Innovation and specialisation are the keys to increasing sales and growing the value of your business, according to high-achieving Adelaide adviser, Peter Moyle.
Speaking at this years’ MDRT Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Mr Moyle shared with his audience how specialising in one specific field had allowed him to significantly grow his business.
Mr Moyle previously conducted a successful general practice across insurance, retirement planning and investment business, but it was only when he specialised in the financial protection field that his business began growing to its potential.
Each business proposition needs to be unique in order to differentiate itself, said Mr Moyle, but he added that the real key to the adviser’s success is to focus on his/her own unique abilities.
Mr Moyle defined unique abilities, based on learnings from Dan Sullivan’s The Strategic Coach, as those:
- In which you have a superior skill
- That you love
- That give you energy
- That allow never-ending improvement
Spending as much time working on your unique abilities will help you grow your business, said Mr Moyle, who advocates the delegation of other tasks and activities that fall outside your unique skill set.
For example, Mr Moyle’s unique skills set includes his passion for face to face meetings with clients and prospective clients, but he is less passionate and less competent in some of the more detailed aspects of his business process. These detailed aspects he delegates to a colleague who in turn prefers not to ‘sell’, but rather to focus on those detailed parts of the process, which become his own unique skills.
Mr Moyle said that by delegating as many of the tasks and activities as he can that fall outside his unique skills set buys him the most valuable of commodities, which is time.
Mr Moyle then uses the additional time he creates by delegating and outsourcing to work on two businesses:
- His current business, on which he is always working to improve
- The future business that he wants his current practice to become
Mr Moyle then shared with his audience a number of specific strategies he uses in his practice to grow and achieve success:
- Use of good visuals in the client presentations to create an impact
- Use of important health statistics to disturb the client and to force them to consider their own likelihood of dieing or contracting a serious illness/disease
- Ask a lot of ‘what if’ questions, to ensure clients apply ‘what if’ scenarios to their own circumstances
- Be referable by observing four very simple ‘referability’ habits:
- Show up on time
- Do what you say
- Finish what you start
- Say please and thank you
Mr Moyle says that while these four simple habits are almost ‘no-brainers’, it is surprising how many sales people across so many industries fail to get these basics correct and therefore fail to get the referrals.
Other tips include:
- Brand your emails to stand out from others
- If you don’t have an internet site, get one (see Mr Moyle’s Integrated Financial website)
- Ensure your internet site is professionally presented and maintained and is one that tells a positive story about you and your practice
- Hold client functions to thank them for their business and also to use as a referral opportunity
- Be connected in your community, in order to provide your own referrals in other fields back to centres of influence and to your own clients
- Create a ‘Wow Factor’, by going above and beyond what your client may expect from you, eg sending ‘Happy New Year’ cards (but not Xmas cards!), thank you gifts etc
- Send tailored client newsletters
- Send tailored newsletters to centres of influence
- Issue media releases on achievements, activities, current issues
Mr Moyle told his audience that “people buy people”, and the best way for this to happen is to focus on your unique abilities and the power of differentiation.
