Recession Is Great For Client Segmentation

Recession can be great if you learn how to take advantage of it and recession can be great a cure for complacency.

You have heard “they were so successful, they quit doing the things that made them successful”.

By the time you realize that you have been lulled into the killer comfort zone, those beloved clients that you could have taken care of, have been scooped up by another financial advisor.

Then the stress hits and it seems like you need to improve everything and your unmet need of worthiness triggers limiting beliefs that include; “you are not good enough” and “nothing you do is good enough” which trigger an array of limiting emotions that include anxiety and fear.

The stress also triggers you into the habit of comparing yourself to all the other financial advisors that appear to be more successful leaving you wishing for what could have been.

You go for consolence from family and friends who offer you advice from a position of never being in the place that you are in.

I see financial advisors sabotaging themselves all the time by trying to get their unmet needs met from their spouse and their spouse offers them the wrong advice because they don’t want to see their spouse go through any pain or none at all because they are sick of listening to them.

You stay in your comfort zone because you have no vision or pathway to a brighter future … it seems a lot safer where you are.

To change, you must change what you are looking at. Without vision you can’t figure out what is real, fact or fiction.

You must create individual visions for each area of your business and personal lives because you can’t differentiate from what is working and what isn’t.

They say that the best way to experience life is to feel all of it rather than medicating or blocking your feelings out.

As of March 19^th, my 89 year old mother Irene will have been in hospital for a month. Two weeks ago, we were not sure if she was going to make it. During this time I have remained open to feeling love and compassion towards her  …  at the same time, it was difficult to see her suffer. She has taken a turn for the better and still on her way to recovery.

I make sure that I take the time to offer myself some compassion by quietly breathing through the feelings that are coming up during this time. If I suppress them, I’ll suppress everything else.

While all this is going on, Laura and I are the busiest we have been with an ample amount of clients, scores of new client opportunities along with financial advisor speaking opportunities galore.

I must take the time to differentiate between the two experiences because I could easily feel sad about everything and sabotage the success that we are experiencing in the rest of our business and personal lives.

One of the keys to success is you must separate what you experience from who you are inside because the bad and the good times can all become a blur of bad times creating tomorrow’s bad times.

The one thing about bad times is they sure get you back on track to practice what it takes to return to the good times.

How you experience bad times and what you do about it has a lot to do with how long you remain in the bad times.

I suppose that’s why you see some financial advisors stuck in their comfort zone because they chose not to practice what made them successful in the first place.

In bad times you long for what is missing versus remembering to appreciate what you have in good times.

You have been trained to work hard in bad times, so hard that you forget to celebrate your success changing success into defeat.

You can’t control what happens on the outside but you can control what you believe and do.

What if you were to choose to believe that losing a client is the best thing that could have happened to you?

Chances are, you were struggling to keep the client happy and you were doing the best that you could do and perhaps it was time for the client to make a change.

Instead of beating yourself about what you could have done to save the client, concentrate on what you can do to retain and attract new clients.

In a way, the client has helped you with your client segmentation process because they may not have met the following criteria;

• You love working with the client and the client loves working with you
• Your client has a strong business and personal network
• Your client has a high net worth … whatever net worth means to you
• Your client has enough appreciation for your work and enough self esteem that they feel comfortable with referring you to their strong business and personal network

This blog was inspired by Spencer Johnson’s new book Peaks And Valleys.