Don Connelly, Soft Skills Trainer for Financial Professionals

Don A. Connelly is a speaker, motivator and educator for financial advisors. During a career of more than 40 years on Wall Street, he worked for nearly 19 years as company spokesperson, senior vice president and senior marketing officer for Putnam Investments, in addition to holding positions as a stock broker, financial planner, branch manager, wholesaler and national sales manager. As founder and CEO of Don Connelly 24/7, he provides timely and provocative sales ideas to thousands of financial professionals, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Seven Things to Do to Set Yourself Up for Success as a Financial Advisor

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All Financial Advisors need a track to run on. That is, a set of activities that you know are productive, and that will continue to guide you on your path to success, even … and this is key… even if you don’t feel like working!

Here is a set of seven principles that will help keep you focused and moving along your path to the very top of our profession.

How to Build Your Story-Benefit Matrix

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Last week I blogged about a useful sales tool called a story-benefit matrix, and why you should develop one for your practice. Just going through the process is beneficial: It forces you to think through a number of different ways your prospective client will benefit by working with you – and gives you an opportunity to help tell an illustrative story that will cement that case.

It’s basic “soft-skills” at work.

But it’s helpful to understand how to build one yourself, so let me help you with that.

Why You Should Create a Story-Benefit Matrix

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Recently, in my post ”Never Underestimate the Power of a Good ‘Who I Am’ Story,” I mentioned the concept of building a good “story-benefit” matrix. I wanted to take a little time and drill down that concept.

Many salespeople are familiar with the concept of a features-benefit matrix – a handy little cheat-sheet that helps sales and marketing people translate product features into benefits for the customer.

Here’s how a features-benefit matrix works in a nutshell.

4 Reasons Financial Advisors Should Invest in Education and Self-Development Early On

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Why Advisors Should Invest in Education and Self-Development Early On

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Warren Buffett is perhaps the most successful investor there ever was. Not from just one or two big hits, but from a long string of investment successes over more than six decades. But he didn’t get where he is now without studying very hard at Wharton, then at Columbia, where he studied with the legendary Benjamin Graham.

Further, like a Roth IRA, self-development pays off the most when you do it aggressively early in life. The benefits of learning and knowledge compound over time (as long as you keep learning).

Here are four reasons why you should start investing in education and self-development as early in your Financial Advisor career as you can.

8 Stories to Help You Build Trust and Open Accounts

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As you might know already, I’m a big believer in telling a story.

As I write this, it’s presidential campaign season. The candidates are all about telling their stories. They want to get their preferred narratives out there, in front of voters. Successful candidates are very well rehearsed on these stories. They constantly make references to these stories, in the effort to brand themselves, differentiate themselves from other candidates, and inoculate themselves against attacks from competing candidates and their staffs.

Why?

Because it works!

It works in financial services, too.

In fact, it works so well that I don’t want you to have a single story defining you. I want you to have at least eight! And I want you to know them cold.

Becoming a Financial Advisor at 40? Yes, You Can!

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This is for all you career-switchers, and those considering a career change move into financial advisory services:

Don’t listen to the nay-sayers and the haters: You absolutely can become a successful financial advisor as a second career. In fact, as a career-switcher, you’ll have many advantages over your younger peers in your training classes.

Here are some of the many pros of becoming a financial advisor mid-career – and a few of the obstacles you may encounter.

Advice for New Financial Advisors – 8 Things Veteran Advisors Wish They Knew When They First Started Out

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“Experience is the best teacher. But only a fool learns by no other.”

This is a slight misquotation of Benjamin Franklin. But the idea is sound: We all can and should learn from the mistakes and experiences of those who came before us.

And advisors are certainly making mistakes! Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of financial advisor trainees are out of the business by their fourth year. And too many of those who survive aren’t thriving.

So we asked some veteran financial advisors what they wished they knew when they first started out in this business, or what they would do differently if they could start over. There was a lot of variation in the details, but most of them had these themes in common.

The Clock: A Great Sales Idea to Overcome Irrational Pessimism

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You may have heard me talk before about my good friend and successful Advisor, Mark Dick. He once said to me that ‘dividends are tangible evidence that good companies don’t use smoke and mirrors because dividend checks don’t bounce.’ That is a strong power phrase that gave me a great sales idea.

Listen to the audio episode or read the transcript below to learn what the clock sales idea and how to use it.

Reasons Clients Need a Financial Advisor – Overcoming the Do-It-Yourself Objection

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We’ve all encountered them: The prospect or client who wants to go it alone. They want to manage their own portfolio.

Well, here’s one approach you can use:

First, ask the question, “Can I share something with you?” (I like this phrase because it’s non-confrontational. It doesn’t activate the prospect’s ego, leading to an argument you can’t win. It neutralizes it.

Then you can show them the latest DALBAR study.

It doesn’t matter much what year you use. The results for individual DIY investors are almost always dismal: According to the 2019 DALBAR Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, the typical do-it-yourselfer achieved an annual real return of just 1.71%.

Compared with the S&P 500, do-it-yourself investors lagged the S&P 500 by huge margins:

• 4.35 percentage points, annualized, over five years;
• 3.46 percentage points, annualized, over 10 years;

The reason: Bad market timing decisions. People pile into the market at the wrong times, and then they panic and sell at the wrong times.

Why? Because people are irrational, and are hardwired to make sub-optimal decisions.

Financial Advisors and Social Distancing: How to Keep Prospecting and Servicing Clients

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Traditionally, being a financial advisor has been a face-to-face business. We are creatures of the working lunch, the handshake, the coffee meeting. Appointments are the lifeblood of our business, because we’re in the business of personal relationships. That’s our real advantage over the low-cost robo-advisors, and a big part of how we justify our fees.

But social distancing is changing all that in a flash. I’m optimistic about the economy and the stock market long-term. But this bug isn’t going away anytime soon. We are undergoing a rapid cultural shift where social distance may very well become the norm for a good, long while.

And all of us old-school financial advisors, as well as brokers, planners, insurance agents, all of us, are going to have to adjust.

I’ve talked with a lot of people, and I’ve seen a lot of economic cycles. Here’s what I suggest you do to keep growing your business even with social distancing.

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Articles by: Don Connelly