clients relationship Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Financial Advisor Do’s and Don’ts During Extreme Market Volatility

/ by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom / 0 comments

Financial advisors play a vital role in helping clients achieve their most important financial goals. But where they really earn their fees is during times like these, when helping clients navigate the choppy waters of extreme market volatility. Clients look to their advisors to guide them through scary times and reassure them that everything will be okay.

Emotions run high when the market turns volatile. When stressed, humans instinctively want to do something and take some kind of action to reduce or eliminate the threat. That’s when mistakes typically occur. The value of a financial advisor rises in direct proportion to the anxiety levels of their clients, who look at volatile market swings as a threat to their financial security. The critical role of financial advisors is to keep their clients from making costly behavioral mistakes. During periods of extreme market volatility, there are some things advisors must do and things they should avoid doing to maximize their value to their clients. Here are a few.

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.

A Simple Story – Financial Advisor’s Best Friend

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments

Simple Stories – Financial Advisor’s Best Friend

Being misunderstood may be funny in burlesque, but it’s not funny when you’re trying to make a living as a Financial Advisor. There is nothing more important to an Advisor than communicating clearly.

The safest and surest way to communicate in our business is to make your message as simple as possible, to make the unfamiliar familiar. Stories and analogies do that better than anything else. They allow you to make your point concisely and they make people feel comfortable.

Make Sure You Are Not Just Moving, but Moving in The Right Direction

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, What's New / 0 comments

Don Connelly Center Stage with Brian Church - Moving in the Right Direction

Brian Church, business consultant and author, was our special guest on the recent April 30, 2014 Webinar. Participants from around the globe watched and listened as Brian put forth his ideas on how Financial Advisors can and must keep their businesses, their ideas and their client relationships moving in the right direction.

We must focus on LIFT, Brian’s term for growth; bettering our delivery, making the best use of our time, and growing our revenue through thick and thin. As fees continue to get compressed, we must increase the value of what we offer to the public.

Your Clients Look to You for Leadership

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Leadership Skills for Financial Advisors

The more uncertain the times, the more certainty clients want from you. They want you and they expect you to guide them to their goals. Like it or not, you are depended upon for your leadership skills. This may be unfair to you.

You weren’t taught leadership in training.

Nonetheless, the role has been thrust upon you.

Care More than People Expect You to Care

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

When people get poor service, they are not the least bit surprised.

People no longer expect good service except in the very finest of establishments, places where they willingly pay a lot in exchange for that good service. Mediocrity is the new standard.

That opens an enormous door for you. Once people get used to mediocrity, anything above mediocrity stands out.

Think like a Lifer – Being a Financial Advisor Is a Career, Not a Job

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

If anybody asks, you don’t have a job. You have a career. Think that way. Think like a lifer. You are here to stay.

A job involves the pursuit of money. A career involves the pursuit of a lifelong ambition.

A job is something you have to do. A career is something you love to do.

Jobs come and go. Careers last a lifetime.

Two Things Never Change for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Financial Advisors - Focus on Twi Things

As a Financial Advisor, you share a common concern with the wholesalers who call on you. You don’t control your distribution and they don’t control theirs. You can’t force your clients to act any more than a wholesaler can force you to act. As well, neither you nor the wholesaler has control over the landscape. Most of what affects how and what you do is in some else’s hand, be it the stock market, the economy or interest rates. And most of what affects you is in a constant state of change.

How Valuable Are You?

/ by Don Connelly / Presentation Skills / 0 comments

Doing your job, even doing it well, will not set you apart. You will stand apart when you are known for doing more than is expected of you. Every Advisor’s wish is to be highly valued by his or her clients. How, then, do we make the relationship valuable in the eyes of the client?