Don Connelly, Author at Don Connelly & Associates

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.

Create Great Relationships with Your Clients

December 22, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Today I want to talk to you, not as if I’m talking to your clients; I want to talk to you about the type of relationship you have to create with your clients. This podcast was originally posted in the Tools of the Trade Library on Don Connelly 24/7 learning center.

5 Reasons to Be an Accountable Financial Advisor

December 18, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Many advisors know ‘what’ they do, but they don’t know what they ‘need to do’ to achieve their goals, and enjoy real success. They leave their potential undeveloped. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how confident you are or how much you care about your clients, you will find success elusive, unless you become accountable. Accountability is the secret to your success and here’s why.

Why Storytelling Should Be an Integral Part of Any Advisor’s Selling Strategy

December 15, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments

As a Financial Advisor, it’s your job to influence and persuade. In order to buy from you people must like you, trust you and understand what it is you’re offering them. When a hot prospect walks away it’s usually because they didn’t ‘get’ what it was you were selling them. And no one buys what they don’t understand.

Convincing Your Clients to Sacrifice for a Reward They Can’t Visualize

December 8, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Convincing Clients to Sacrifice for a Reward They Can’t Visualize

I am convinced the hardest thing in the world to sell is advice, especially when the reward for following said advice is so far down the road it can’t be visualized. “Trust me” is an understatement.

Convincing others to settle for delayed gratification is a challenge you face every day.

You must establish such a high level of trust with people that they allow themselves to be helped. You have to make them comfortable enough to tell you their goals and their dreams. You have to enable them to see themselves attaining those goals.

How Consistency Will Help You Become an Elite Advisor

December 4, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

The behavior of elite Advisors is consistent. They come up with good ideas and they stick with them. They do something for a long enough time to know if it works. That’s precisely why what they do is so easily measurable.

This type of behavior is mandatory for those who wish to build a business in a dependable manner.

It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of average Advisors because their behavior is less consistent. We might try seminars this quarter and if we don’t see results in ninety days, we’ll try a referral campaign. If that doesn’t work next quarter, we’ll try something else. We don’t do something for a long enough time to measure results. Without clearly delineated goals, accountability becomes elusive.

Snippets from Successful Financial Advisors

November 27, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 0 comments

I have the very good fortune of running a blog for Financial Advisors Magazine, the electronic version, and in case you don’t read the magazine, I want to read you a blog I once put in for them. I call it Snippets.

I spend a lot of time with Financial Advisors and not so coincidentally I am a very diligent copyist note taker. In the end of every month I sort out and save all the good stuff. I thought it might be fun to tell you some of the things I’ve heard during the said 30 days. These comments are all made in conversation; they are all snippets; yet they all resonate.

Read the post on FA Magazine or listen to the audio below.

Why Presence of Mind Is Crucial for Financial Advisors Success

November 24, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Let’s talk about presence of mind.

When wagon trains traveled across America, the trips were fraught with peril. Wagon masters hired scouts to go in advance of the wagons to look for potential danger. All human beings are hardwired to be on the lookout for danger. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

The media serve as today’s scouts. We want to know what dangers lay ahead. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. And the media outlets do a great job. Be careful!

5 Reasons You Should Get a Mentor

November 20, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

When you first start out as an Advisor you’re given a set of products to sell, but unfortunately they don’t come with an instruction manual. You need to learn how to market and sell them yourself. This is where a mentor can step in, by helping you prospect, sell and manage your practice.

Mentors can also help you stay on track and improve, no matter how long you’ve been in business. Making sure you can still execute the fundamentals is key to becoming the Advisor you always wanted to be.

A Valuable Lesson from Disney on Customer Service

November 17, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 2 comments

Let me quote from a speech, given by Valerie Oberle, who at the time was the Vice President of Disney University. You know Disney’s not clean by accident. Disney is Disney, that’s top down management. So here’s the speech she gave:

4 Things Elite Advisors Do that Average Advisors Don’t Do

November 13, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 4 comments

This is a guest post by Don Connelly published on the website of FA Magazine earlier this week.

Elite Advisors are not born elite. They ply their craft for years, making mistakes and learning from them.

Once such mistake is to assume that numbers matter. Newer Advisors talk about the numbers because that’s the focus of our training. We have to learn our products and processes and we have to pass the tests. When we get in the field, we naturally lead with what we know.

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Articles by: Don Connelly