Some years ago, I asked myself ‘How do I win business from Private Clients?’. Not knowing the answer, I decided to write a book on it – which meant reading up on the psychology of selling and winning business –The book was eventually written and published under the title ‘Uncovering secrets: Winning business from Private Clients’.
The first chapter deals with setting goals – what business do you want, at what profit margins and who is likely to want your services.
Setting goals is the most important step to take, as I have proved time and time again – if you do not set your own goals – someone will set them for you, and you will end up resentful or envious – which is not good for your health or happiness.
I included a sub chapter in setting goals on ‘Your subconscious’
‘Have you ever been at a party chatting to someone and then out of the blue heard your name? How did you hear it over all the noise? Have you heard a mother tell her child ‘Don’t run’ and the child immediately starts running? Or you say to yourself ‘Why am I so clumsy?’ and immediately drop something?
Your subconscious or reticular activating system is continually working; trying to solve problems, and looking for things of interest. But, like a child who is told ‘not’ to run and immediately starts running, it cannot process a negative.’
You need to set goals and they must be specific and positive – For example; I want a profit of £3,000,000 from global families who want to protect their family wealth through a trust over which they have control and they want their wishes to bind future generations.
Once goals have been set, it is much easier to find clients – direct and indirect.
I took the slightly more unusual route of finding clients direct by forming a club of UHNW global families with a partner, Ankush Mehta, who is better able than me, to run events and promote private deals which is what single family offices want. Ankush and I formed The BConnect Club and Barbara Brudenell Bruce is our business development director. The Deal Dinners which Ankush hosts are already established and proving to be popular with our UHNW global families and single family offices.
It is now time to add into the event mix ‘Learning Lunches’.
Each Learning Lunch event, will be exclusive to 6 global families where they can learn how best to protect their family wealth through a trust while staying in control of the investment decisions and the distribution policy, without being beholden to professional trustees, and how to introduce binding wishes which guide the family for more than three generations.
The other, and more widely adopted route to win business, is networking and how to do it effectively and efficiently. At its most basic level, networking should be about finding a group of professionals who have clients who you would like to be introduced to.
Sadly, however, most people have no real idea why they go to events or what they are expected to do when they get there. They have a glass of wine and look vaguely around for someone they may know. According to the professionals I interviewed for the book, their networking has poor if not non-existent returns on their investment of time. They collect business cards, put them in a drawer, and do nothing further with them.
In my book, I talk about the innate fear of the influence of strangers, and that it takes between 5 and 12 touches, before this fear is sufficiently reduced to want to refer business.
As from May, BConnect Club will host B2B networking events –designed specifically for private client professionals to win business.
At each event, we will ask three or four professionals across a wide spectrum of services to give a ten-minute case study. Stories involving people who have a name (not their real name), an age, family and lifestyle are engaging, informative and fun stories. Ironically stories are one of the four ways to get around the innate fear of the influence of strangers, which means through case studies you can win business more quickly.
At our B2B events we will also digitally match each professional with five others across a wide spectrum of service providers. When you arrive, you will be given five names who you our BConnect Club team will introduce you to. So, at our events, you will have no fear of walking into a room full of strangers, you will be carefully matched with the people you need to meet.
If you would like to find out more about how to stay in control or your trust and how to create binding wishes, you can contact me at caroline@garnhamfos.com, or on 020 3740 7422.
If you would like to buy my book ‘Uncovering Secrets: Winning business from Private Clients’ you can do so from my website www.garnhamfos.com or from Amazon.
Or, if you would like to know more about our Deal Dinners, Learning Lunches, or B2B events, please contact Barbara on barbara@bconnectclub.com or call her on 020 7484 5168.