Archive for the ‘financial advisor marketing’ Category

Financial Advisor Value – What Value Are Your Really?

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

financial advisor holding moneyThe brutal truth is that most (i.e. 90%) of financial advisors provide no value. Don’t take that personally and don’t get defensive. There may be a breakthrough here that can make you very successful and turn you into a financial advisor marketing powerhouse.

I just finished reading a financial publication from the fall of 2008. The articles were absolutely worthless. One article said that REITS looked good (they are down 50-60% as I write this). Another article opened with a statement “mutual fund managers are cautiously optimistic about value funds.” Is that another way of saying “We are optimistic but if you lose money, we told you we were cautious.” Another article talked about how you need to educate your clients during bear markets and why this is such a good time to buy (the Dow was at 11,000, now 7300 2-24-09). I like to read old publications because you realize how valueless opinions are and how supposed experts know nothing more than lay people.

If you have been espousing your opinions and making forecasts for clients, you have no value because you have a 50% chance of being wrong. Forecasts and opinions are equally wrong by the brightest PhDs so please keep your opinions to yourself. If you’ve been telling your clients this is a great time to buy, you don’t know that. The Dow could go to 3000 or stay flat for 10 years. Sorry to tell you that those forecasts and opinions you have are worthless and potentially quite detrimental, but its not personal–ALL opinions and forecasts are worthless.

The other financial advisor value proposition often stated is helping clients stay logical and not get emotional about their money. If I were your client and I had just lost 50% of my portfolio, how much would I pay you for that hypothetical value of helping me stay logical or stick to my plan? I would have to say this assistance you provided had no value to me.

So before you go to work tomorrow or pursue any additional financial advisor marketing tactics, ask yourself what substantial value you can be–not that same old diatribe you’ve been telling prospects and clients for years. How can you actually deliver something that has objective, substantial financial advisor value?

Here are some possibilities:

1. Actually make people money in the market  You won’t do that in the way you have been taught. Please read “How to Make Money in Stocks” by William O’Neil or “Beating the Dow” by O’Higgins to understand how money is made.  Stop using funds and the other packaged crap that other financial advisors use.  These packaged products are generally good for the manufacturer, good for the distributor (the BD), pay you good commissions and can be junk for the client.

2. Stop blindly listening to what you have been told like “buy and hold”, “you can’t time the market”, “diversify.” Have these “rules” helped your clients get rich or helped you add financial advisor value?  Start thinking for yourself.  Start reading voraciously.  What really seems to work and not work.  Develop your OWN philosophy and point of view and stop following the crowd. IN addition to the books above, read “What Works on Wall Street” by O’Shaugnessey.

3. To add to point 2, have an investing system for your clients like top producers do.  For example, buy low and sell high.  That means you need metrics to determine what is “low” and “high.” Or have a momentum system to buy or sell what is trending.  But you must have a system or methodology as you cannot blow with the wind and sell what the next wholesaler recommends. I successfully use a very simple but objective system as explained in “Beating the Dow” which outperforms most mutual fund managers.

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Branding for Financial Advisors – Fahgettaboudit!

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

direct responseThe importance of branding for financial advisors is mostly important to the people who sell branding items – brochures, postcards, newsletters etc. Unless you are already one of the top 10% of producers in your community and you want to move beyond your 10% market share, branding won’t help you so don’t worry about it. Of much greater importance than branding is having superior direct response marketing.  Financial advisor marketing often turns to issues of less-than- paramount importance (e.g. branding) to the sacrifice of the important (generating leads).

Branding is oft spoken about because it is important to larger organizations. Bank of America needs to have good branding. Cisco needs to have good branding. John A. Smith financial advisor or Ben Proctor, Insurance Agent, doesn’t need to have good branding. What John A. Smith and Ben Proctor need are an awesomely successful and productive lead generation/direct response system so that these professionals talking to plenty of prospects and get plenty of new clients. If you already have 10% of the available clients in your town, then you need to turn your attention to your branding and building an image. However, my bet is you don’t even have one percent of the financial services business in your town. Therefore focus on getting clients, not getting an image.

