simplify your message Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Advisors Must Master Communicating Complex Financial Concepts in Simple Terms

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Whether planning for retirement, investing in volatile markets, or managing tax implications, clients are often presented with intricate information that can leave them overwhelmed, confused, and anxious, undermining their ability to make informed decisions.

Of all the key roles and responsibilities of a financial advisor, one of the most essential is communicating complex financial concepts into simple terms the average person can understand. This is critical to helping clients understand their options, feel confident in their decisions, and build lasting trust.

When clients clearly understand their financial plans and the reasoning behind recommendations, they’re more likely to remain engaged, ask insightful questions, and feel empowered to take ownership of the plan.

5 Common Mistakes Financial Advisors Make When Developing Their Storytelling Skills

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

Financial advisors are increasingly recognizing the power of storytelling in their practice. Storytelling helps them earn the trust of prospects, build stronger relationships with clients, simplify complex financial concepts, and inspire action. However, developing this skill comes with challenges, and many advisors make common mistakes that hinder their storytelling effectiveness. Here are five of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Conducting Client Research to Boost Prospecting Results

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

Highly successful advisors have long determined that the traditional shotgun approach to prospecting using blast emails no longer works. They have found that prospecting with a more targeted approach, focusing more narrowly on clearly defined ideal client types based on a readily identifiable market segment or niche, increases both efficiency and results. These segments or niches are identified by demographics, businesses, careers, interests, or shared financial concerns that distinguish them from others.

We’ve written about the many advantages of niche marketing, including the more efficient use of resources, the ease of establishing one’s authority within a niche, and the built-in networking apparatus of well-connected clients residing in a niche.

However, the most significant marketing advantage is the ease of conducting research to gather intelligence about your market. Through market research, you can uncover critical information enabling you to develop more effective communication methods that appeal to your target market while honing your value proposition to touch their pain points.

How to Raise Conversations Your Clients Don’t Know They Should Have

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Most clients hire a financial advisor because they expect him or her to know more than they do about planning their future. They willingly pay you to leverage your expertise to educate them and guide their financial decisions based on your understanding of their circumstances, goals, and concerns. They expect you to help them navigate obstacles that pop up unexpectedly.

Most clients don’t know what they don’t know, which is their greatest vulnerability. That means they don’t know enough to ask their financial advisor about things that could potentially impact them. If they’re left in the dark about such things, the financial advisor takes the blame when bad things happen. What is their defense when a client asks, “Why didn’t you tell me about that?”

5 Red Flags That Will Cause Your Prospects to Dismiss You

/ 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.

How to Make Sure Your Message Sticks

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices, Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments

We tend to forget most of what we’ve been told within a week, unless that message has been repeatedly reinforced. So, unless you reinforce your messages and deliver them in an interesting way, there’s little chance clients and prospects will digest your information and act on it. There are however some key ways to make sure your messages are understood and remembered.

The Five Soft Skills Financial Advisors Must Have to Succeed

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

The development of an excellent soft skillset is crucial to your success as a financial advisor. You can find technical knowledge in any book, but practical knowledge involves ‘being’ rather than ‘knowing’, ‘practicing’ rather than ‘being taught’. Soft skills are absorbed through years of experience.

To develop great soft skills, practice them every day, hone them and never give up the quest for perfection.

What’s Most Important for Client Retention?

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

What's Most Important for Customer Retention

Client loyalty is getting harder than ever to achieve. Clients are bombarded with options when it comes to financial advice and they know they can switch to another advisor in the blink of an eye if they are dissatisfied. So it’s essential to understand how to ensure your clients remain loyal and stick with you for the long term.

How to Get Your Point Across in Fewer Words

/ by Don Connelly / Presentation Skills / 0 comments

When you address clients and prospects, you are a techie talking to non-techies. There is always the threat that you will confuse your listener and we all know by now that people don’t buy what they don’t understand. Many are the Advisors who have talked themselves out of commitments.

One way to mitigate this danger is to get our message across in as few words as possible. Advisors who can do that gather a lot of assets.

If You Want to Be a Successful Advisor, Avoid These 5 Behaviors

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 2 comments

Successful advisors do what average advisors don’t do. If you want to be extraordinary you need to avoid the behaviors that are making you your own worst enemy. Study your habits. What can you do better? What should you not be doing at all?

Here are some behaviors you need to avoid if you want to achieve success…

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