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.
