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.

Snippets from Successful Financial Advisors

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

What Elite Advisors Do That Average Advisors Don’t Do

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Center Stage with Don Connelly and Richard Capalbo - What Elite Advisors Do that Average Advisors Don'd Do

What Elite Advisors Do That Average Advisors Don’t Do

I am happy to report that our webinars keep growing in size and popularity. On November 5, 2014, we had several hundred Advisors join in to listen to words of wisdom from Richard Capalbo. Richard was so scintillating that the questions poured in at the end.

Richard told the participants that he intended to focus on three main topics:

5 Marketing Ideas for Financial Advisors to Ignite Their Business

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There are hundreds of thousands of advisors out there but only a small percentage ever hit the $1 million turnover mark. So what gets these advisors into pole position? The answer is ‘marketing’. The amount of time you spend marketing yourself this year will dictate how much you grow next year. If you want your business to grow by 50% you need to spend half of every day marketing yourself, getting yourself in front of people, spreading the gospel. Read up on these five marketing ideas and ignite your business.

Why Waiting for a Pullback is Not the Right Investing Strategy

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According to a preponderance of clients, the stock market is overbought. They’re going to invest, but not until the pullback takes place. What’s an advisor to do?

First, it’s not “the” pullback we’re talking about. It’s “a” pullback.

Why Your Clients and Prospects Need You

/ by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom / 0 comments

Let’s talk some more about Mr. and Mrs. Client and why they need to invest now and with you. The whole discussion of commissions and fees is not about the question ‘what your commission is’; it’s ‘why should I pay a commission? Do I need to pay a commission or a fee when I can do this on my own? Why should I have a financial advisor?’

So when somebody says “What are your commissions? What are your fees?” I’d say “Let’s discuss the real question here, which is: do you need an advisor?”

Wisdom and Knowledge – What’s the Difference for Clients and Financial Advisors?

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This is a guest post by Don Connelly originally published on the FA Magazine website.

We are living in the Information Era. The government relinquished control of the internet in 1984 and the speed at which we could access information exploded. Each day, information becomes more easily transferable and knowledge more readily gained. Yet things are more complicated than ever.

You’d think that the more information available, the more we’d learn; and the more we’d learn, the clearer and simpler things would become. I find it ironic that the opposite is true.

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Articles by: Don Connelly