100 best sales & marketing ideas: 41-50

45. Ask prospects about their previous advisors.

Determine if they have worked with a financial advisor in the past and what that experience was like. This is valuable information that can assist in finding the right balance when working with a prospect to ensure a positive and productive relationship. This method is effective because it has less to do with the actual question and more to do with truly learning to listen to the prospect’s answers.

— Herb White, President, Life Certain Wealth Strategies

44. Sell well online.

Traditional sales approaches don’t work for Social Selling. To succeed in selling online, you will need to listen more and provide value through a consultative approach in order to capture the attention of your audience.

— Todd Greider, CPLP, Training specialist, Fortune 500 Company; Twitter @toddgreider

43. Use your darn vacation.

It is very easy to work at a frenetic pace and forget that you need to recharge your batteries. Learn from my mistakes — take the vacation you earn at work. I use the work “earn” on purpose. Your vacation was not given to you, it was earned due to your sweat equity. Use your vacation on a consistent basis to keep your batteries charged up, your creative juices flowing. You will also work more effectively and efficiently with your colleagues when you are fresh and rested! 

— John Richard Pierce, Jr., author of ‘Sell More and Sleep at Night’

42. Should your grantor trust be a non-grantor trust?

Consider gifting assets that throw off K-1 income to an irrevocable trust that can spray income to cooperative family members in lower income tax and capital gain tax brackets. Not only is the asset value now out of your estate, but you can spray income and have your parents, siblings, older children (above Kiddie Tax) pay for your non-deductible expenses like tuition and life insurance. Suppose the client needs $100k pre-tax to pay $50k tuition. The clients’ parents and siblings need only $75k pre-tax to net the same $50k. Take advantage of the income tax benefits as well as the estate tax benefits of $5.43M lifetime gifts.

— Herbert K. Daroff, J.D., CFP, Advanced Markets Director, Financial Services Representative, Financial Advisor, Baystate Financial Planning

41. Integrate Social Security into a holistic plan.

Social Security continues to have one of the highest response rates for generating new prospects in the financial industry. The key to converting this topic into new clients that you can help is to integrate Social Security planning as a part of a holistic picture, illustrating how each income source will work together.

— Willie Schutte, The JL Smith Group

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth article in a ten-part series identifying the best sales techniques for 2015. To view the rest of the series, click here.