/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
Allow me another movie reference because it’s crucial for the point I want to make. If you haven’t seen the movie, Oh God! or if you haven’t seen it in a while, I encourage you to track it down. The film is excellent – funny, full of life’s lessons and a joy to watch. But it’s the last ten minutes that is worth 100 times your time and effort in trying to find it.
You remember the story: Jerry Landers, an assistant manager of a supermarket played by John Denver, is convinced he has visits from God, played brilliantly by George Burns, who asks him to take on some worldly responsibilities.
Now, imagine telling your spouse, friends, and co-workers that you’ve spent a few hours talking with God, and you describe him as Jerry did, as a short, old man wearing sneakers, a fishing hat, and smoking a cigar. That his wife threw him out, his friends ostracized him, and his boss fired him shouldn’t surprise anyone.
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Advisors Must be Able to Lead Clients Through Emotional Struggles
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
Last year during the COVID market crash was a golden opportunity for financial advisors to demonstrate their true worth to anxious clients as a coach and a counselor. Your greatest value to your clients is being there for them during times of financial stress and anxiety. Good financial advisors are prepared to handle the fallout of a severe market decline, holding their clients’ hands, and coaching them through their anxieties.
However, few advisors are as prepared when it comes to facing their clients’ personal emotional issues that can cause even greater stress and anxiety, leading to poor financial decision-making. Life events, such as the death of a spouse or family member, divorce or family rifts, a medical crisis, a job loss, or other major life changes are common. Yet many advisors aren’t prepared to help their clients face the issue, or worse, are unable to recognize when a client is struggling emotionally.
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8 Client Event Ideas for Financial Advisors
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, Prospecting / 2 comments
Client events have always been the most effective way to increase client and prospect engagement, providing the opportunity to express appreciation while strengthening personal connections. It has always been a challenge for financial advisors to keep their clients engaged and their prospects enthusiastic, more so during the pandemic, keeping everyone at a virtual distance. Now, with the pandemic waning, client events should once again stand as a key pillar in advisors’ marketing plans.
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Why It’s Vital to Join the Community of Financial Advisors
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
“No man is an Island, entire of itself.” That excerpt from a 17th-century sermon given by a man named John Donne has become a popular proverb that describes the inherent connectivity of humankind. In essence, it says that humans cannot get along with their lives and succeed on their own—that we are all dependent on other people for support.
If you can imagine a conversation between two people, one of whom has ambitions of becoming a financial advisor, it might sound something like this:
First person: When I leave school, I’m going to start a financial planning practice.
Second person: That’s great, but how are you going to do it by yourself?
First person: I don’t need anyone else; I can do it alone.
Second person: No man is an island; you’ll need someone’s support at one point or another.
While that actual conversation may have never taken place, it’s no secret that many people who set out to become financial advisors do so because they like the idea of being independent. But it doesn’t start out that way. Most of us started our careers as trainees thrown together with other trainees to learn the business, typically by reading manuals or attending formal classroom presentations.
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8 Tips to Revive Your In-Person Seminar Marketing
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Financial advisors have long favored in-person seminars as an effective prospecting tool. That changed when the pandemic hit, forcing advisors to adapt, using online webinars and Zoom meetings. But, while online webinars have been helpful in broadening advisors’ reach, they haven’t necessarily led to more appointments for some Advisors—certainly not at the level of in-person seminars. If that is true for you too, with the pandemic receding, it may be time to get back to tried-and-true in-person seminars.
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How to Become Top of Mind with Your Clients and Prospects
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
As a financial advisor, you can’t always be there when a client or prospect has a need. You can only hope that you’re the first person they think of when they want to discuss it or when one of your clients is asked to recommend an advisor. That’s where top-of-mind awareness comes in. If you can develop it effectively, your name is more likely to be the first to come to mind when they have a need.
Chances are, when you crave a cola, you think Coca Cola. That’s because Coke spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to ensure you do. You want that same reflexive thought to occur with your clients and prospects, but you don’t have to blow out your budget to create similar top-of-mind awareness. The objective of a top-of-mind strategy is to be remembered, and you can accomplish that with five easy steps.
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Why You Matter: Embracing the Difference Financial Advisors Make in People’s Lives
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
Allow me another movie reference because it’s crucial for the point I want to make. If you haven’t seen the movie, Oh God! or if you haven’t seen it in a while, I encourage you to track it down. The film is excellent – funny, full of life’s lessons and a joy to watch. But it’s the last ten minutes that is worth 100 times your time and effort in trying to find it.
You remember the story: Jerry Landers, an assistant manager of a supermarket played by John Denver, is convinced he has visits from God, played brilliantly by George Burns, who asks him to take on some worldly responsibilities.
Now, imagine telling your spouse, friends, and co-workers that you’ve spent a few hours talking with God, and you describe him as Jerry did, as a short, old man wearing sneakers, a fishing hat, and smoking a cigar. That his wife threw him out, his friends ostracized him, and his boss fired him shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Read more
Priceless Lessons for Financial Advisors from George Bailey
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
“Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” Angel Second Class, Clarence
For many of us, it took these words, proffered by a fledgling angel to a despairing George Bailey, to realize one of life’s most enduring truths. The timeless movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is full of valuable lessons. But its central theme – that each of us is a hero in waiting – should remind us that it’s through our challenges that our superpowers and unique gifts are eventually revealed.
For me, the essence of the story is conveyed in a scene not usually associated with the classic moments people remember about the movie.
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Only Elite Advisors Step Out of Their Comfort Zone—Do You?
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
It’s human nature to seek comfort in familiar habits and patterns. When anything comes along to threaten the status quo, we naturally feel uncomfortable, even anxious. Most of us will take great pains to cling to our comfort zone just to avoid those feelings, rejecting change and its unpredictability. The inevitable result for many people is to languish in predictable mediocrity. While they may feel safe, they eventually slip into obsolescence.
In the financial advisory business, if you are not constantly working at getting better, you are getting worse. That’s because successful advisors always strive to improve, to find ways to perfect their craft, which often requires breaking from familiar habits and stepping outside their comfort zone. They know that if they continue to live inside their complacency zone and do what they’ve always done, they’ll continue to get the same results. As a financial advisor, that is ultimately a formula for failure.
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The Slippery Slope from Empathy to Role Reversal, and How to Avoid It
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
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
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
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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