One of the ancillary services I offered in connection with attendance at my October 2 Behavioral Strategies Conference was a review of their 2010 business plans. And indeed, during these closing days of the old year, I’m very much involved in that process, and in the follow-up phone calls also promised.

It may be a little early to generalize from this exercise—and then again it may not—but so far, I’ve noticed a couple of disquieting trends. (1) The respondents have very specific goals, but very gauzy (to nonexistent) plans for reaching those goals. (2) They consistently mistake marketing for prospecting. To me, both these phenomena are symptomatic of a high degree of prospecting anxiety.

I’ve tended, in recent years, to assume that people who were far enough along in our profession to benefit from (and be willing to pay for) the newsletter—much less the Conference—had long since overcome whatever prospecting issues they had to deal with earlier in their careers. I no longer think that. In fact, I now think prospecting is the elephant in nearly everybody’s living room.

This got me going on a book to be called The Game of Numbers: Professional Prospecting for Financial Advisors, which I expect to have out in early summer.

For the moment, as the new year begins, I want to call the question: exactly what do you intend to accomplish in terms of increased numbers of clients, AUM and income? And what specific program of prospecting—number of hours on what specific days, number and kind of direct approaches—do you propose to invest in reaching those goals?

Disabuse yourself of the notion that you can ever effect meaningful change in a personal financial advisory business without a specific, disciplined, measured and consistent prospecting effort of some kind. Moreover, know thyself: you are not going to start on January 2 a program of calling fifty estate attorneys on each of three days a week if the average number of calls of this nature you made each week in 4Q09 was zero. Trying to run an instant marathon after five years of sitting on the couch, watching college hoops and eating Ruffles, ain’t gonna work. It is setting yourself up to fail. There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no miracle cures in prospecting behavior.

Nor is marketing prospecting. Indeed, marketing by itself is an avoidance behavior. "I’m going to start sending all the estate attorneys in the county Nick’s Client’s Corner essays" is a classic example of marketing as prospecting avoidance. So is "client appreciation," as an end in itself. On the other hand, asking every single client for whom you’re doing an annual review in 1Q10 for an introduction—not a referral, an introduction—is most assuredly prospecting, not marketing. (Assuming always that you follow up, and make very sure the three-way introductory conversation takes place.) For that matter, saying "I’m going to send all the estate attorneys in the county Nick’s Client Corner essays and then I’m going to call and invite every darn one of them to lunch"—well, brothers and sisters, now that’s prospecting.

A prospecting approach is any direct attempt to start a conversation with another human being. Note that I said attempt. I am not responsible for the outcome; I’m only responsible for the behavior (the attempt) that leads to success. If I call an estate attorney, and his assistant blocks the call, that’s a valid attempt. I took the shot. That’s what counts, and that’s how I keep score. (Remember always Gretzky: "One hundred percent of the shots you don’t take don’t go in.") My ego is totally invested in inputs, not in outcomes. I do not know anyone who ever became lastingly successful in this business who did not—even if only unconsciously—keep score this way.

What has always taken advisors out, I think, is keeping score by outcomes. But since the vast preponderance of all your prospecting attempts will not lead to a conversation of any kind, and since the majority of those that do lead to conversations will end in "no," you’re not only keeping score by in terms of a variable you can’t control, you’re branding almost all your prospecting attempts "failures." I just don’t think anyone can sustain that experience for very long. It’s too painful.

I look at prospecting the way I look at any other physical exercise program. You go out one day, jog as long as you can, and stop when you can’t anymore. Next day, you go out, jog just as far as you did yesterday, and stop. You do that for a week. First day of the new week, you try to increase your baseline by ten percent. If you’re able to do that, see if you can sustain it for a week. And so on. By building yourself up slowly but steadily, you increase your capacity very significantly over time—and you increase the consistency of your effort exponentially—without shocking your system, injuring yourself, or slinking back to the couch in remorse and self-recrimination. You’ll find that an awful lot of the process of developing healthy, consistent new prospecting behavior is just climbing down off your own back.

We’ll be talking more about this in the run-up to the book’s publication, hopefully by midyear—if I just write consistently for a set time and/or a set number of words each day. In the meantime, get honest with yourself. You can’t go out and run a prospecting marathon today. But you can train to run a very competitive prospecting 10k by the end of 2010, if you train moderately but consistently. And always remember: the only failed prospecting approach is the one you don’t make.