January Business Tip

Cross Selling

presented by Alva Royston, President - A.RANDALL Financial

Cross Selling is basically offering other products and services that you have to your existing clientele.

As a young financial advisor working for a large financial services firm on a daily basis I did a lot of stock trades for my clients.  When I attempted to offer other investments to them, such as, U.S. Treasury Bonds or Long Term Care Insurance, it would always upset me to no end to discover that they had purchase this investment or service from another financial firm.  The response I would often hear from clients was “I didn’t know that you offered that investment”.

Fortunately, an associate offered me a key to offset this problem using a matrix concept where you make each and every client aware of all the products and services that you can offer.  It works like this – take a sheet of paper and list your client names down the left-hand margin, and list 13 products or services along the top of the sheet.  Create a column for each product/service.  Thirteen columns are chosen because there are 13 weeks in a quarter, giving you an opportunity to remind your clients of these offerings four times a year.  In my case, I now made all of my clients aware that I had Tax Fee Bonds, Mortgage Refinancing, Trust Management, Wealth Management, Retirement Planning, and many more areas of investments and services.  Each conversation with a client ended with me mentioning the product or service for the week.  Today, with technology, you can make this a much more efficient process.

The outcome of this process was that in 2 years I was able to double the amount of income that I earned. An alternative to the products and services list was to add a week where I spent time honing my skills by taking a course in technology, or asking for referrals, or doing a continuing education course.