You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Hey, financial advisors. This is another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. My name is James Pollard. I am the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com. I've been helping financial advisors get more clients since 2015 and I'm pretty darn good at it, but you don't have to take my word for it. Here's something a financial advisor told me a few days ago. [00:53.4]
“James, I'm dropping you this note to let you know that you have been a huge influence on my career. I want to thank you for doing office hours for Inner Circle members. It was helpful, and even though I didn't engage much, it was still worthwhile to hear you walk other advisors through their challenges. I hope you don't mind if I'm a fly on the wall for these things.”
Thank you for that. I appreciate it and, yeah, I recently started offering monthly office hours exclusively for Inner Circle Newsletter subscribers. On the second Tuesday of every month, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I hang out in a Zoom room with my camera on and my microphone on, ready to help financial advisors with whatever they need.
For instance, during the first office hours, we had some great discussions about headlines that work for getting attention online, including a pretty awesome success story about a headline that more than tripled or quadrupled conversions, I don't quite remember. This one thing made the entire office hours worth it for those in attendance. This guy, and I think it was in the first 10 minutes, he said, “Look, I had this headline. It got, for example, 37 sign-ups, and then I used the headline that you recommended in one of the newsletters and it got 156 sign-ups,” something like that. It just made it worth it for everyone in attendance. They could take that one thing and run with it. [02:07.3]
We talked about email marketing, which makes sense, because I am arguably the best email marketer in the financial advice industry. We talked about LinkedIn marketing, including exactly what I would do if I only had 20 minutes per day to allocate to the platform.
We talked about landing page design. Two financial advisors, not just one, two financial advisors shared their landing pages with me, which was pretty awesome, and everybody there got to see these landing pages and what I would do to make them a little bit better. They could see screenshots of what we were doing, why I recommended certain things. It was just cool.
We talked about online ads. I even logged into my online ads account, my Facebook account, specifically, and took a screenshot showing what to do, how to do it, and more. If you were on these office hours, you got to see exactly what to do. We also talked about direct mail. I think direct mail is highly underrated, and I shared one of my favorite resources for jacking up direct mail response rates. It was an awesome office hours. I'm so glad that I am doing these now. [03:04.5]
One of the reasons why I wanted to do these office hours was because I wanted to be able to help financial advisors right there on the spot. “Do you have a problem with your landing page? If so, let me see it.” “Are you trying something new on LinkedIn? Let's explore it together.” Sometimes it's easier, faster, and more beneficial to have someone help you right then and there, just do the thing for me. It's one thing to learn about a concept in an email or a podcast episode like this, or, heck, even the newsletter itself. It's another thing entirely to have someone tell you, “Do this, not that,” live and on screen.
Second, I wanted to let advisors learn from each other instead of just for me. I'm incredibly thankful that we got to hear advisors talk about what was working and what wasn't working for them. We can shorten so many learning curves together this way and save so much time, energy and effort. I love the collaboration. I want advisors to help each other. I don't want it to just be about me, because, third, it's a great way to build real relationships with people. [04:01.1]
Seeing familiar faces and names, and sharing experiences and just talking about life, and we talked about Lord of the Rings, and we talked about different hobbies and doing tours as a Rum Runner. It's just different things. I just get to know people, I love that. There are so many marketers, gurus, coaches and consultants who hide behind the screens and never truly engage with people who support them. I don't want to be one of those people. I want to be able to help however I can and serve them at the highest level.
I wanted to start this episode sharing this with you, because this episode is all about reducing skepticism, and this is one of the best ways to reduce skepticism. It's all about showing people that you are the real deal, that you are truly there for them.
I'll tell you another little story. I consider a man named Gary Halbert to be the greatest marketer of all time. I have learned so much from him, and I'll gladly give credit where credit is due, I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for Gary Halbert's influence on me. [04:58.8]
Gary used to promote himself in a lot of ways, a lot of the typical ways that people would promote themselves back in the 1980s and 1990s, by the way. He would send direct mail. He would network. He would get referrals. He would go to events. He would do all of the stuff that people did to promote themselves.
He was primarily a copywriter, so he would write advertisements and create marketing campaigns for people. He wrote in a bunch of different industries, ranging from weight loss to finance, and just different industries, golf, I believe, the stock market promotions, like trading options. He was that good. He could make stuff work in multiple industries. I don't think people truly appreciate how good you have to be in order to make that work.
