When Mariant Carolina Navarro Protzel emigrated from Venezuela to Mexico a month before starting her financial services career, she didn’t have an in-country network of friends and family that first-year advisors typically lean on when they begin prospecting.

The sales cycle starts with having someone to call. So, what did the five-year MDRT member from Mexico City do? Navarro Protzel’s insurance company coaches exposed her to two tools — a street survey and a process for tracking daily productivity — that helped her focus on actions that cultivated prospects and grew her practice.

One tool was a paper questionnaire. During her first six months in a new country, Navarro Protzel stood outside the big office complexes in the nation’s capital and approached people on the street to complete a two-minute, eight-question survey about financial planning, saving and risk management. After the passersby answered those queries, she asked if they would like to have a free advice session. If they agreed, she would get their contact information to arrange an appointment later. 

Comfort zone

Simultaneously, she was training with successful agents at her company and learning how to execute the fact-finding process, provide helpful advice for clients and run a good meeting. Yet, she had to overcome her embarrassment about asking for referrals. Navarro Protzel perceived that act as a cry for help, even begging. Eventually, she realized that providing great advice, making prospects think about their future and teaching them basic tools to manage their personal finances was giving them value, so she earned the right to ask for referrals without feeling awkward about it. 

So, near the end of the first meeting with new clients, she would ask them to grade the advice they received: What do you think of the conversation we had today? What are the takeaways? What helped you the most? Next, she applied the yes-set technique by asking the client questions, typically three queries, where the easy answer is a yes. The repetitive pattern of saying yes aloud, inwardly or nodding in the affirmative gets the client into a habitual response that, in theory, makes a suggestion easier to be accepted. Then she posed the question she really wants them to answer with this script: “I’m going to ask you to share the name of 10 people you are sure need to meet with me,” Navarro Protzel would say. “They should have the following characteristics: You admire their finances. They can earn as much money as you do or even more, that is, people that make you think, if I earned as much money as my friend does, I would have achieved more goals than he has so far.” She’ll then ask the client to open the contacts on their cell phone and see who fits that profile and read out the names.

“I promised myself that I would generate a list of referrals so big that I would never need to apply questionnaires on the street again for as long as I worked in this career,” Navarro Protzel said.

She sought other methods to build up her prospect list and embraced a second tool from her coaches, the 25-point system. This planning system takes an advisor’s annual and quarterly goals and breaks them down into daily habits that drive business
and help clients. Using a daily activity tracker, the advisor earns points for activities like cold-calling prospects, setting appointments, establishing contact with prospects, scheduling appointments and completing fact-finder interviews, all aimed at tallying at least 25 points daily. So even if an advisor didn’t close a sale on a particular day, the system at least validated that they were doing work required to build a pipeline of prospects to turn into clients.

Navarro Protzel’s goal was to get at least five new names to call every day. The statistics on the cold calls show that 70% of cold-call prospects cancel their initial appointments, which is considerably higher than the warm market rate (prospects who are familiar with an advisor), where 30% of initial appointments are canceled. Knowing those numbers, Navarro Protzel figured she needed to overschedule appointments to attain the same results that her veteran colleagues were getting.

“Whether prospects show for the appointment or not, or whether they take the call or not, are things beyond our control. Therefore, I scheduled an average of 20 initial appointments per week, so I could meet with around six new prospects for an initial appointment. This habit led to obtaining at least 100 referrals per month,” she said. “I track my activity on Excel, and my progress is automatically calculated, enabling me to evaluate my performance, trends and generate projections for the outcomes I want to achieve based on the efficiency indexes.”

Strict confidence

For any advisor who lacks contacts to call, Navarro Protzel says don’t give up. 

“There are plenty of ways to obtain names. If you’re working with your natural market, schedule an appointment with each of your friends, at least 10, to tell them how excited and happy you are about your new project. Let them know how wonderful this career is and what it means for you,” she said.

If you struggle with asking for referrals, look inside yourself to find out what is stopping you from asking for names. 

“You will want to project the following: I’m doing incredibly well; I do an excellent job giving advice, and my clients always recommend me to other people. Who would you like to recommend me to, Mr. Prospect?”

Carina Madrid and Adrian Charansonnet write for Team Roma, an agency assisting MDRT with content development for Latin America. Contact carina@romacompany.mx or adrian@romacompany.mx.