Best Practices Archives - Page 4 of 24 - Don Connelly & Associates

In this category, we will share stories and practical tips for financial advisors and consultants which have proven to be best practices throughout the years.

How Financial Advisors Can Take Control Over Their Time

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As a financial advisor, your most valuable resource is your time. If you are not in control of how you spend your time, then you are not in control of your results. Controlling your time and injecting your schedule with the right mix of high-payoff activities is vital to achieving your goals.

However, time is a diminishing resource, which is why it’s so valuable yet so challenging to manage. Advisors must find a way to maximize their critical high-payoff activities, such as client interactions, prospect meetings, and prospecting, while allocating sufficient time for other essential activities that need to get done, such as administrative tasks, marketing, and planning. Advisors must also be able to allocate adequate time for professional and personal development and ensure there’s enough left over for a healthy work-life balance.

Why Financial Advisors Quit

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It’s estimated that nine advisors out of ten don’t last three years in the industry. That seems high for a career that offers so much promise and potential. Most people come into the business checking all the appropriate boxes for having what it takes. Still, when you consider the gap between reality and expectations of fledgling financial advisors, it begins to make sense why most choose to leave the business.

To put it bluntly, not everyone is cut out for a career as a financial advisor, even for those who do check all the boxes. However, with a better understanding of why many financial advisors quit the business, you can beat the odds by avoiding that fate.

The reasons why financial advisors quit are varied, but here are some of the most common.

Why Financial Advisors Need a Coach

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For challenging endeavors in which people seek to achieve a level of performance beyond their current capacity – such as sports, weight loss, or running a business – they have a better chance of getting over the top by working with a coach. Even successful business executives and sports figures recognize the significant gap that separates a plan from action, theory from practice, and activity from results.

For most people, it often takes an external force to push them beyond their comfort level. That’s what a coach does. The top athletes in the world hire a team of coaches because they know they can’t get to the next level without them. In complex and vital endeavors, we could all use a coach to keep us detached from our emotions and accountable to our goals when our discipline fails.

Ask any professional athlete, corporate executive, or entrepreneur why they hire a coach, and they’ll tell you they want to increase their earnings by improving their performance. It’s no different for financial advisors.

5 Ways Financial Advisors Can Establish Credibility and Build Trust

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We’ve made no secret of the fact that a trust deficit exists between the public and the financial services industry. Advisors, new and experienced, must work consciously and deliberately every day to overcome it. The challenge for advisors is they could be the most trustworthy person in the world, but without credibility, there can be no trust.

There could be trust, but it might only be fleeting without proof that it’s genuine. That’s where credibility comes in. The building blocks of trust include honesty, transparency, reliability, consistency, competence, empathy, authenticity, and vulnerability—traits that, when demonstrated by actions, create credibility. An advisor’s credibility is bolstered even more when both parties feel they benefit mutually with a vested interest in each other’s success.

Here are five ways advisors can establish credibility by demonstrating the building blocks of trust.

5 Scenarios When Advisors Should Fire Clients with Conflict of Interest

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We’ve posted several times on the topic of conflicts of interest created by financial advisors when their objectivity may be compromised, and their interests are not necessarily aligned with their client’s best interests. We talked about the harm it can cause to the advisory relationship. Financial advisors caught up in ethical dilemmas, whether intentional or not, must be ready to take corrective action to save the relationship and keep the trust of their clients.

But what about when the tables are turned, and the client creates a conflict of interest or ethical dilemma? It happens more than you might think—when a client’s personal interests or values don’t align with their advisor’s. The conflict may not be egregious or illegal, but even if it just rubs you the wrong way, it might be time to cut the client loose.

Twelve Quick Suggestions for Building a Better Business

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Allow me to give you 12 suggestions – things I’ve learned over the years. Watch this video episode or read the transcript below to learn these 12 ways to build a better business.

Control Is Important for People Over 60

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There’s a subtlety about getting old that really concerns people and we don’t talk about it enough. That’s loss of control, loss of being able to control their lives. I know I went through it with my mother when she became too old to drive.
She was driving years before myself and my two brothers were born. To her, her driver’s license was not a privilege. It was a right. And for us to say as her children, ‘You shouldn’t be driving’, it’s loss of control. She freaked out and it infuriated her. I don’t blame her. If someone does it to me someday, I’m going to go nutty also. But we’re all afraid of losing control.
I don’t care if someone has a million dollars or $1. Rich people are poor people with money. We’ve all got the same worries about losing control of our lives and letting other people make our decisions. Listen to this audio episode or read the transcript below to learn about losing control, Frank Luntz, the pollster, and one of his books.

Top 5 Critical Acquired Skills Financial Advisors Need for Success

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There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the only skill you needed to succeed in financial services was how to sell. The business of selling investments was almost entirely transactional, and all a financial advisor needed to do was shake the bushes for prospects and close them on a product sale. It was not easy by any means, and only the most tenacious advisors survived.

Certainly, that required some skill, but most were learned through memorizing scripts and drilling on closing techniques. The rest was all about persistence in dialing the phone.

Fast forward to today, and the game has changed drastically. With compensation coming largely from recurring revenue from assets under management or planning fees, advisors have had to develop an entirely new skill set. Tenaciousness, persistence, dogged determination, and knowing how to sell are still essential, but they take a back seat to more critical skills needed to succeed in the business today. Here are five such acquired skills you need to master.

Overcoming Information Overload: What Advisors Can Do to Help Their Clients

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Living in the digital world, with its instantaneous access to information, has made us smarter and more empowered. In many ways, it has leveled the playing field for clients who now have access to much of the same information once only available to investment professionals. Information is so highly valued that it is churned out 24/7, accessible on any number of devices people carry around. For clients especially, this should be a good thing, right?

The barrage of headlines and hype around market events often leads to behavioral mistakes, like following the panicky herd over the cliff during a market selloff or frantically trying to buy into the market after a massive rally. Studies show it is the primary reason why investors consistently underperform the market.

Why Mediation Skills Matter for Financial Advisor Success

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When most people think of mediation and negotiation, it typically refers to lawyers or third parties who facilitate dialogue between two or more parties to help them reach an agreement. In practice, financial advisors sometimes find themselves in the same position, having to resolve conflicts between a client’s family members or within their advisory team, where it’s essential to find win-win solutions.

Disagreements about money are common among married couples. Money conflicts are often rooted more deeply in people’s attitudes and beliefs about money, or, in some cases, money is not even the primary issue. However, in almost all cases, it involves two or more people who don’t know how to engage in productive financial conversations.

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