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Articles by: Don Connelly

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.

How Interpersonal Relationships Lead to You Being Trusted

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

How Interpersonal Relationships Lead to You Being Trusted

By now you know my belief about gathering assets. If someone likes you, trusts you and thinks you are smart, you get the assets. If another Advisor ranks higher in those categories, he or she gets the assets.

Follow the Golden Rule and you will be likable. Simplify the business so that your listener can understand every word you say and you will be perceived as smart.

Do what you say you are going to do and you will earn the other person’s trust.

Like most things in life, the solution to each of these perceptions is simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple.

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What Are The Most Important Networking Skills for Financial Advisors?

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

What Are The Most Important Networking Skills for Financial Advisors

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 Does ‘Think on Your Feet’ Mean for a Financial Advisor?

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

What Does Think on Your Feet Mean for a Financial Advisor

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

Am I oversimplifying things? - AskDON episode

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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Why Some People Choose Not to Do Business with You

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Why Choose Not to Do Business with Some Financial Advisors

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

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Every Time You Sit with a Client, Your Leadership Skills Are on Display

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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How to Use Stories and Analogies to Influence and Persuade

/ by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases, What's New / 0 comments

How to Use Stories to Influence and Persuade - for Financial Advisors

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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