March 17, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Effective communication occurs when the listener understands everything you just said. You made the complex simple. That’s not an easy thing to do.
It takes a long time and a lot of practice to become simple.
The effort is worth it. There is nothing more important to a Financial Advisor than being understood. After all, if everyone understood everything you said, you would be one of the highest paid and most influential people in the world.
Fortunately, effective communication is an acquired skill, not an innate skill.
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In this category you will find blog posts with practical tips how to better market yourself as a financial advisor.
Good Manners Will Endear You to More People than You Realize
April 3, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 1 comment
The euphemism ‘Silent Majority’ most likely dates to the 1830’s in America. It originally signified dead people, there being more dead people throughout history than living people at any moment in time. It slipped into our political vocabulary in the 20th century. Today the phrase denotes an unspecified large majority of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. There are so many things about which people simply do not speak up. One such thing is rudeness.
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Effective Communication Is an Acquired Skill
March 17, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Effective communication occurs when the listener understands everything you just said. You made the complex simple. That’s not an easy thing to do.
It takes a long time and a lot of practice to become simple.
The effort is worth it. There is nothing more important to a Financial Advisor than being understood. After all, if everyone understood everything you said, you would be one of the highest paid and most influential people in the world.
Fortunately, effective communication is an acquired skill, not an innate skill.
Read more
Optimism Is a Choice
February 24, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 1 comment
I read an interesting article that stated each of us has nearly 60,000 thoughts per waking day, one each second. We mostly think about things we have thoughts about before and many of those thoughts are negative.
Mood and memory are linked.
For whatever reason, bad thoughts seem more powerful than good thoughts. We hash over the bad thoughts and we get in a bad mood. People in bad moods think negative thoughts. We should call it a negativity loop.
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People Are Deciding about You, Not the Numbers
February 3, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 2 comments
When you are trying to convince someone to do business with you, you must earn that person’s trust. When you use charts, graphs and numbers to make your point, you are asking the person to trust the numbers. Asking someone to trust the numbers is really saying there is no need to trust you.
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Advice Is the Hardest Thing in the World to Sell
January 2, 2014 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
I’m convinced that the fastest growing industry in the world is cheap advice. From discount houses to DIY websites to blogs like this one, everybody’s got advice for us and most of it’s worth exactly what it costs, little or nothing.
That’s because it’s not advice. It’s information and information without a user’s manual is useless. There’s so much information disguised as advice being shoved our way that it’s hard to tell the good from the bad. Real advice gets lost in the shuffle.
Our advice is hard to sell precisely because there is so much information flying around falsely packaged as advice.
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What Is #1 Reason Advisors and Wholesalers Fail
December 2, 2013 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Lance Armstrong once observed that a boo is a lot louder than a cheer. He’s right. And a no is a lot louder than a yes.
Advisors (and wholesalers) who fail often do so because they don’t see enough people.
Imagine the financial planning gods coming down and granting you immunity for a year. You don’t need to rely on your skills. Every time you call for an appointment, the person says yes. Every time you ask the person to become your client, the person says yes. Every time you ask for an introduction to your clients’ friends, they give you five names and go with you on the appointments.
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Stand Apart from the Crowd
November 25, 2013 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
I have a friend who is married to one of America’s most successful professional golfers. My friend is a golf pro, but a teaching pro. He is also his wife’s coach. He knows her game so well that he can watch her on television during the day and give her his advice that night. He is a consummate pro.
One day he and I were discussing the golf swing, specifically my lousy swing. He asked me if …
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