/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
What do successful financial advisors do that unsuccessful or even adequate advisors don’t, won’t, or can’t do? I could list several things here, but it all starts with setting clearly defined goals—and then achieving them. But, while the vast majority of advisors understand the importance of setting goals—actually writing them down—and having a plan to achieve them, fewer manage to achieve them. As a result, they never raise the bar for themselves, gradually slipping into mediocracy.
The failure to achieve goals can be attributed to a number of things—i.e., the goals are unrealistic or too vague; not having or strictly following a plan; not being accountable for your goals, to name just a few. While these are identifiable reasons for not achieving goals, they are more of an expected outcome for advisors who lack the vital qualities to carry them to success. You can have the most incredible work ethic, but if you’re not setting and achieving your goals, it’s like a rudderless motorboat spinning around in a lake.
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7 Qualities Financial Advisors Must Have to Achieve Their Goals
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
What do successful financial advisors do that unsuccessful or even adequate advisors don’t, won’t, or can’t do? I could list several things here, but it all starts with setting clearly defined goals—and then achieving them. But, while the vast majority of advisors understand the importance of setting goals—actually writing them down—and having a plan to achieve them, fewer manage to achieve them. As a result, they never raise the bar for themselves, gradually slipping into mediocracy.
The failure to achieve goals can be attributed to a number of things—i.e., the goals are unrealistic or too vague; not having or strictly following a plan; not being accountable for your goals, to name just a few. While these are identifiable reasons for not achieving goals, they are more of an expected outcome for advisors who lack the vital qualities to carry them to success. You can have the most incredible work ethic, but if you’re not setting and achieving your goals, it’s like a rudderless motorboat spinning around in a lake.
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Three Challenges Advisors Face in the Post-Pandemic World
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
At the height of the COVID crisis, financial advisors were confronted with unthinkable challenges. All things considered, the industry has been resilient in the face of unprecedented headwinds. But, as the other side of this crisis begins to come into view, the industry faces a significant shift that will shape the way advisors operate long after the pandemic wanes. Advisors who get in front of that shift and adapt to the new paradigms quickly will not just survive; they will thrive.
If you could capture clients’ general mood today in one word, “anxiety” would probably say it best. In their hearts, minds, and souls, it’s a very different world from just a year ago and, as much as we all hope for a return to normal, there may be no going back for clients. Their perceptions and priorities have forever changed, much like they did during the 2008 financial meltdown. Only this time, it’s different because it involves both financial and health risks.
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3 Types of Prospects Financial Advisors Should Pursue and How to Connect with Them
/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
All financial advisors know that prospecting is the lifeblood of their business. Filling the funnel with a constant flow of qualified leads has long been the biggest challenge facing advisors, regardless of how long they’ve been in the business. Scores of books and articles have been written on “the best” prospecting tips and techniques. Yet, many advisors continue to suffer from the “spinning your wheels” syndrome, feeling as if their efforts keep dredging up the same results—poor-quality prospects or prospects who have neither the incentive nor financial capacity to take action.
Sure, prospecting is and always has been driven by the “law of numbers,” but who says you can’t tilt the numbers in your favor. You’d be foolish not to try. Even if you’ve identified a target market based on an ideal client profile, it’s still a numbers game. However, if you truly understand the type of prospect you’re looking for, you may be able to drastically reduce the number of rocks you need to turnover.
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The Importance of Your Storytelling Skills in Building Trust
/ by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
Now and then, financial advisors must be reminded that they are in a relationship business and that what they have as a clientele is a direct by-product of trust.
The cold hard reality is that people need to trust you before they will engage with you. Especially these days, people are almost instinctively cynical, overly careful to approach others they don’t know with a heavy dose of skepticism. So, when we want to connect with any group of people, our first task must be to break through their defensive shells so we can build trust. Without trust, there can be no connection, no relationship, and no channel through which vision and ideas can flow.
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Using Client Personas to Attract Your Ideal Client
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Most financial advisors are familiar with the concept of creating an “ideal client profile” used to identify the type of prospects they want to target. However, that may not go far enough to attract and directly engage with digitally savvy high net-worth investors in the digital age. Emerging-affluent millennials, in particular, are cautious about who they engage with if they can’t see what’s in it for them.
In a digitally wired world, financial advisors need to be able to identify with their target market and communicate in a way they can identify with you. That requires taking the ideal client profile to the next level by digging deeper into who they are, what they do, how they think and communicate, and why they might want to engage with someone like you.
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Three Stories about Trust to Use with Prospects and Clients
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
The most fundamental principle of building a clientele is understanding that people do business with people they like and trust. While it’s easy for many advisors to be likable, trust has to be earned—quickly and often. As an advisor, you can never lose sight of that because trust not only binds a client to you but it also enables them to follow your guidance with confidence and conviction, which is critical to their long-term success.
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know I believe in the power of storytelling to drive home concepts and change a client’s perspective. I offer these three stories about trust to you as an advisor to drive home the crucial role trust plays in your client relationships.
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How to Succeed at Giving Financial Advice
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
So, you want to be in the business of giving financial advice. That’s understandable because not only can the career of a financial advisor be financially rewarding, it can also be very fulfilling. Through a relationship that can span a lifetime, you become the essential source of advice in one of the most important aspects of your clients’ lives. There’s just one problem. You don’t have any clients—yet.
As a new financial advisor, your number one job is to find new clients. That has always been advisors’ biggest challenge but more so today due to the trust deficit that exists in the financial services industry. According to a CFA Institute survey, only 57 percent of retail investors trust the financial services industry, which is up from a few years ago, but it’s still a wide chasm to overcome. The same survey found that retail investors listed “trust” as their top consideration when hiring an advisor. Prospective clients simply won’t work with an advisor they don’t trust.
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What Not to Do in Building Lasting Client Relationships
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
For financial advisors, building lasting client relationships is as essential as it is challenging. There’s really no more important aspect of an advisor’s practice to ensure sustainable growth. While many advisors try to focus on facets in their practice to bring more value to the relationship, they tend to gloss over what not to do, which can have an even more significant impact on their relationships – and not in a good way.
Here are four key “what not to do’s” all advisors need to proactively convert into a priority to-do list.
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Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors – Email Can Still Be Your Most Powerful Communication Channel
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
It wasn’t long ago when you were considered a marketing dinosaur if you didn’t use email campaigns. Today, you are obsolete if you aren’t using digital marketing to take advantage of all the digital channels available to you, including email marketing. A digital marketing strategy aims to push targeted content out to pull qualified leads in, and email marketing is core to that strategy.
The challenge is your target market is receiving so much content through the internet, email, social media, and snail-mail that the noise has become deafening. It used to be that marketers would create the message and push it out to anyone within range of their ads or mailers. In the digital age, consumers control the message, with the ability to determine what information they receive, how they receive it, and how they respond, if they want to respond. If any content manages to reach them outside that control, it is probably deemed irrelevant or a nuisance.
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Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors – How Social Media Can Generate Leads
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Financial advisors know how difficult it is to make contact with high-net-worth people through phone calls and emails. However, when they reach out to connect with the same people via LinkedIn or Twitter, they are often welcomed with open arms. From there, they simply become part of the conversation, which opens the opportunity to build relationships.
By actively participating in popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you automatically expand your online presence while building social capital. At the very minimum, your participation provides social proof to your target market that you exist and that you might actually have something of value to offer.
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