focus on the long term Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Want Your Clients to Take Their Financial Plan Seriously? Keep It Front and Center in Your Relationship

March 28, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Help Clients See the Value of Their Financial Plan

It wasn’t so long ago that clients perceived financial plans as an extension of the prospecting process to entice them to open an account and hand over their money. Many financial advisors feigned the role as a financial planner to create the perception of objectivity with the recommendations they would make. Clients received a faux leather-bound financial plan that just took up shelf space, never to be revisited by them or their advisor.

Fast forward to today, and we see an increasing number of financial advisors who are committed to a more holistic approach to working with clients, making the financial plan a critical cornerstone of their relationships. That, of course, is in response to what more and more clients are looking for in their advisor relationships—a plan that addresses the entirety of their financial life to guide them in life-critical decisions.

Why is it then that the value of a well-conceived financial plan seems to wane among clients who, further into the advisory relationship, begin to question their advisor’s advice or express disenchantment because their investments are underperforming their neighbor’s or colleagues’ portfolio? What do advisors need to do to get their clients to refocus on what’s really important?

Advisors Must be Able to Lead Clients Through Emotional Struggles

August 23, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Last year during the COVID market crash was a golden opportunity for financial advisors to demonstrate their true worth to anxious clients as a coach and a counselor. Your greatest value to your clients is being there for them during times of financial stress and anxiety. Good financial advisors are prepared to handle the fallout of a severe market decline, holding their clients’ hands, and coaching them through their anxieties.

However, few advisors are as prepared when it comes to facing their clients’ personal emotional issues that can cause even greater stress and anxiety, leading to poor financial decision-making. Life events, such as the death of a spouse or family member, divorce or family rifts, a medical crisis, a job loss, or other major life changes are common. Yet many advisors aren’t prepared to help their clients face the issue, or worse, are unable to recognize when a client is struggling emotionally.

Helping Clients Understand the Normalcy of Market Corrections

September 7, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom / 0 comments

As a financial advisor, you work closely with your clients to craft investment strategies tailored to their objectives and risk profiles, and then monitor them over time. That very well may be the easy part of your client relationship. The more significant challenge you have as an advisor is to make sure your clients stay the course with their strategy even in the midst of a steep market correction.

One of the primary responsibilities of a financial advisor is to convey to their clients that the only concern they should have about a market downturn is not how deep it falls or how long it lasts, but how they react to it. After all, no one can predict when a market correction will occur, but we know that it will. After the longest bull market in history, clients tend to forget that stock prices can go down as well as up, and that market corrections are quite normal. That confers upon advisors the responsibility of educating their clients on the inevitability of market corrections and how they should react to them.

How to Build Your Story-Benefit Matrix

May 25, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments

Last week I blogged about a useful sales tool called a story-benefit matrix, and why you should develop one for your practice. Just going through the process is beneficial: It forces you to think through a number of different ways your prospective client will benefit by working with you – and gives you an opportunity to help tell an illustrative story that will cement that case.

It’s basic “soft-skills” at work.

But it’s helpful to understand how to build one yourself, so let me help you with that.

8 Stories to Help You Build Trust and Open Accounts

May 4, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments

As you might know already, I’m a big believer in telling a story.

As I write this, it’s presidential campaign season. The candidates are all about telling their stories. They want to get their preferred narratives out there, in front of voters. Successful candidates are very well rehearsed on these stories. They constantly make references to these stories, in the effort to brand themselves, differentiate themselves from other candidates, and inoculate themselves against attacks from competing candidates and their staffs.

Why?

Because it works!

It works in financial services, too.

In fact, it works so well that I don’t want you to have a single story defining you. I want you to have at least eight! And I want you to know them cold.

Your Success Depends on The Strength of Your Client Relationships

November 6, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Client relationships are the cornerstone of your business. They must be strong enough to weather bad market conditions and to ensure clients stay invested for the long term.

Here are some things you should do to maintain a secure ongoing partnership with your clients, regardless of market conditions.

3 Things You Should Never Do in Volatile Markets

October 30, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

It’s your job as a financial advisor to stop your clients acting on emotion. You need to get across the fact that the financial plan you created is valid in all types of markets. To manage that, there are some things you should never do…

Four Common Client Objections and How to Counter Them

September 11, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Presentation Skills / 0 comments

There’s so much uncertainty surrounding investing that people postpone the decision. Clients and prospects can think of a multitude of reasons not to invest: Whether it’s tax time, retirement looks too far away or they want to buy a new car or kitchen.

However, when clients say they’ll ‘think it over’ it doesn’t mean they’ve found a good reason to delay investing; perhaps it means they don’t trust you enough yet, perhaps they don’t understand what you said or perhaps you simply haven’t convinced them to act. So how do you get them to do the right thing and start securing their financial futures?

Here are some common objections you’ll face – and how to answer them.

Weekly Focus: Goal Setting

January 2, 2017 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 1 comment

The beginning of a given year is the time to rewrite our goals, our mission statement and our business plan. For some of us that will involve a major overhaul and for some of us it will involve a tweak. For all of us, it will be a thought-provoking experience. Goal setting comes first. Decide what you want to accomplish and write it down. Set a date by which you will accomplish each goal. If you were charged with running a twelve-minute mile and nobody posted a finish line, you would have no way of knowing if you succeeded. It’s no different with business goals.

Why Financial Advisors Must Embrace Prospecting

December 21, 2015 / by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 1 comment

Prospecting is the one crucial marketing activity you need to undertake in order to identify and attract new clients.

New clients will not fall into your lap by accident. If people don’t know who you are, they will never understand what you can do for them. If you don’t make prospecting a habit you will neither achieve success in terms of your own goals, nor will you be able to help others achieve theirs. So rather than dreading the ‘prospect’ of prospecting, see it for what it is: the backbone of your business.

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