How to Become Naturally Empathetic (and Build Deeper Connections with Clients)

How to Become Naturally Empathetic and Build Deeper Connections with Clients

At a time like we are now experiencing, when clients are feeling anxious and vulnerable about the future, financial advisors’ most potent tool is empathy. They need to know you understand how they’re feeling about their circumstances and their concerns about the world around them.

There may not even be a problem for you to solve other than to make your clients feel understood and validated for having those feelings. That’s where many financial advisors fall short because they view themselves strictly as problem solvers and not therapists. If your goal is to build enduring relationships with clients who have confidence in your advice, that needs to change.

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The Slippery Slope from Empathy to Role Reversal, and How to Avoid It

The Slippery Slope from Empathy to Role Reversal, and How to Avoid It

Successful financial advisors know that expressing empathy is critical in helping them to connect with clients and solidify their relationships. Clients need to know you understand their circumstances and what they may be going through at any given time. However, empathy taken too far can backfire when advisors find themselves sharing the same emotional distress as their clients, which can threaten their objectivity and compromise sound planning advice.

At the extreme, this can lead to advisors relinquishing control of the relationship to their clients and acquiescing to their desire “to fix the problem” in the short-term at the expense of their long-term plan. This type of role reversal is not uncommon for advisors who become emotionally vested in their clients, wanting to do what they can to ease their pain. Suddenly, the relationship is no longer being guided by rational, objective advice; but rather the behavioral impulses advisors are supposed to prevent, such as selling into a steep market decline, or abandoning the long-term strategy just to alleviate the immediate suffering.

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Email Newsletters for Financial Advisors: 6 Tips to Engage Your Contact List

Email Newsletters for Financial Advisors - 6 Tips to Engage Your Contact List

With the heavy emphasis on social media marketing, many have said that email marketing, and sending email newsletters in particular, is outdated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Why do I know that? Because the financial advisory business is a relationship business and there’s no better method for cultivating relationships in a digital environment than email marketing. Why? Because it’s inexpensive, easy to manage, gets quicker than most results, and it reaches your clients and prospects where they spend a lot of their time—in their inbox.

It’s also effective. According to Litmus, on average, for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you receive $42 in return. Can you think of anything else you could do to acquire more clients that generates a better return?

Of course, that also assumes that you are doing email marketing right, employing all the best practices to ensure optimal results. Executing an effective email marketing campaign is not rocket science, but it does require adherence to some proven techniques that involve some effort and resources.

Here are six critical elements of effective email newsletters and other email marketing campaigns.

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Financial Advisors: What You Should Be Doing During the Holidays

Financial Advisors - What You Should Be Doing During the Holidays

First things first: Use the Holidays to spend time with friends and family. That’s what you want for your clients; That’s what I want for you. Recharge your batteries, and remember why you’re working so hard: To provide a better life for the people you love.

Besides: The immediate return on investment (ROI) of generic cold calling techniques tends to decline after Thanksgiving. Not that it doesn’t pay off eventually. I’m a hard-core prospector, and I hope you are, too. Smart prospecting always pays off in the long run. But it’ll take a little longer to pay off at the end of the year, because you’ll get a lot of people saying, “call me again after the Holidays.”

So, if you’re going to take some time off to be with the family, the Holidays are as good a time to do it as any!

Then, here are a few more holiday marketing ideas if you’re spending time at the office after all.

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Top 10 Most-read Posts on Our Blog in 2019

Another year is about to end tomorrow – we hope it was as great for you as it was for us at Don Connelly & Associates. We’d like to close our blogging year with a recap of the most-read posts on the blog by tens of thousands of Financial Advisors and Wholesalers in 2019.

They are mostly on using stories and analogies, getting referrals and becoming brilliant at the basics. But there were also a couple of posts on preparing yourself for market corrections, overcoming your fears and building strong relationships with prospects and clients. Enjoy and thanks for reading!

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How to Help Clients Make Good Decisions

How to Help Clients Make Good Decisions

Your job is as much about managing relationships as it is about managing money. You need to establish close ties with your clients so you can become a positive influence in their lives over the long term. Unless you can steer your clients into making good decisions you not only risk losing them as clients – but you are doing them a disfavor – because you are allowing them to make potentially disastrous financial decisions.

Here are a few things you can do to influence your clients’ decisions positively.

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How People Find a Financial Advisor

How People Find a Financial Advisor

People search for financial advisors in various ways and via numerous channels. To ensure your appointment book is full, you need to identify where your potential clients are searching so you can focus your marketing efforts in these areas.

Potential clients often find a financial advisor in one (or more) of the following ways.

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4 Tasks You Can Delegate to Grow Your Business

4 Tasks You Can Delegate to Grow Your Business

To grow your business, you need to focus on what’s important and this generally means prospecting and meeting with clients. There will be a host of routine tasks that don’t require your continual, personal, input. Hopefully, you work with an assistant.

Identify your non-revenue generating activities – as well as activities that lie outside your core competencies – and delegate them. In this post we’ll look at 4 tasks you can and should be outsourcing – leaving you free to take on key areas of your business.

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You Need both Hard and Soft Skills to Succeed as a Financial Advisor

You Need both Hard and Soft Skills to Succeed as a Financial Advisor

You can’t offer financial advice until you have the necessary training and education under your belt. Learning the technical side is fundamental to your career, so that you can recommend appropriate products as well as adhere to the increasingly strict industry regulations.

But hard skills alone won’t secure you success. Even if you’re highly competent with technical information and product knowledge, unless you also possess the right soft skills, you won’t get your message across. Without excellent communication and interpersonal skills, you won’t get past the first post. That’s because prospects won’t understand what you’re saying or see why they should do business with you.

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Learn to Manage Client Expectations

Learn to Manage Client Expectations

Running the business gets in the way of growing the business. That’s a fact of life in the Financial Services industry. As the business gets bigger, an Advisor has to make a decision. Am I going to manage money or am I going to manage client expectations? It’s almost impossible to manage both. In my travels, I find most elite Advisors opting for outside management. They choose to manage their clients and their clients’ expectations.

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