February 6, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
For financial advisors, there’s nothing like the thrill of signing a new client. But it doesn’t take very long in the business to realize that, without prospecting, those thrills can be few and far between. While signing new clients is the opportunity all advisors relish, they must first create those opportunities, which can only be done through continuous prospecting.
Most advisors consider prospecting to be the most challenging aspect of their work. The challenge for many is doing it consistently and effectively enough to produce sufficient opportunities. For some advisors, prospecting is an afterthought, only becoming necessary when their pipeline dries up. But with the typical lead-to-prospect conversion process lasting as many as six months, that could mean weeks or months before signing a new client.
Successful advisors know that the key to sustainable growth is a constantly replenished pipeline through persistent prospecting. The only way that happens is by building solid prospecting habits.
Here are the essential success habits advisors must develop to become effective and consistent prospectors.
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How Newer Financial Advisors Can Build a Solid Client Base
July 10, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
There’s never been a better time to build a financial advisory practice. More people than ever are clamoring for quality, objective financial advice to guide critical life decisions. It’s also a very challenging time for newer financial advisors as the competition for quality prospects is fierce.
However, unlike fledgling financial advisors of yesteryear who worked with little more than a reverse phone directory to find clients, advisors building a practice today have the advantage of years of hindsight along with some cool technology to get them over the proverbial hump.
Rather than applying a dated “all of the above” approach to prospecting that included endless cold calls, direct mail, and even blast emails, newer financial advisors can systematically and incrementally build a solid client base using a proven marketing and sales framework fit for the digital age.
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Four Imperatives You Must Embrace to Achieve Sustainable Growth in Your Practice
June 19, 2023 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
As you might already know, the key to achieving sustainable growth in a financial advisory practice is to focus on your core business of business development and client management. From a practice management standpoint, that requires developing business processes that enable you and your team to gain greater efficiencies while increasing productivity by doing more with less. In other words, turning your practice into a well-oiled machine.
But what about you? As the guiding force of your practice, what are you doing individually to ensure its sustainable growth? Business processes are essential for scaling your business and expanding its capacity for growth. But there are certain things only you can do to drive its growth.
Here are four imperatives financial advisors must embrace to achieve sustainable growth for themselves and their businesses.
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3 Ways to Boost the Promotional Power of a Marketing Resume
November 21, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
A marketing resume can be a very potent tool because it can be used in unlimited number circumstances—at networking events, canvassing businesses, social events, speaking events, or anywhere you would normally hand out business cards. But you must be thoughtful about who exactly should receive your marketing resume. If your value proposition is too broad (trying to be everything to everybody) it may not resonate with anyone because it doesn’t differentiate you.
Here are three tips on how to get the most promotional power out of your marketing resume.
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Nail the First Meeting with a Prospective Client: Address What Your Prospects Want to Know
July 18, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, Prospecting / 0 comments
It takes a lot of time, patience, and effort to move a prospect through the funnel to the point when they finally agree to meet with you. For every prospect that makes it that far probably six to nine fall by the wayside. That makes that first meeting ever so crucial. There’s a lot that must be accomplished. It has to go perfectly. There’s a minimal margin for error.
Every advisor has their own formula for constructing a perfect prospect meeting. It invariably includes a polished presentation and ample opportunities to present oneself as a likable, competent professional.
However, ensuring that first meeting is a success comes down to how you structure it to address all the prospect’s questions and concerns. They’re meeting with you to find out who you are and why they should work with you. They need the answers to very specific questions on their mind even though they may not ask them. So, why not structure the meeting around what your prospects really want to know?
Here are a few such questions they are asking themselves.
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Your Biggest Prospecting Mistake: Calling Prospects Before They’re Ready
December 13, 2021 / 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?
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Using Client Personas to Attract Your Ideal Client
March 1, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
Most financial advisors are familiar with the concept of creating an “ideal client profile” used to identify the type of prospects they want to target. However, that may not go far enough to attract and directly engage with digitally savvy high net-worth investors in the digital age. Emerging-affluent millennials, in particular, are cautious about who they engage with if they can’t see what’s in it for them.
In a digitally wired world, financial advisors need to be able to identify with their target market and communicate in a way they can identify with you. That requires taking the ideal client profile to the next level by digging deeper into who they are, what they do, how they think and communicate, and why they might want to engage with someone like you.
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How to Choose Your Specialty as a Financial Advisor
February 3, 2020 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
The financial services market is becoming more complex and more complex every day. Everybody needs a focus. And those with focused practices are better able to serve their clients. None of us can be all things to all people so it’s important to specialize in the kind of advice you give.
But do you know how to choose your specialty as a Financial Advisor?
There are two key considerations – both equally important: Your market, and your passions.
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5 Risks You Run If You Grow Your Practice Too Fast
November 18, 2019 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
It’s natural to strive to grow your business, but too rapid a growth can bring with it a host of problems. By taking on too many clients and ‘running before you can walk’ you might damage your practice in the long run.
“The fuel of persistence is patience, the ability to tolerate delays while persisting.”
Elite advisors all share an important trait – that of patience. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. If you don’t see that success requires time and effort, you will remain at a mediocre level.
Here are five consequences of attempting to grow your practice too fast.
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Best Target Markets for Financial Advisors: How to Choose The Best One for You
November 11, 2019 / by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments
There’s no ‘one size fits all’ target market for advisors. A market that may be perfect for one advisor may be a poor fit for another. You need to narrow down to the best target market for you, based on your personal background, specialty, knowledge, interests, social networks and so on.
By identifying your perfect niche you’ll find it far easier to differentiate your practice and set yourself up as the ‘go-to’ expert.
If you’re struggling to identify the ‘right niche’ here are a few ways to get started.
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