Sam Richter on Selling Intelligently

Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we talk with Sam Richter, the foremost expert on sales intelligence and digital reputation management and the creator of the Know More System, that’s K-N-O-W More. I love talking with Sam. I’ve seen his presentation so many times and he’s one of the few people who, when I go to one of his presentations, I cannot write fast enough to keep up with all of the good ideas coming out of that. He tells us how to use research to develop connections and rapport with people, whether it be the first time that we meet them or whether it be an existing client, to open up new kinds of conversations and get introduced to new people.

In this episode, he’ll tell us how to use social media to boost your new client acquisition without needing compliance approval. We’ll talk about how to use the internet research to ask better questions. We’ll learn how leveraging LinkedIn can get us better introductions and we’ll talk about what Web 3.0 means for you and your social media interactions. We had a lot of fun with this conversation, I hope that you enjoy listening to it too. And now, Sam Richter.

Sam, welcome to Becoming Referable, we’re very excited to have you here today.

Sam Richter:
I’m just really honored. I’m a big fan of both of yours and the great work that you do and I’m just thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with you guys today.

Steve Wershing:
I love the stuff that you do and that’s why I’m so excited to have you. Let’s jump into that, you are the foremost expert on sales intelligence. You’re one of the few people whose program I can remember going to and I could not write fast enough to keep up with all of the ideas that were coming out of it. For the people who don’t know you yet, what is sales intelligence and how can and advisor use it to grow their business?

Sam Richter:
Sales intelligence is really learning about the other person. When you think about an advisor — let’s go back before Google, 20 years ago when an advisor would meet with a prospect. That prospect might give the advisor an hour or two-hour lunch. Why? Because 20 years ago there was no such thing as Google and if you were a prospect you really needed to meet that advisor. You needed to build a relationship, but you also didn’t even know what that advisor did for a living. Well, fast forward to today, our prospects, especially our high net worth individuals that might be a little bit more sophisticated if you will. The likelihood that they’ve, for lack of a better term, Googled that advisor prior to a meeting is pretty darn close to 100%. So, our buyers today have buyer’s intelligence. They’re pretty smart about us. They’ve gone in, they’ve obviously looked at our company website, they might have even looked at some of the FPA websites and things like that and learned about the advisor.

Yet as advisors, often times when we go into a prospect meeting, we don’t know very much about that prospect. Maybe we’ve looked at their LinkedIn profile. Maybe it was a referral. But we really don’t know too much about them. The problem there is, when we as advisors go in and start talking about asset allocation models, clients don’t care. Prospects don’t care. What prospects really care about is themselves. They’re massively passionate about themselves, their own goals, their family. What we need to do as advisors when we go in and speak with a prospect, we need to make sure the first words out of our mouth are about them and what do they care about.

Sales intelligence is really nothing more than using the internet, but using it in ways that 99% of the planet have no clue how to do. Using it to quickly, and that’s the operative word, quickly find information about the other person so in a meeting the first words out of our mouth are about what they care about.

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