Stop Selling Products; Start Selling Solutions
By Martin R. Baird

Would you like to grow your business without selling products? You may be wondering if I’m nuts. I don’t think I am. It’s all a matter of how you see the business you are in and the solutions you provide
You’ll never sell another product! EVER!
 
I’ve been attending and conducting programs at financial conferences for many years. I’ve been to some great programs and walked away with some wonderful information. But the problem with conferences, from my point of view, is this: all people do is talk about products.
 
Hour after hour, they talk about this mutual fund or that annuity. It becomes mind numbing. Why do they spend their time talking about products that people don’t care about? You read that right. People do not care about products!
 
People care about solutions! They want to know how something is going to make them happier, healthier or wealthier. Wouldn’t it be nice if conferences focused on how products and services can actually help your clients so you could take that information back to your office and use it to grow your business?
 
When you sit down with your clients or prospects or talk with them on the phone, you need to think about solutions, not products. You will be amazed how much easier it is to help your clients if you adopt that simple point of view.
 
It’s true. One of the easiest ways to increase your sales is to stop selling products and start providing complete solutions. It’s very simple and makes great business sense.
 
Think about this for a moment. Let’s say you purchase a new Blu-ray disc player. When you get home, you realize you need higher-quality cables to get the absolutely best picture quality possible on your TV. What a pain! You can use your new Blu-ray player immediately but you don’t want to watch until it’s working at its best. This means you have to go back to the store to get the upgraded equipment. It’s not expensive, but a return trip is a huge inconvenience.
 
Ley’s say the cables cost $20. And let’s say the store notices your frustration and begins packaging that item with their Blu-ray players to improve customer service. If that store is in a busy area and it sells 100 players each month, that would increase sales by $24,000 a year just with that simple change.
 
The same is true in your business.
 
When you discuss long-term care insurance with a client, for example, there’s a lot more at stake than just the need for insurance. What’s really important is the client’s total needs. What other problems does the client have that you can help them solve? If you start looking at your client’s complete financial situation, you will be looking for complete, holistic solutions.
 
Develop solution tip sheets and keep them at your desk. You can refer to these tip sheets to identify complete solutions. You can develop these solutions in a variety of ways. You may do them by age or income level. You could also base them on common financial problems that people face.
 
For example, you could have a solution sheet for college education or for estate planning. Each of the solutions needs to be designed to address all of the issues related to a subject, not just one. Estate planning needs to deal with more than just life insurance. It could also include addressing long-term care and trusts.
 
Providing a complete solution not only increases your revenue, it also makes your clients happier.
 
Another solution-oriented tactic to consider is having favorite problems to solve for clients. I grew my speaking business by having such favorites. For example, I love helping financial advisors increase their sales. Although this is a focused idea, it’s still too broad to get most advisors interested. So I developed favorite subjects for my financial advisor programs. I started with one and have grown to more.
 
The subject that I spoke on the most in the early days was how to make direct mail more effective. How do you increase your response rate? I still love this subject and it’s still a favorite.
 
By developing a highly focused target, I get recognized for it. You need to do the same thing. What area of financial planning do you love? What area gets you excited when you talk about it? What area are you passionate about?
 
Once you answer these questions, you should have a good idea what your “favorite” is. By doing this, you develop a solution for that need. This solution is that ace in the hole that you use to grow your business.
 
Developing solutions makes your day easier because you have passion about the solutions you are providing!

Martin R. Baird is chief executive officer of Robinson & Associates, Inc., a consulting company that helps financial professionals measure and manage the quality of client service and improvements to their internal operations to enhance business performance and increase revenues. He is a highly regarded speaker in the areas of marketing and client retention and development. Baird is author of “The 7 Deadly Sins of Advisor Marketing,” a book that offers easy-to-implement marketing ideas for financial professionals. He may be reached at 206-774-8856 or mbaird@raresults.com.