/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
Not to diminish the hard work, effort, and time that goes into becoming a financial advisor—few professions are as demanding—but the essential skill advisors must acquire is the ability to sell. Perhaps a more acceptable term would be “the art of persuasion.” Whichever way you want to frame it, if you have difficulty persuading or convincing people to take action, you stand little chance of success.
Of course, that’s true of just about any profession that requires changing or influencing people’s behavior. It just happens to be more challenging when selling financial advice and expecting to get paid for it. Advisors must understand that buying an intangible service requiring people to trust that the advisor can deliver that intangible value is scary for most people. It’s far less threatening to stay with the status quo and do nothing.
The trouble is, if you can’t convince people to follow you or your advice, you aren’t accomplishing anything. To overcome the inherent trust deficit and open prospects’ minds, financial advisors must constantly refine three critical soft skills, or they will have fewer chances to demonstrate their highly trained competencies.
Read more
3 Soft Skills Advisors Need to Refine for an Immediate Connection with Prospects
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
Not to diminish the hard work, effort, and time that goes into becoming a financial advisor—few professions are as demanding—but the essential skill advisors must acquire is the ability to sell. Perhaps a more acceptable term would be “the art of persuasion.” Whichever way you want to frame it, if you have difficulty persuading or convincing people to take action, you stand little chance of success.
Of course, that’s true of just about any profession that requires changing or influencing people’s behavior. It just happens to be more challenging when selling financial advice and expecting to get paid for it. Advisors must understand that buying an intangible service requiring people to trust that the advisor can deliver that intangible value is scary for most people. It’s far less threatening to stay with the status quo and do nothing.
The trouble is, if you can’t convince people to follow you or your advice, you aren’t accomplishing anything. To overcome the inherent trust deficit and open prospects’ minds, financial advisors must constantly refine three critical soft skills, or they will have fewer chances to demonstrate their highly trained competencies.
Read more
Five Reasons Advisors Needn’t Fear Technology
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
People are becoming increasingly adept at – and comfortable with – interacting with computers. This is fueling the debate around the merits of automated versus face-to-face financial advice. In reality, there’s no reason why both forms of communication can’t happily co-exist.
Technology can be a powerful aid to advisors when it comes to prospecting, building and maintaining relationships but it cannot replace the job of a full-service advisor. Here’s why.
Read more
Convincing Your Clients to Sacrifice for a Reward They Can’t Visualize
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
I am convinced the hardest thing in the world to sell is advice, especially when the reward for following said advice is so far down the road it can’t be visualized. “Trust me” is an understatement.
Convincing others to settle for delayed gratification is a challenge you face every day.
You must establish such a high level of trust with people that they allow themselves to be helped. You have to make them comfortable enough to tell you their goals and their dreams. You have to enable them to see themselves attaining those goals.
Read more
Wisdom and Knowledge – What’s the Difference for Clients and Financial Advisors?
/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 0 comments
This is a guest post by Don Connelly originally published on the FA Magazine website.
We are living in the Information Era. The government relinquished control of the internet in 1984 and the speed at which we could access information exploded. Each day, information becomes more easily transferable and knowledge more readily gained. Yet things are more complicated than ever.
You’d think that the more information available, the more we’d learn; and the more we’d learn, the clearer and simpler things would become. I find it ironic that the opposite is true.
Read more
Advice Is the Hardest Thing in the World to Sell
/ 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.
Read more