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July 26, 2012 at 08:23 AM
Last week we discussed the concept of hosting joint educational workshops for your strategic alliance’s clients. As promised last week, I’m not just going to follow it up with best practices for achieving the greatest results. The best place to start would have to be the guest list and invitation.
Many advisors who might try to implement this concept may be tempted to blast ahead without much thought about who they are inviting 
or how the invitation is structured. This would be a fatal error and would likely result in less than ideal attendance. Here are a few important things you must make sure to consider before sending even one invitation.
Screen the list of invitees.
While it may be tempting to blast invitations to each client in your strategic partner’s database, remember this is not the direct mail game. More invitations does not necessarily equal greater response or end results. The CPA or other professional you form an alliance with may have 1,500 clients in their database, but what good does it do you to invite them all if half of them are under the age of 50? Or are in some other way unqualified for you to work with?
Screening the list of invitees with the other professional is a great way to ensure that only those who will truly benefit from the content you’ll be presenting will be in attendance. You can decide ahead of time your criteria for making it on the invite list, but in the past I’ve not only screened clients by age, but also by having the CPAs I work with go through and purposefully remove those from the list they may know enough about to know that they’d be a waste of my time. This process has been immensely helpful (and I’m sure has saved me a lot of time) by not meeting with unqualified prospects and being directed to the “right ones.”
