FA Magazine Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

How Much Value Do You Bring as a Financial Advisor?

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What determines your value is not up to you to decide. It is left for the client to decide. And that decision is a lot simpler than you might think.

When selecting an Advisor, three things are of value to a prospective client.

That person must like the Advisor, that person must trust the Advisor and that person must think the Advisor is smart. There is very little else to factor in initially.

Prospective clients generally are not looking for more information.

Get Comfortable with the Notion that You Need to Sell in order to Grow Your Business

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Advisors approach me about coaching. Rarely are the requests about improving their selling skills. Being better organized, being more efficient and going to the next level are popular goals. But I cannot recall one instance where an Advisor said to me, “I want to be better at selling.”

I don’t think that the reason for not asking me is that every Advisor thinks he or she is a great salesperson. Rather, I think that ‘salesperson’ is an image to be avoided at all costs. To many Advisors, selling is a dirty word.

Snippets from Successful Financial Advisors

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I have the very good fortune of running a blog for Financial Advisors Magazine, the electronic version, and in case you don’t read the magazine, I want to read you a blog I once put in for them. I call it Snippets.

I spend a lot of time with Financial Advisors and not so coincidentally I am a very diligent copyist note taker. In the end of every month I sort out and save all the good stuff. I thought it might be fun to tell you some of the things I’ve heard during the said 30 days. These comments are all made in conversation; they are all snippets; yet they all resonate.

Read the post on FA Magazine or listen to the audio below.

4 Things Elite Advisors Do that Average Advisors Don’t Do

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Don Guest Authoring at... / 4 comments

This is a guest post by Don Connelly published on the website of FA Magazine earlier this week.

Elite Advisors are not born elite. They ply their craft for years, making mistakes and learning from them.

Once such mistake is to assume that numbers matter. Newer Advisors talk about the numbers because that’s the focus of our training. We have to learn our products and processes and we have to pass the tests. When we get in the field, we naturally lead with what we know.

Why Waiting for a Pullback is Not the Right Investing Strategy

/ by Don Connelly / Don Guest Authoring at..., Investing Wisdom / 0 comments

According to a preponderance of clients, the stock market is overbought. They’re going to invest, but not until the pullback takes place. What’s an advisor to do?

First, it’s not “the” pullback we’re talking about. It’s “a” pullback.

Wisdom and Knowledge – What’s the Difference for Clients and Financial Advisors?

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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.

Objection Handling – Is It Possible to Forestall Objections?

/ by Don Connelly / Don Guest Authoring at..., Prospecting / 0 comments

This is a guest post by Don Connelly, originally published on FA Magazine website.

The late Zig Ziglar observed that every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, or no trust. Which of these obstacles is a Financial Advisor likely to experience and can they be forestalled?

We can eliminate three of those obstacles as unlikely.

Why Some People Choose Not to Do Business with You

/ by Don Connelly / Don Guest Authoring at..., Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Why Choose Not to Do Business with Some Financial Advisors

This is a guest post by Don Connelly for FA Magazine. He shares his insights about the three reasons why some people choose not to do business with certain Financial Advisors. Here’s how the post goes.

I’m sure you rarely, if ever, get the chance to ask someone why he or she chose a competitor over you. If you were able to ask, you probably wouldn’t get a straight answer, anyway. People would rather lie to your face than hurt your feelings.

Building Your Business with These 12 Tips for Financial Advisors

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This is one of Don Connelly’s guest posts over at FA Magazine, giving you 12 tips how to build a better and more enjoyable business.

1) Get really good at what you do. Do the ordinary things extraordinarily well.

The Only Thing People Are Buying Is You

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This is Don Connelly’s latest guest post for FA Magazine.

I was having lunch with a friend recently. My friend ordered a Coke with his food. The waitress told him they didn’t serve Coke. Would a Pepsi do? Without hesitation my friend said yes. He didn’t care if he was drinking Pepsi or Coke. He just wanted something to drink with lunch.

Clients think like my friend thinks. They don’t care if they are drinking Pepsi or Coke. Clients want to hit their goals.

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