Serve Don't Sell with Liston Witherill

Sometimes the best way to improve your business as a financial advisor is to speak with people outside of that arena. While there are plenty of nuances to your business, you'll find there are many common themes between successful business regardless of what type of product they're selling.

That's why we're turning to Liston Witherill on this episode of the Profitable Advisor podcast. He's the creator of Serve Don't Sell, which is an online sales training and coaching platform aimed to assist professional and business development. He does that by taking the focus away from traditional methods of selling and moving it to serving prospects. Doing so produces more trust with clients over time and helps you drive the business you know you should.

As you'll hear on the show, it's not about reading from a script when selling and putting such an emphasis in closing. Like we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast, you have to be comfortable turning business away that doesn't fit your business. And that's the case with our profession as advisors.

Many times we will value every prospect that comes into the office as someone we can't afford to lose. That's part of the problem. If you get to the point where so much is at stake with every prospect, it's difficult to say no to a client. The solution for that is to expand your pipeline so that more leads are coming through the door.

So how do you do that?

Traditionally, ebooks or webinars have been a key tool for building lists, and webinars continue to have value during the pandemic. Witherill also uses podcasting and SEO to generate leads and he explains how he does that on the show. He also identifies what he calls 'mega-assets' as a key tool to leverage, and that's something he gives examples of during the conversation. Ultimately though, whichever method you choose to use needs to lead back to the list you're building and then you should sell strictly to that list.

So as you go through the episode today, keep an ear out for some of these topics that we cover:

• You can't serve everyone. Determine who your ideal client is.
• Figuring out your niche
• Creating more pipelines for prospect
• Techniques and strategies for list building
• His approach to using podcasting as PR
• A give-first approach

Learn more about Witherill's services here: https://servedontsell.com/ 

For more on this topic and other strategies to growing your business, join us over at RenegadeAdvisor.net.

What we discuss on this show:

0:44 – Meaning behind the name 'Serve Don't Sell' 

2:57 – Choosing a niche or definition of your ideal client

5:17 – What makes a good niche? 

8:35 – Be clear who your services are not for

14:11 – List building for email marketing

19:52 – Podcasting for PR

23:52 – Dan's small business podcast strategy 

30:00 – Providing good direction for people

33:16 – How to connect with Liston