It’s hardly news that that the most attractive market for your financial and insurance services and products are successful business owners. Yet, it can be difficult to attract and engage these owners as clients because they are laser-focused on their businesses. These owners are often deeply immersed in the day-to-day operations, strategic planning, and decision-making processes of their businesses. To effectively engage owners, financial and insurance advisors must approach owners through methods that recognize the specific needs and constraints of successful business owners.
In order to engage owners in planning, you must use an approach with owners that aligns what you have to offer with what owners want: To grow and protect their businesses. Owners are far more willing to meet and engage with you if you can demonstrate how you can help them. Is that something you are doing effectively today?
It might be obvious that a process called “Owner-Based Planning” would do precisely that: Help owners do what they want to do by growing and protecting cash flow and business value. What isn’t so obvious is that financial and insurance advisors trained in Owner-Based Planning more effectively engage more business owners clients than those who are not. But to work with more owners, you need to change or alter your approach to attracting and engaging them.
In this blog, we’ll cover how utilizing Owner-Based Planning can help.
A New Approach to Engaging Business Owners
At BEI, we are firm believers in the effectiveness of targeted marketing and client engagement, which entails delivering the appropriate messages to the right individuals with consistency, and then delivering customized solutions to your prospects. For owners, their time is a precious commodity, and they are highly selective about how they use it. That’s why we’re providing you with a three-step approach to connect with owners.
Step One: Focus your marketing on providing information about how to grow and protect value. Clearly articulating the value of your offerings and the efficiency of your services is essential to capturing owners’ attention.
Our Owner-Based Planning Advisors use brandable newsletters (“Business Briefs”) whose topics include:
- When Business Value Stalls
- All Business Value is Not Equal
- Using Owner-Based Planning to Build Business Value
Our Advisors also use brandable white papers that describe in greater detail topics like using value drivers to increase the value of a company and filling gaps in business continuity plans.
Our marketing tools and resources seldom mention life insurance or investment planning. Instead, the emphasis is placed on the ways owners can build and safeguard the value of their businesses – a topic that universally captures the interest of all owners.
Step Two: Help owners identify and prioritize their company-related concerns or challenges using a software-based Assessment. Common challenges include developing and retaining management, growing cash flow, and involving family in ownership.
Step Three: Address the concerns identified in the Assessment. We’ve created over 30 recommendations for action designed to address various owner challenges. Nearly all of them require the purchase of one of your products or services. These tailored solutions are not only a critical component of attracting and engaging successful business owners, but also reinforce the necessity of your firm’s products in growing and protecting their business.
Once owners understand that you—unlike your competitors—have the expertise and tools to help them grow and protect business value, engaging them is that easy.
