By Anthony Schorling

Introduction

Meeting with a new prospect is always a great opportunity for business owners, but it also usually comes with the added responsibility of intaking new information, getting it into your tech stack, and the inevitable possibility of meeting with a poor fit. This can often lead to a love-hate relationship with what should be one of the most exciting points of the client lifecycle. Thankfully, we have a few tricks up our sleeves!

Below, you'll find just a select few of the best practices or automations that we recommend to our clients. With added efficiency surrounding the initial meeting, our clients are able to better utilize the time before and after the call usually spent on tedious administrative tasks. Now, we're more than happy to pass some of that knowledge onto you!

Pre-qualify Leads with a Screening Questionnaire

Screening questionnaires are a great way to maximize your time with prospects. By having a prospect fill out a screening questionnaire before booking a call, you can pre-qualify them so that only potential good fits are able to book time with you. This way, you don't need to spend time weeding out poor fits in real-time on a call, when you could be utilizing that time on something more pressing.

If your scheduling system, like Calendly, has screening/routing functionality built-in and it comes with your plan, we highly recommend taking advantage of it! You can have new leads answer a short set of key questions that would give you significant insight into a potential fit, and then based on how those questions are answered, route them to a call-booking link, a resource, a personalized "not a good fit" message, or something else.

If your scheduling system does not have screening/routing functionality, you can always pivot to something like Jotform in order to create a brief screening questionnaire with conditional routing logic, like above. Once you have your form up and running, you can embed it on your website in place of a call-booking link so that leads need to answer a few qualifying questions before getting anything on the calendar.

Gather Additional Data with an Introductory Questionnaire

I know what you might be thinking - what's the difference between a screening questionnaire and an introductory questionnaire?

While the purpose of a screening questionnaire is to ask a few key questions to pre-qualify leads to be able to book with you, an introductory questionnaire comes into play AFTER the call has been booked. This type of questionnaire will allow you to gather additional details about the prospect's situation so you can more adequately prepare for your call together.

For instance, we use an introductory questionnaire to ask prospects about things like the tech they're using, what services they offer, team size, and more. With this information at our disposal before an introductory call, we can utilize our time together to focus on exactly what the client needs, rather than using the time to gather simple information. Not to mention, it also gives us the ability to make initial recommendations for low-hanging fruit items, such as syncing calendars, utilizing direct integrations between apps, or identifying gaps in tech where prospects may be able to start trying out free versions of apps to see what works for them.

Create Zaps to Add Prospect Information to your CRM and Email Marketing Software

One of the most-common tedious and time-consuming tasks of the prospecting phase of the client lifecycle is the manual entry of new information into your CRM, and if you have one, your email marketing software. Automating these steps are massive-time savers, especially when collecting a heavy flow of information upfront.

If you have a scheduling system and decide to also adopt the questionnaires from above, you then have at least two sources of new information flowing in. For your first zap, you'll want to take data from the call booking/screening questionnaire submission and use it to create new contacts in your CRM and your email marketing system. As part of this process, you can also create a household in your CRM, and/or add your new lead to a set of campaigns in your email marketing system.

Once you've set that zap up, you'll likely want to then create a second zap to update your contact (specifically in your CRM), with additional information from the prospect's introductory questionnaire submission. The tricky part here is that you cannot simply use the "create contact" action again, as you'll wind up with duplicate contacts in your CRM. Instead, you'll need to find the existing contact, then use an "update contact" action to make changes to what is already on the contact. Depending on which CRM is being used, you may not have this ability with Zapier's standard integration with your CRM. Thankfully, we've created custom Zapier integrations for two commonly-used CRMs in the financial planning industry - Wealthbox and Redtail - to expand on the existing functionalities of the integrations provided by Zapier. This added functionality includes abilities such as updating contacts, creating workflows, updating tags, and much more. (Visit our Sphynx store to learn more!)

Utilize an AI Notetaker

Lastly, one of the best things you can do to enhance your in-meeting experience with a prospect (or anyone, for that matter) is setting up an AI notetaker. AI notetakers can be set up to automatically join your scheduled calls to take notes and transcribe audio. Depending on the AI notetaker being used, they can also do things like draft meeting summaries, outline tasks/action items, and record audio as well. This allows meeting hosts to focus more on the content of the call, rather than needing to run the meeting and take notes at the same time.

AI notetakers with a Zapier integration, such as Fireflies.ai, can also be used in conjunction with our Meeting Notes & Tasks form. Zapier allows us to access transcribed meeting content and push it into Jotform, so you can edit meeting summaries and tasks before sending them to clients or various pieces of your tech stack. This way, there are no transcription discrepancies within your emailed meeting summaries or actionable items that make their way into your CRM, project management system, or something else.

For more information on AI notetakers, be sure to check out our blog post comparing four of the most popular AI notetakers we see being used amongst our clients and within the financial advising industry.

Conclusion

If you're looking to trim down on the amount of time utilized within your new prospect processes, the aforementioned best practices will be key contributors in helping you cut back. And while this handful of best practices is a great start for most of our clients, don't stop there! Every business/firm has a different process for gathering prospect data, so there may be more automation opportunities hiding within your workflows that we haven't referenced in this blog post.

Interested in implementing some of these solutions, but don't know where to start? Schedule an intro call with us! We're happy to help point you in a direction that works best for you - whether that be implementing for you, coaching you through implementation through Zoom, or providing resources for you to DIY it on your own time.

Keep your eyes peeled - another edition of the Sphynx Automation blog series will be headed your way next month!