clients. However, it does not work.

The truth is, if you’re investing your time and energy with multiple conversations, you’re only lowering the number of new paying clients you’ll be acquiring. Why is that?

As an advisor, you must recognize that you’re not simply in the financial advice business. First and foremost, you’re in the problem-solving business.

Here are four key questions to help pinpoint where the break in your sales process might be occurring

Being an expert often comes with what I call “the curse of mastery.”

In this new economy, your prospect is assessing you, the opposite of the way things should be and used to be. The advisory industry is now officially in a trust recession.

How you connect with your prospects and how you position yourself in their eyes is crucial to becoming their Trusted Authority.

Trusted authorities don’t market their solutions or dispense free advice pre-sale, to impress their prospects and compete in the market.

The truth is, relationship-building and trust-building are mutually exclusive, like two parallel planes that don’t intersect.

For most advisors, using persuasion to get prospects to see things their way is a deeply held belief. It was taught by the old guard “sales gurus” for many years.

How do you convey your value and convince qualified prospects that hiring you will be a worthwhile investment without breaching your compliance obligations as an advisor?

You did everything by the book. Your prospect talked and you listened. But listening alone is not enough to build trust.

When you master the art of trust-based selling, you’ll be able to create trust in a split-second and never feel afraid about losing a client again.

Here’s the truth: your prospect doesn’t need a friend and isn’t looking for one. They need someone to be honest and to tell them the truth, as painful as it might be, about the seriousness of their situation.

You can deal with a yes or no (the truth), but what you can’t afford is to waste your precious and valuable time chasing “ghosts.”

If there’s one thing that’s hard for many advisors to let go of, it’s the idea that a multi-step sales process is required to make the sale.

A lack of clients is not a lead generation problem. It’s a conversion problem.

If you’re finding referrals aren’t as plentiful or as easy to activate as they used to be, it’s time to ask yourself: is concentrating on referral hunting really worth your time?

In short, your prospect isn’t looking for a relationship, they’re looking for someone to solve their problem. As a result, trying to build a relationship pre-sale invites the two-pronged consequence of having them doubt your motives and then reject your plan.

Traditional selling has always been about persuasion and creating forward momentum in the sales conversation. Ironically, although your prospects have specific agendas, they won’t allow you into their world if they sense you’re operating with one.

The intention of making the sale in one meeting, not over a series of meetings, is the sales mindset shift that’s required for you to succeed in today’s business environment.

It might seem like a far-fetched concept, but making the sale should be a consistently predictable and effortless experience. Your outcomes should not be unpredictable and you should not have to “follow-up” on qualified prospects who have ghosted you.

A peaceful retirement, including the knowledge that your business will survive long into the future without needing to be sold, can quickly evaporate if you’re still the central rain maker of your business.

If your prospects aren’t hiring you at the rate you believe you deserve, chances are you’re still unconsciously using the old selling behaviors and habits you were taught in your early years. It’s time to be open to a completely different approach...

When potential clients don’t call us back, we automatically feel fearful and anxious. We’re afraid we will lose the sale, and that makes us uncomfortable. We’ve been so conditioned to focus on the sale that we assume we’ve lost it if they haven’t called or e-mailed us back.

Losing a sale comes not from failing to educate your prospect on the complexities of their situation. It comes from failing to simplify their problem.

When you attract the most ideal prospects only, you increase your conversion rate of turning them into paying clients, and you do it in less time and for less effort. This non-traditional strategy unleashes a cascading effect of net gains into your business.

You’re coming to the end of your first meeting with a potential client. You’ve done a great job building rapport. They have clear issues you can help them solve. All is going well… until you explain your “next steps.”

What aspect of the advisory profession can you be exceptional at, and who is your target audience that you can consistently deliver it to, who doesn’t yet know you exist?

You’ve just had a promising initial meeting with a high net worth prospect, the chemistry between the both of you felt right, and they agree to the next step in your process.

Dispensing advice presale allows prospects to “try” you with no strings attached — and with no compensation for your time, turning advice itself into a commodity.

You need to be open to a new client-acquisition model that starts with a business context, not a social context.

Shift your sales approach from personality-based to a deep-drive, problem-centric approach.

Advisors try to prove their credibility through education and information – believing that their solution or company brand will differentiate them.

High-net-worth prospects aren’t looking for you to prove your competence in terms of your knowledge or skill – they’re subconsciously looking to see if you’re the one who can stop them from needing to see anyone else.

It’s time to question and challenge the notion of the “discovery” meeting.

A reduction in situational awareness occurs in a profession when everyone does the same thing and gets similar results.

To build the level of trust required for your prospect to select you as their advisor, especially when they’re meeting with other advisors, you must override your logic-based mindset.

The first step to finding high-quality prospects for your advisory practice, consistently and affordably, is not to go where everyone else is.

Referrals may have gotten you here, but they won’t take you where you need to go.

Prospects are bombarded with so much information about investing and working with advisors that they’ve become skeptical of advisors themselves.

Is prospecting (in the traditional sense) still a relevant and applicable concept for selling?

Your prospects aren’t looking for a new friendship to hire you.

If your solutions are becoming commoditized, then your sales process (not your solutions) need to change to be seen as a “category of one.”

The idea that you need multiple meetings to build trust with a qualified prospect is a myth driven by old-timers who say: “This is how I built my practice. Do as I do.”

What would it take for your qualified prospects to feel so confident after an initial meeting with you that they felt it wasn’t necessary to see any other advisors and they were ready to hire you on the spot?

Are you an experiencing a decline in the acquisition of new clients?

To break out of your prospect’s selection process and avoid being commoditized as an advisor, you must shift them out of their shopping-mode mindset.