/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
Networking is an important prospecting tool, especially for newer Advisors who have a paucity of clients. Probably the two most common ways to network are via social media or face-to-face. Both methods are effective if done correctly.
The concept of networking is not new. In fact, it is two thousand years old. It would not have survived if it didn’t work. Getting ahead in the business world has a lot more to do with who you know than what you know.
While networking is pretty straight forward, there are specific skills involved. It involves a lot more than simply handing out business cards. Like other prospecting methods, networking entails being brilliant at the basics.
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What Are The Most Important Networking Skills for Financial Advisors?
/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
Networking is an important prospecting tool, especially for newer Advisors who have a paucity of clients. Probably the two most common ways to network are via social media or face-to-face. Both methods are effective if done correctly.
The concept of networking is not new. In fact, it is two thousand years old. It would not have survived if it didn’t work. Getting ahead in the business world has a lot more to do with who you know than what you know.
While networking is pretty straight forward, there are specific skills involved. It involves a lot more than simply handing out business cards. Like other prospecting methods, networking entails being brilliant at the basics.
Read more
What Does ‘Think on Your Feet’ Mean for a Financial Advisor?
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 0 comments
An idiom is a phrase that cannot be taken literally. For anyone learning English, it must be disconcerting to hear that it’s raining cats and dogs outside. You and I know it’ll rain cats and dogs when pigs fly.
Think on your feet is just such an idiom.
Every Financial Advisor knows what it means to think and speak without special preparation. Being forced to think this way is neither fun nor comfortable. And it can lead to an awkward moment. We all wait for the train wreck when a speaker who is dependent on a teleprompter wanders off course. We all wander off course at one time or another.
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Are You Good at Dealing with Difficult Clients?
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 2 comments
Difficult clients are not unique. Every Advisor has encountered or will encounter obstreperous personalities. There are many reasons why clients become difficult. Let’s make this easy and say we are dealing with a personality clash. A decision has to be made: keep him or fire him. Let’s explore both choices.
Firing a client is difficult if you don’t like confrontation or hurting someone’s feelings.
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How to Manage Your Emotions in Difficult Situations
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
You know by now that I believe the development and use of certain soft skills contributes far more to our success than does the development and use of hard skills. Self-awareness is just such a soft skill. The importance of being aware of and controlling our emotions cannot be overstated.
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Why Some People Choose Not to Do Business with You
/ by Don Connelly / Don Guest Authoring at..., Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
This is a guest post by Don Connelly for FA Magazine. He shares his insights about the three reasons why some people choose not to do business with certain Financial Advisors. Here’s how the post goes.
I’m sure you rarely, if ever, get the chance to ask someone why he or she chose a competitor over you. If you were able to ask, you probably wouldn’t get a straight answer, anyway. People would rather lie to your face than hurt your feelings.
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Every Time You Sit with a Client, Your Leadership Skills Are on Display
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
I want to remind you that next to the family doctor, you are the most important person a family will meet. You are not a vendor. You are the person who has been chosen to lead this family to their safe retirement heaven. The burden is on them to make the sacrifices necessary to guarantee peace of mind in their later years. The burden of you is to make sure they do it.
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Building Your Business with These 12 Tips for Financial Advisors
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 0 comments
This is one of Don Connelly’s guest posts over at FA Magazine, giving you 12 tips how to build a better and more enjoyable business.
1) Get really good at what you do. Do the ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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Maximize Your Efficiency
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
Michael from Bank of America asks how many hours a week he should be working to get to a certain level. The answer lies in the productivity of his work hours.
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How to Use Stories and Analogies to Influence and Persuade
/ by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases, What's New / 0 comments
During our latest monthly webinar, held July 24, 2104, we discussed the importance of speaking in such a manner that our listener understands everything we say. It is the Advisor’s job to influence and persuade and it all begins with communicating clearly. “We want to go home and think it over” is often code-speak for “We don’t really understand you.”
When you give a good presentation full of sound advice and people choose not to act, what went wrong? Why did they choose not to do business with you? Why did you fail to move them?
There really aren’t that many possible answers to this question.
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Your Selling Skills Are a Reflection of Your Self-confidence
/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself, Prospecting / 0 comments
Would you open an account with a Financial Advisor who was nervous and unsure of himself? Neither will your prospects.
Your livelihood is dependent upon your ability to sell yourself.
How well you sell yourself is in direct proportion to your self-confidence. The more success you have, the more you believe in your abilities and the higher you go. Top tier Advisors are supremely confident in their ability to influence and persuade. They have overcome the fear of failure.
It takes self-confidence to move another person to take action.
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