As we all know by now, this pandemic has been very hard for professionals like us to grow our businesses. But we also know that to grow in this business, you need new prospects. By far, the only way to stay one step ahead of the game is to keep a steady stream of prospects coming in. But as you know, this is not easy!

Below are my 5 top tips for getting new prospects at this time. Tap into the following to create new contacts and hopefully convert them to leads and prospects:

1. Existing clients

2. LinkedIn

3. Free financial clinic

4. Bundles and offers

5. Cold message on social media

Existing Clients

Your best resource for gaining more referrals will always be your existing clients/contacts. These people know you, know what you do for a living, they know a bit about the products and services you offer, and above all, they really should trust you by now.

Start by contacting anyone you’ve sold a policy to, by phone, email, messenger, Viber, or any other method. Thank them for remaining a client of yours. Ask them what they like about doing business with you and Pioneer. Then ask them who else they know who could benefit from your service/advice. Ask for a direct name and phone number. Ask for ten and if you’re lucky they will give you five!

LinkedIn

This is a tried and tested resource for finding contacts and business associates locally. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile then sign up (for free) as soon as possible. Make sure you add as much info about yourself on your profile, for example: your name, company, job title, experience, job history, CV and a lot more.

Once you’ve built a comprehensive profile of yourself, then start searching for new contacts. To make things easy, start with colleagues from Pioneer, then move onto ex-colleagues from your past work experiences. Now you can make a move to searching for people you don’t know but you’re interested with making contact with. Pick your local area where you live, think of good-size companies in that area and search for those. Then when you find those companies, look at their LinkedIn company profile and look at the employees. Then you can start to connect with them. After a short while, you will start to build a local network of people that might be interested in your services. Once someone on LinkedIn connects with you, you are then able to message them and of course that’s the time to explain what service you offer. I can tell you this method really works, I’ve been doing this in the Philippines for 3 years and I have over 600 contacts!

If you require more information on how to gain referrals on LinkedIn, then please reach out. I’ll be more than happy to help!

Free Financial Clinic

This one is simple! First create your own Facebook business page (if you don’t know how, just Google it!). Then create an ad offering a ‘Free financial clinic’, try not to give too much away. Just a simple ad offering a confidential financial review of their circumstances from a savings, protection and insurance perspective. This is genuinely something you will give them for ‘free’ but of course you would love them to be a client at some point. It makes sense to pay a little something to ‘boost’ this ad in your local area through Facebook.

People love free advice. Believe me when I say it, if you give someone something for free no matter how big or small it is, they are more likely to trust you to sell to them in the future. The free financial clinic is a chance for you to ask them about their short/medium-term plans for their family and what protection they have in place. Do not be tempted to sell at this point, just collect the facts and offer advice. At the end, you can offer the product/s that you think they need and hopefully they will see it’s a good idea. It’s better they discover their own ‘need’ than you telling them.

Bundles and Offers

Again, this is a fantastic way to drum up interest in you and the services you offer. So firstly, think of how you could create your bundles and offers. For example, you can offer free dengue insurance with every VUL policy you sell this month. But whatever you do, make sure the bundles and offers are attractive enough for people to be interested enough to contact you.

Once you’ve decided on your best bundles and offers, then it’s time to get posting them all over social media. If people aren’t interested themselves you may find they share it with their friends and of course, I would encourage you to encourage them to do that.

Cold Message on Social Media

This one is really the easiest and most simple one of all. Just build your social network. Send invites and friend requests to ‘people you may know’. These are people that you may have a small connection to and they may know of you. Then after a week or so, you can message them to introduce yourself and your business- but of course be subtle. No one likes the hard sell!

My conclusion is that you should be online and doing these things at least once a day and maybe 6 days a week. If you did that and made one new contact a day, then that’s 24 new prospects per month that you could potentially sell to!

If you sold to only one third of those new contacts everything month then that’s 8 new customers!!! Think how successful you’d be.....

Anyway-guys thanks for reading. Don’t forget, if I can be of any help please reach out.

James Havell

Managing Director

Step Services