cold calling Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Changing Negative Perceptions and Attitudes as a Financial Advisor

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Most people become financial advisors because it is one of the more rewarding careers, indeed in terms of monetary rewards, but also working in the service of others to help them achieve financial security and long-term prosperity. However, many advisors struggle with aspects of their job that can lead to self-doubt, hesitation, and guilt.

These negative emotions often stem from deep-rooted perceptions and attitudes that can negatively impact client relationships and hinder professional growth. For example, for experienced advisors who become good at what they do, the job gets easier—almost too easy.

How to Get Your First Client as a Financial Advisor

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

All financial advisors start in the same place—with no clients. Getting that first client (who’s not a relative) is a significant hurdle but not insurmountable. And, as many successful advisors will tell you, once you clear that first hurdle, it’s off to the races.

While getting your first client can be a challenge, you can succeed with the right skills, a solid game plan, and a hefty dose of persistence.

5 Essential Lead Generation Tools for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

A common mistake many advisors make is to look to lead generation as a short-term solution to a dwindling pipeline, with bursts of activities such as cold calls, direct mail, email blasts, or scheduling webinars. While these can sometimes work to fill the void temporarily, they can be very time-consuming, inefficient, and unpredictable.

To ensure a constant flow of qualified leads, lead generation must be built into your daily practice as a machine continuously attracting leads to your pipeline. Fortunately, with digital technology tools, generating qualified leads is easier than ever.

Here are the essential tools available to any advisor seeking to create a systematic process for generating non-stop qualified leads:

Your Biggest Prospecting Mistake: Calling Prospects Before They’re Ready

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

If you’ve been in this business for any length of time—one day to ten years or more—you know one thing to be an absolute certainty, that prospecting is your lifeblood. You understand the critical importance of filling up your pipeline and keeping it full of qualified leads that can be continuously converted into qualified prospects. But to identify someone as a qualified prospect, you have to contact them. So, you make the phone call.

If you don’t reach them the first time, you call back in a few days. After a third and fourth try, you dare to leave a voice message. Nothing. So, you recycle them in your CRM for a call two or three months from now. Meanwhile, your potential prospect has blocked future calls. Your CRM is now full of candidates who have refused and will continue to refuse to take your call. Where does that leave you?

If you are still counting them as potential qualified prospects, you are probably deluding yourself and diluting your pipeline with people who have no desire to talk with you. But what was your big mistake?

5 Cold Calling Mistakes Financial Advisors Must Avoid to Improve Results

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

For many financial advisors, cold calling does not play a dominant part in their marketing plans. Many feel it can be replaced by other prospecting methods, such as email campaigns, social media networking, or trade shows. But would it surprise you to know that cold calling still generates better results than those other methods? When you ask advisors why they avoid cold calling, you often get responses like, “It’s not working for me,” or “It’s a waste of time,” or “no one wants to talk to me on the phone.”

No one ever said cold calling is easy. But if your efforts aren’t producing results, have you ever considered it’s not the method, but how you’re executing it that’s not working?

3 Situations When Financial Advisors Should Use a Prospecting Script

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

If you’re like most financial advisors, you probably started out with a phone script, whether calling strangers, LinkedIn contacts or referrals. Prospecting scripts are critical for new advisors because they help them keep organized and stay on track for the brief time they have in that first interaction. No doubt, using phone scripts can serve inexperienced advisors well if they work at it. They can also make experienced advisors even more effective when used in certain circumstances.

The 5 Essential Qualities Financial Advisors Need to Improve Cold Call Results

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Prospecting / 2 comments

No one ever said cold calling was easy, but some people have an easier time of it than others. Skills have a lot to do with that. But sometimes, learning skills is not enough.

The most successful cold callers share certain qualities and traits that give them an edge over and above the skills they acquire. We’ve discussed some of these traits in past articles, including positivity, perseverance, tenacity, and resilience. These traits are critical because they can keep you in the game in the face of constant rejection. However, successful cold callers possess other essential qualities and attributes that help them up their game.

Let’s have a look at five such essential qualities and traits.

Financial Advisors: What You Should Be Doing During the Holidays

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

First things first: Use the Holidays to spend time with friends and family. That’s what you want for your clients; That’s what I want for you. Recharge your batteries, and remember why you’re working so hard: To provide a better life for the people you love.

Besides: The immediate return on investment (ROI) of generic cold calling techniques tends to decline after Thanksgiving. Not that it doesn’t pay off eventually. I’m a hard-core prospector, and I hope you are, too. Smart prospecting always pays off in the long run. But it’ll take a little longer to pay off at the end of the year, because you’ll get a lot of people saying, “call me again after the Holidays.”

So, if you’re going to take some time off to be with the family, the Holidays are as good a time to do it as any!

Then, here are a few more holiday marketing ideas if you’re spending time at the office after all.

Communication in a Post-Pandemic World: How to Connect with Prospective and Current Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

All of us are affected by the coronavirus and the shutdowns. The virus is slowly running its course but social distancing will be with us for a very long time to come.

That means most of us are going to have to change the way we market and sell our services. “Meet and greet” networking events will be out of the picture for a while. When they do come back, they’ll be different. They may look more like ‘show and tells’ with slide shows than mingling sessions.

Even walking into businesses and asking for the owner is going to be fraught. The small ‘handshake’ ritual that has been with us since antiquity will be changed as we figure out our new forms of etiquette and social conventions.

So, what’s the best path forward?

There Are Three Main Ways to Gather New Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

There are three main ways to gather new clients and grow your business. To excel, you should put your effort into mastering all three of them.

1. Acquiring new clients from existing clients
Referrals are by far and away the best way to gather new clients. And the only way you can earn referrals is by becoming referable – which will only happen once your clients feel you’re delivering them a 5-star service.

Clients won’t refer you until you become part of their inner circle, when you become someone they like and trust on both a personal and professional level.

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