April 19, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
You never see it coming, and you may never know the reason why. A prospective client you have carefully cultivated agrees to a meeting to learn more about how you can help them. It seems to go well. Their heads were nodding up and down, and they laughed at your joke. At the end of the 30-minute meeting, you suggest the next step with an offer to follow up with them. Turning toward the door, they reply, “We’ll let you know.”
You know that’s the end of it. So, you replay it in your head, asking, “What were the red flags that soured their perception of me?”
Whether the outcome of a prospect meeting is good or bad, you should always replay it in your mind. With a positive outcome, you need to know what worked and why. For a negative outcome, it’s vital to understand what didn’t work and why. Identifying the negatives is often more difficult because it’s hard to be self-critical. But that’s where the path to self-improvement begins. To help in your diagnosis, we list the five of the most common red flags that could cause your prospects to dismiss you.
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Two Stories to Help You Explain What You Do
June 6, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
I have a thought I want you to pass on to your clients. Tell them this from me. The only people who lose weight are the people who hire trainers. People that buy equipment and put it in a house don’t use the equipment. How many times have you seen a treadmill with a neck tie or a blouse hanging on it? You’re the trainer. You make them do sit ups and you get them on the treadmill. It’s a great analogy.
Listen to this audio episode or read the transcript below to learn two more quick simple stories about advisors who were great at getting people on the treadmill.
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3 Soft Skills Advisors Need to Refine for an Immediate Connection with Prospects
May 16, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
Not to diminish the hard work, effort, and time that goes into becoming a financial advisor—few professions are as demanding—but the essential skill advisors must acquire is the ability to sell. Perhaps a more acceptable term would be “the art of persuasion.” Whichever way you want to frame it, if you have difficulty persuading or convincing people to take action, you stand little chance of success.
Of course, that’s true of just about any profession that requires changing or influencing people’s behavior. It just happens to be more challenging when selling financial advice and expecting to get paid for it. Advisors must understand that buying an intangible service requiring people to trust that the advisor can deliver that intangible value is scary for most people. It’s far less threatening to stay with the status quo and do nothing.
The trouble is, if you can’t convince people to follow you or your advice, you aren’t accomplishing anything. To overcome the inherent trust deficit and open prospects’ minds, financial advisors must constantly refine three critical soft skills, or they will have fewer chances to demonstrate their highly trained competencies.
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Put Success in Perspective, Be Humble and Believe in Yourself
March 7, 2022 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Connelly Corner / 0 comments
One of the challenges we all face is staying humble in the face of success. We work very hard to attain success. Stay humble when you do, and you’re going to be successful. I have a story I love about being humble, about putting success into perspective. It’s a story about the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Watch this video or read the transcript below to learn the story about two Alpine skiers who achieved their two, very different goals at the Olympics.
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Overcoming the Age Bias Prospects Have About Young Advisors
December 27, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments
For young financial advisors, nothing is more challenging than overcoming the age bias that older clients have against them. I hear it often from advisors who come through our training programs—that feeling as though they are viewed more like a child or grandchild than a financial advisor. It creates a perceived impression that young advisors don’t have the experience, skills, or knowledge to appreciate the circumstances of older clients, let alone guide them in making critical financial decisions.
That may be understandable and, in some cases, deserved. Older prospects are right to question a young advisor’s experience and depth of knowledge. But the problem may not be with the perceptions of older clients as much as it is with the mindset of younger advisors. Most advisors have gone through that painful period of not knowing what they need to know and feeling embarrassed to meet prospects who may sense that.
The primary difference between where they are now compared to where they were back when they knew less and lacked experience is confidence.
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3 Situations When Financial Advisors Should Use a Prospecting Script
October 4, 2021 / 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.
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To Get to “Yes” Financial Advisors Must First Get to “Why” and Stir Up Emotions
May 24, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments
What if, in every initial client meeting, your prospects would just come right out and tell you what’s important to them and what it would mean to them if you could help them? Indeed, it would make your job much easier, but then anyone could do it. The challenge is most people don’t think that way, and it’s your job as a financial advisor to help them uncover their most important issues.
But even that doesn’t go far enough because all you’ve done is uncover the “what.” People don’t act on the “what.” They act on the “why.” When fully revealed, the “why” becomes the key motivating factor. It contains the emotions that drive people to act. Your value as a financial advisor is to get people to take the actions you know will help them. If you can’t trigger the emotions behind what’s important to them, they are not likely to take action.
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The 5 Essential Qualities Financial Advisors Need to Improve Cold Call Results
May 3, 2021 / 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.
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The Importance of Your Storytelling Skills in Building Trust
March 8, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
Now and then, financial advisors must be reminded that they are in a relationship business and that what they have as a clientele is a direct by-product of trust.
The cold hard reality is that people need to trust you before they will engage with you. Especially these days, people are almost instinctively cynical, overly careful to approach others they don’t know with a heavy dose of skepticism. So, when we want to connect with any group of people, our first task must be to break through their defensive shells so we can build trust. Without trust, there can be no connection, no relationship, and no channel through which vision and ideas can flow.
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Three Stories about Trust to Use with Prospects and Clients
February 22, 2021 / by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
The most fundamental principle of building a clientele is understanding that people do business with people they like and trust. While it’s easy for many advisors to be likable, trust has to be earned—quickly and often. As an advisor, you can never lose sight of that because trust not only binds a client to you but it also enables them to follow your guidance with confidence and conviction, which is critical to their long-term success.
If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you know I believe in the power of storytelling to drive home concepts and change a client’s perspective. I offer these three stories about trust to you as an advisor to drive home the crucial role trust plays in your client relationships.
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