Today I am honored to have a guest blogger on my blog, his name is Neil Jain and he empowers people to make confident financial decisions. Here is his article:

In keeping with Alen’s current theme about Trigger Events, I can confirm that in my business identifying trigger events has been a key aspect of the sales process.

Importance of Trigger Events

In my business, we offer financial education workshops and, if you think about it, it’s hard to get excited about being more responsible with money unless there is some sort of life event that’s requiring you to make decisions regarding your finances.

For example, we find that our clients are interested in taking our workshops when they’re about to start a new job, or they need to know how to complete their tax return or they want to take control of their investments.

Deliberate Approach

What I would recommend to salespeople is to make a list of the top five trigger events suitable for your (potential) client base, quantify the frequency of each event and identify where it would be suitable to connect with the client when this event is occurring.

For instance, one of our clients’ trigger events is starting a new business. New business owners need to make a number of decisions about money including how to take advantage of business expenses. Using the approach described above, first, I would determine how many new businesses are started in my target market each year (and when) so that I can quantify the potential pipeline. Next, I would conduct research to determine what percentage of this market has a need and would be interested in my product or service. Finally, I would research where I can find these new business owners, so that I can meet them.

Do they go to entrepreneurial networking events? Or, perhaps they attend local information seminars on starting a new venture? What online forums do they frequent?

Your trigger event list should be a working document, constantly refined based on what you learn from your clients and determining how best to reach them when they need your product or service.

Partnerships

One final tip: partnering with non-competing organizations that already service your prospective customers during a trigger event stage can be a potential shortcut to connecting with clients. The organization may already have an established distribution mechanism making it easy to connect with potential clients. Just remember to offer to reciprocate if appropriate!

Participate:

Do you use trigger events to determine when to approach your customers? Any tips that you can share?

Neil Jain is President and Lead Facilitator of Money Life Skills.

Money Life Skills aims to empower people to make confident financial decisions. We offer unbiased private, customized and affordable workshops to individuals, couples and families on how to save, spend and invest money. For more information, visit www.moneylifeskills.com.