The problem with branding is you cannot control the result, it is a long-term process and the cause and effect is hard to measure. You may not see a payoff for years. Direct response marketing on the other hand will provide results this week. If you mail 1000 postcards and get 12 responses, you know what you have. You can calculate the ROI, your can make adjustments and tweak your mailings to success. Would you rather have a new client in 10 days or potentially, maybe many new clients in two years? My guess is you’re interested in more immediate results and branding is not the key to get there. That’s not to say branding is bad, it just costs money and takes time thereby taking resources away from the far more important direct response marketing. Money put into any of the following will produce far faster and far more identifiable results:

Direct mail
Seminars
Internet marketing (pay per click marketing)
Newspaper advertising
Radio advertising
TV advertising

All of the above must be used in a way that is not oriented toward building your image or building your name but rather getting people to respond i.e. pick up the phone, send back a card, attend a seminar or do something so that they take a step toward you to become your next client. If you do your direct response marketing actively and effectively, then in a couple years we can talk about how to do branding well.

For more on Financial Advisor Marketing.

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Back To Financial Advisor School

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

The financial advising business will get tougher because your prospects are getting smarter. Are you getting
smarter, too? Fifteen years ago, stockbrokers had an edge in that people had to call them for midday stock quotes. Financial professionals also had an edge, as they had product information and the prospect did not. That’s all changed. If all you’ve got is product information, your days are numbered.  It’s back to financial advisor school and more financial advisor training for you.

The broader your knowledge base, the more you stay one step ahead of your prospects. As they get smarter, so must you. If you stay wedded to selling only one product, don’t be surprised if it gets harder to do business. People want advice. Not product advice, but rather, financial advice. Start giving it and start charging for it!  If you don;t have the financial advisor training you need, read on.

This is the millennium of self-learning. Those advisors who continually expand their knowledge base and apply what they’ve learned will win. Sadly, those who tread in one place will lose.

If you think that tax issues are for CPAs and legal issues are for lawyers, you’re mistaken.  Some of the top financial advisors I know have far more expertise in their field than the average CPA or attorney. And they use that knowledge to attract business.  After all, anything that anyone knows is in a book or on the Internet.  The Internet is an integral resource of your financial advisor school of self-learning. The resources to learn anything are at your fingertips.  Do you use them?

If you have been lazy in seeking out experts, then I guess you have some work to do. No one will call you up to give you the answers. Financial advisor training means training yourself–reading, attending seminars, researching issues on the Internet. The answers are there, however, for the taking. Million-dollar producers are self-learners. If a big producer wants to be an expert in direct mail, he reads books on direct mail, researches the issues on the Internet, finds the leading magazines and consults with an expert. In a short time, he too is an expert. And he makes profit with direct mail. Others who use direct mail but don’t learn the best practices, lose money and fail and then tell everyone they know, “direct mail doesn’t work.”

But learning by itself is not enough.  The fallacy in our culture is that knowledge is power.  Not true.  Applied knowledge is power. More accurately: Applied knowledge = money. Let me share an example.  Plenty of CPAs know more than Stan, a financial advisor knew about IRA distribution rules.  But years ago, Stan took what he knew, arranged it into a system to fill a seminar room and provided a turnkey system that helps financial advisors gain new retirement plan accounts.  This system earned Stan many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  The knowledge by itself was worthless until he packaged his knowledge into something other people valued and until he marketed it.

In future articles, I will give you many examples of producers I’ve met like Richard Heckman who turned his knowledge of golf into becoming one of the top stockbrokers in the nation or Larry Banks, who turned his knowledge of health care marketing into earning a spot as one of the largest producers of LTC insurance.  Or possibly you know my Ed Slott, CPA.  Like possibly other CPAs, he knows a lot about IRA distribution issues.  But how many CPAs get paid $10,000 to talk about it to an audience for 50 minutes?  If you cannot convert what you know into a form that people will pay for, the knowledge has no value.  Knowledge must be combined with the execution of smart financial advisor marketing.

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Differences Sell—How to Differentiate Yourself from other Financial Advisors

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

 
It amazes me that most financial advisors go through their career saying the same things as their competition, selling the same products an services and never setting themselves apart. Why would any client come to you if you are not different than your competition? If you don’t have an answer, it may be why your prospecting is hard and your business does not grow as fast as you desire and you don’t havethe client quality you crave.  The focus of your financial advisor marketing must be differentiation.

