Thought leadership content can be employed—through strategically broad but cleverly targeted distribution—to sensitive non-competing professionals to you, your firm and your expertise. For example, as a wealth manager, distributing high quality thought leadership content through well-researched international networks and associations of various types of professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, can be instrumental in finding some who are working with billionaire clients that potentially can benefit from your services.
When you have determined which particular professionals are possible strategic partners, you have to carefully evaluate each opportunity. In effect, you will need to develop deep understanding of their business models from how they source their super-rich clients to their capabilities and their limitations. Based on these insights for each possibly strategic partner, you decide whether to pursue a relationship or not. It is critical that you understand you are selecting whom to strategically partner with. The non-competing professionals are not choosing you.
With so many amazingly talented and adept professionals intent on working with billionaires and the fact that nothing is truly proprietary, you need some form of economic glue to solidify and enhance your relationships with your strategic partners. Part of the evaluation process is identifying how you can add value to each referring professional.
One of the most effective approaches is to help your strategic partners build their practices. Providing formidable business development support is one of the most powerful forms of economic glue.
A highly effective way to generate more business for your strategic partners is to help them become thought leaders and showing them how to monetize their industry stature. By providing them with high-quality thought leadership content they can use with their clients, prospects and referral sources, you are facilitating new business opportunities for them. It is rarely enough to give them the content and have them send it out. To get truly meaningful results will regularly entail working closely with them to determine whom to send what material, and you will need to make sure they appropriately follow up.
As part of the process, you will need to help your strategic partners effectively introduce you. A high degree of tactical precision is required, and they need to make a strong connection to your positioning as a thought leader. By not managing the introduction process, there is a high probability that your strategic partners will be not as effective as they could be, resulting in you having a much harder time getting the referred billionaire’s business.
Again, the thought leadership content you are using that has worked well in connecting you with other non-competing professionals will often be effective here. Some of the material should be provided to the billionaire and his or her other advisors based on circumstances. At best, doing so will both help solidify your stature as well as foster the halo effect.
In meeting billionaires and their teams, it is useful to remember that unless the matter they are considering you for is incredibly urgent (and most are not), it may very well take some time before you get a piece of business. Your investment product might be sensational but is unlikely to dramatically impact the lifestyle of billionaires and their families. What this means is that you will need to be patient and persistent for you to close business with billionaires. However, when you do the business can be extraordinarily profitable.
For All the Wealthy Who Are Not Billionaires
The methodology for sourcing billionaires is empirically derived and has been repeatedly validated in the field. When implemented well, it results in billionaire clients. Furthermore, when implemented well it also results in a significant number of super-rich and less affluent clients. While your focus might be on billionaires, the probability of being referred to clients worth hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to happen and with greater consistency.