Best Practices Archives - Page 5 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.

5 Ways You Should Be Asking for Feedback from Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Advisors who are in the dark about how their clients view their relationship or feel about the level of service they receive risk losing them to advisors who care about what they think. It’s not that you don’t care; it’s that your clients won’t know that you do if you don’t periodically ask them for their feedback.

Without direct and honest feedback from your clients, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. You could be perpetuating a less-than-remarkable client experience that could drive clients away. At the very least, you won’t know the reasons why you’re not getting referrals from your clients.

Want to know how you differentiate yourself? Be the advisor who demonstrates a sense of partnership and commitment to the relationship by proactively asking for your client’s feedback. When you do, it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve and grow your practice and make your clients appreciate that you value their opinion.

Here are five ways you can gather valuable insights from your clients while deepening your engagement with them.

The Best Newsletters for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

The list of traits and characteristics financial advisors must have or develop to be successful is long. We’ve discussed many here, including excellent communication skills, outstanding work ethic, uncommon optimism, persistence, and resilience, a hunger for self-improvement, and a passion for helping people achieve their goals, to name a few. While all are essential, advisors with ambitions of becoming tops in their field must also have a zest for learning and staying abreast of the news, trends, and developments that impact their business.

Four Imperatives You Must Embrace to Achieve Sustainable Growth in Your Practice

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

As you might already know, the key to achieving sustainable growth in a financial advisory practice is to focus on your core business of business development and client management. From a practice management standpoint, that requires developing business processes that enable you and your team to gain greater efficiencies while increasing productivity by doing more with less. In other words, turning your practice into a well-oiled machine.

But what about you? As the guiding force of your practice, what are you doing individually to ensure its sustainable growth? Business processes are essential for scaling your business and expanding its capacity for growth. But there are certain things only you can do to drive its growth.

Here are four imperatives financial advisors must embrace to achieve sustainable growth for themselves and their businesses.

Developing a Business Process for Your Advisory Business

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Advisors embarking on the challenge of growing an advisory business understand that the key to sustainable growth is to be able to specialize in their core business of business development and client management. However, with that growth comes increasingly complex operations in all facets of the business, which can consume resources and hinder growth.

Smaller advisory businesses are disadvantaged by the lack of scale and resources, so they must rely on clearly defined, repeatable, and well-documented business processes to optimize their resources.

Winning the “Why Do I Need a Financial Advisor” Argument

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Winning the Why Do I Need an Advisor Argument

Long before it became a field of academic study, legendary investor Benjamin Graham knew a thing or two about behavioral finance. Graham went on to say, “In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.”

For financial advisors, understanding how emotional and intellectual processes combine to influence investors’ decisions offers the opportunity to help their clients avoid costly mistakes and optimize investment outcomes.

Why It’s Critical to Have a Well-Conceived, Repeatable Advisor Onboarding Process

/ by Diana Marinova / Best Practices / 0 comments

It is well-established in the financial advisory industry that the client onboarding process is crucial to building profitable, long-term relationships. When done poorly, you’ll likely see clients heading for the exits leaving you with thinning profit margins and a tarnished reputation. For the same reasons, onboarding advisors is equally critical for financial advisors looking to […]

You Can’t Be Afraid to Fail. It’s How You Succeed.

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Who doesn’t want to be a success? It’s what people, particularly financial advisors, strive for every day. No one wants to be a failure. But did it ever occur to you that it’s virtually impossible to be a success without failing? Successful people must be very comfortable with failure because they probably fail more often than they succeed. They’re successful because they use their failures as learning experiences to propel them forward.

Yet, many people seem to have such a dysfunctional relationship with failure that they can’t see the value in it, choosing instead to avoid it by not taking the same risks that led to it. That’s not learning. That’s capitulation, which never leads to success.

Are You Working in Your Business or on Your Business? The Key to Growth Is Delegation

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Growing a successful financial advisory practice is one of the most challenging endeavors anyone can choose to undertake. The road to success is riddled with the many mistakes financial advisors make along the way, such as not prospecting consistently, not marketing themselves, or failing to provide their clients with an exceptional experience. These and other mistakes are symptomatic of a much bigger mistake many advisors make: spending too much time working in their business and not enough time working on the business.

Stop Justifying Your Fees and Start Explaining Them in the Context of What Your Prospects Value

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

The financial services world has undergone significant change in the last few years, mainly for the benefit of those seeking financial advice. They have more options, investment costs are decreasing, and they have more protections thanks to the regulators. However, for financial advisors, the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same—at least as it relates to fees. Advisors still find themselves in the unenviable position of having to withstand fee compression while, at the same time, justifying them to their clients.

Essential Working Habits to Ensure Your Success as a Financial Advisor

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 2 comments

In recent posts, we have outlined why financial advisors must master critical habits for prospecting, calling, and selling, without which success can be elusive. However, while you may identify as a financial advisor, you are, first and foremost, a businessperson. You can have all the best habits for prospecting, calling, and selling, but you need to have the vital working habits of a successful businessperson or entrepreneur to help you in the long run.

If your business lacks direction or you can’t manage your time effectively, you are essentially practicing your craft on borrowed time. Without self-discipline and a results-oriented mindset, you’ll be less likely to progress to the next level. These are just some of the working habits that, when mastered, make it possible to exercise the revenue-generating practices of prospecting, calling, and selling to the greatest extent possible with much better outcomes.

To succeed as a financial advisor, you must create a sustainable business that supports your efforts to grow your clientele. These are the crucial working habits any businessperson must master to be successful.

1 … 3 4 5 6 7 … 24