We have spelled out this simple formula for thousands of advisors. Maybe 1% have followed it and they are among the more successful financial advisors.

First, specialize. If you are a generalist, no one wants to consult you. Every prospect thinks their situation is unique or that they are unique. So decide how you want to specialize and do it. For example, if you want to specialize in working with retirees, then:

1. name your business appropriately, something like “Nestegg Protectors”
2. have a tag line “ We help you protect the financial assets you’ve accumulated”
3. have a brochure and a web site that detail how you help retirees with your specialty and what they will gain by employing you

Second, write a financial book on your specialty: “ Six Mistakes Retirees Make that Destroy Their Nestegg and How to Avoid Them.” If this seems like a daunting task, it’s because you simply don’t know how a book is written. Bill Clinton did not lock himself in an attic for 14 months. He simply dictated his answers to a writer’s questions into a cassette recorder.

The writer then took those dictations and wrote the book.

Comments from advisors who have had books written for them:

“Just a note to let you know how successful the co-authored book program has been for me. I mailed copies to CPAs that I wanted to meet with and I was able to set appointments with several. I also use the book as the second mailing in my referral program, which has made the program even more effective. I have made over three hundred thousand dollars from new clients to whom I have given the book. Thanks again for helping me make my marketing effort more successful.”Dennis R., St. Louis MO
 

Next, you must publish a financial advisor newsletter or insurance newsletter if an insurance professional. This shows that you are a knowledgeable professional on top of the evolving issues in your field. Would you rather have your knee surgery done by a physician who completed medical school 30 years ago and does not read any medical journals or the one that publishes “Knee Surgery Monthly—latest techniques in knee bone and cartilage repair.” You want to go to the newsletter publisher because that professional is obviously on top of their field.

Similarly, your prospects want to go to such an expert.

You don’t need to write a word to publish your financial newsletter. Simply buy the articles. We’ve provided hundreds of FINRA reviewed newsletter articles and newsletters to financial advisors and they have built a professional reputation without writing a word.

This is very little work to differentiate yourself, set yourself apart from the competition and gain clients that other advisors cannot. And you only need to set these differentiating factors in motion and outsource the continued writing to maintain your specialist image.

Note that suggestions in this article address ghost written materials.  Please follow the disclosure requirements if you are licensed by FiNRA found at http://www.cecouncil.com/Documents/d8d04a07-32ba-4405-b16a-b5efef81bc65.pdf

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Say Goodbye to Clients

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

If you don’t have an aggressive financial advisor marketing plan to keep clients, you will lose them.

In the past, marketing plans were all about how to get clients. But now, there are several factors which force you to focus on client retention or else they will say “bye bye.” The factors are:

  1. The level of trust in financial professionals has eroded due to questionable ethics on Wall Street (e.g. the ten largest brokerage firms admitting they peddled crap stocks during the dot come era and paid $1.4 billion in fines, the mutual fund scandal where institutional interests were placed above the individual shareholder interests, company CEOs treating corporate assets as their own financial play ground–e.g. Dennis Koslowski, Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay).
  2. Failure of investors to make money. The Dow was about the same level as it is today in March of 2001. So many people had big losses from the dot com bust and have never earned it back.
  3. Failure by you to add value. If all you provide is information (i.e., you explain to people how products work–a features and benefits conversation) and do not provide insight (the act of creatively matching clients personal desires with financial solutions), clients will perceive no value so why should they remain loyal?
  4. And the most persistent and easily remedied reason of all, as Spectrem Group has reiterated in a recent survey (Financial Planning May 2008): the most common reason that clients leave their advisor is lack of contact.

Therefore, you need a marketing plan for client retention. That marketing plan could look like the following:

  1. make sure every client call is returned within 12 hours
  2. make personal contact with every client every 90 days by phone or in person
  3. make contact every 30 days via newsletter or postcard or letter
  4. have 2 client events per year–barbeque in July and holiday party in December
  5. create a webinar every 3 months and post on your web site explaining what is happening in the economy and how it impacts your clients.

There are services that can make implementation of such a marketing plan for client retention easier. But the best part is, you may be able to tear up your financial advisor marketing plan to gain clients when you start getting a continuous flow of referrals by treating clients appropriately.

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