Can you believe how rude advisors are? They don’t call, they don’t write, they don’t pick up voice mail or email. If that sounds familiar, you’re a casualty of advisors’ yen to use the delete button to guard their most precious asset: Time. The good news is that it’s not personal (or at least that’s what the little voice in your head should say).  The bad news is that the digital age requires upgrading your skill set continuously if you expect to win an advisor’s time and attention.

Here are four skill upgrades that will help you to get through the wall of silence and increase your results in 2013.

1. Voice mail strategy
2. Email strategy
3. Questioning sequence
4. ‘Stops’

Because you have a short attention span:) I’ll address these in a series of blogs over the next few weeks.

Here’s the deal on #1:

Voice mail strategy:  If you are still leaving a voice mail at the end of most calls (and getting no call backs), that’s no longer a drip – it may bar your access to that advisor for life.  Your voice mail strategy needs to be deliberate, timed with other touch points, and have customized value.

The requirements of an effective voice mail strategy are simple to understand, more difficult to execute:

• Earn the return call:  Research the advisor’s practice – Linked in, Google, their website, home office priorities, etc. Your customized message needs to be all about your advisor not your product.

• Be respectful. Gone are the days of sounding important and leaving a somewhat mysterious message “Jim it’s Kevin from x firm.  Call me xxx.”  This strategy now has a high risk of getting you bounced forever.

• Make it short, speak clearly and modulate your tone. Ideally you will write the message out and edit the unnecessary words.  Record and listen to your message on your own voicemail – painful and time-consuming but worth it.

• Include an explicit benefit to the advisor.  Benefit language include words like “help, avoid, easy, comfortable, quickly” – simple, emotional and powerful words.

• Make a request:  Ask the advisor to do something specific – read something, call you, go to your website – but again respectfully. Follow up with an email with your contact info again.

Here’s an example of a voicemail to a prospect that might get answered:

“Hi Jim, this is Kevin Taylor. We haven’t spoken before and you probably were not expecting my call.  I’m with x firm and based on the research I’ve done on your business, I can share how other advisors with similar practices are streamlining their client year-end review process to save time.  If that’s of interest and it’s convenient for you, a good time to reach me is between 4 and 5pm.  Again it’s Kevin Taylor with x firm and my number is xxx.

I don’t want to admit to how long it took me to craft this voicemail.  What a pain!  But if you get 3 more advisors to call you back each day, that’s almost 50 advisors per month.  And once you get the hang of it, crafting the emails gets easier and takes less time.

Any other strategies out there for voicemail that help get a return call?

 NEXT IN THE SERIES: Email Strategy