Four years ago, Rickson Joel D’Souza was sharing a few case studies each month on social media about clients who already had implemented his recommendations. But when the 20-year MDRT member from Dubai, UAE, didn’t have one ready about an existing client, he asked his team: What if we feature a prospect who could make a great case study?

“For a year and a half, they were not ready to transact or advance our discussion because, after meeting me socially, they didn’t see me as a thought leader for the problems they were facing,” D’Souza said. “Only when we wrote the piece of business as a case study and they saw the movie of their life unfold — I always tell advisors that facts tell, but stories sell — did they realize this could potentially be a solution, and they started implementing after that.”

D’Souza has worked with a content management team based out of the Philippines and Norway for the last five years to share case studies across LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.

You’re probably wondering how an advisor can share personal information about a prospect’s case and why anyone would offer solutions to a non-client who could use them with another advisor.

Making the case.

Not to worry. When D’Souza shares a monthly case study about a prospect, numerous details are changed, including the person’s profession, their nationality, the gender of their children and the exact numbers involved. No one reading the case study would recognize the person being featured. In fact, when two prospects — brothers who owned a business and needed help with various insurance plans to enhance liquidity — showed a case study to their wives, they didn’t know it was about their family’s story.

These case studies previously were shared as text posts and have evolved into videos on LinkedIn. The subjects who saw their cases anonymously featured reached out a few days later to initiate a meeting. D’Souza sends relevant case studies to high-net-worth prospects via email or WhatsApp if he assumes they don’t browse LinkedIn.

As for the perception that he is providing his advice for free, D’Souza says he isn’t giving answers that another advisor hasn’t already provided or that couldn’t be found using Google or artificial intelligence. Besides, clients work with you because they like and have chemistry with you. “If they buy your solution from somebody else, they weren’t your prospect to begin with,” D’Souza said. “And if that behavior is in the nature of that client, you have to ask yourself if you wanted to work with that person in the first place.”

Sharing advice without any guarantee of personal benefit isn’t uncommon for D’Souza. If another advisor asks for advice regarding a case study he’s posted, D’Souza doesn’t hesitate to help. Like the open sharing among MDRT members, D’Souza sees other advisors as a talent pool to help and learn from, not competition to avoid. He has more meetings with introducers compared with clients, which is how he attracts his new clients. He lands about four clients per year out of 10 to 12 prospects through 30 to 35 introducers. In all, he works with 45 high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth life insurance clients and 87 legacy clients who also receive wealth management services.

Stay the course and know that some business will transpire or something positive will come.
—Rickson D’Souza

He also wins clients through his no-strings-attached philosophy. An individual approached D’Souza for help with a $50 million insurance policy he had to buy from a banker due to the individual’s family relationship. D’Souza offered his assistance to this individual, who was referred by a client, so at the very least, both would appreciate his efforts. What happened, though, was that the individual bought $40 million of coverage for his wife from D’Souza and later transferred that $50 million policy to him as well.

“This told me that I need to seek out people who already have things in place and show that I’m still willing to give it a shot to help out,” D’Souza said.

So, he provides free insurance audits for any right-fit client regardless of their existing advisor relationships. Sometimes he finds things other advisors miss, like someone who used to be a smoker and didn’t have their policy’s terms updated after they stopped smoking.

As with the case studies, this approach wasn’t intentional but rather “a pleasant surprise.” It also was a product of focusing on long-term relationships rather than short-term transactions. The experience reinforced a lesson learned from spending years paying to take another advisor out to lunch and wondering if there ever would be a benefit just before that advisor finally introduced him to someone who for six years has been a fantastic client.

“It made me rethink everything: Stay the course and know that some business will transpire or something positive will come,” D’Souza said. “Now that it’s happened, it’s a strategy.”

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Patience in prospecting