But like with anything else, prospective clients sometimes viewed him with skepticism. He could literally pull out a stack of winners that he wrote and say, “I did this. I did this. I did this. Oh, and this, too, and this, and, yes, this and this and this,” and people would still remain skeptical. I actually identify with Gary much more now than ever, because there's a segment of the financial advisor population that remains skeptical of me, even when I'm like, Do you see these results? Are you seeing what I'm seeing? I'm sharing this and this and this, and I did this and this campaign and this, and they will still stay skeptical. [06:16.0]
But something interesting happened one day. Gary threw this event, I think it was in Key West, and he charged for it. People paid a bunch of money to attend, and I don't know if you've ever been to Key West, but it's kind of difficult to get to. If you're in Florida, you have to drive all the way down and it takes hours to get there, and if you take a flight, the airport is really tiny. Even today, it's tiny. I imagine, back then it was even worse, which means it wasn't very convenient for people to attend.
When the people finally got there, Gary had no lectures planned. He had no scripts, no presentations, nothing. Instead, he decided to do hot seats. This is where people from the audience were put in, quote-unquote, “hot seats.” That's what they're called just in the marketing industry, and I guess in other industries, sure, they're called hot seats. They were put in these hot seats where they could ask Gary questions about their situations and receive direct, often intense feedback on their work, strategy, and sometimes their entire business approaches. [07:15.1]
Now, at the time, a few other marketers who gave elaborate presentations and speeches, they hated the idea of hot seats. They weren't hating on Gary specifically, but they just didn't like the idea. They thought it was lazy. They figured the value came from the work they put into whatever speech or presentation they were giving. No, that was wrong. The value came from the help that the people received.
In hindsight, this seems so obvious. I mean, of course, Gary Halbert's hot seats were more valuable than generic presentations, because people got direct, actionable advice tailored to their specific situations. What ended up happening was that, according to Gary, he got way more copywriting and consulting clients this way, meaning, far more people wanted to hire him when he did things this way, when he was doing the hot seats, than when he did some elaborate presentation. [08:08.8]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
This was a fascinating revelation for him, because he had been schooled in a way of thinking that had a traditional sales approach where you slowly built credibility and rapport, and then segued into a close and handled objections and all that, then you tried to close again. Lots of marketers and copywriters think this way, and to an extent, rightly so, because it can work and it does work. Heck, I use that process all the time.
These hot seats sped up that process into warp speed, because in mere minutes—these hot seats were not very long. They were just a few minutes long for each audience member—in mere minutes, Gary was able to show people that he understood their situations and he could actually help them. He didn't have to do some weird song and dance. He didn't have to go through any strange rituals in order to get people to trust him. Instead, he got people to ask him questions about their situations and he helped them. Whoa, what a concept, right? [10:06.2]
That's kinda sorta what I'm doing with these office hours, except I'm not trying to get them to hire me as consulting clients or the financial advisors who attend. I'm just using the concept of these hot seats as a way to get skeptical financial advisors off the fence, because, truthfully, I am trying to take away all possible excuses for not getting involved in my world. I am also trying to make it as close to guaranteed as possible for financial advisors to get a ridiculous return on investment, and if I am right there helping you, telling you exactly what to do and why, then it should be pretty easy for you to make your investment back many times over.
Of course, big disclaimer, your mileage may vary. Results are not guaranteed. But, I mean, think about it logically. You could literally say, “James, this is what I'm doing in my business. What can I do to improve it?” If I help you improve it, you should get better results. Duh. If that means more leads, more appointments and more clients, then you should make more money. That is my goal, because I get paid when you get paid. If I don't help you make more money, then you wouldn't pay me. It's that simple. [11:08.3]
So, that is the first big secret for reducing your prospects’ skepticism. Sometimes they just need to see that you can help them specifically. Now, the big advantage that you should have over Gary Halbert, yes, that's right, you should have a huge advantage over Gary, despite him being the greatest marketer of all time, in my opinion, you should have a specific niche market. Gary didn't have one of those. But if you can structure your marketing in such a way where it's obvious you work with certain types of people, then they should be more likely to work with you.
In my case, if I have helped 1,000 financial advisors get more clients with a particular marketing strategy, then you have to be pretty darn narcissistic or downright foolish to believe that you are somehow different from the 1,000 financial advisors who came before you. Yes, please, please be my guest, tell me how you are so special and you are so unique that I can't possibly help you. [12:01.8]
Gary didn't have that. He had all sorts of people in his audiences from all sorts of backgrounds, but if he could make it work with that audience, then you can almost certainly make it work with a niche market. Again, I am not telling you to go do hot seats. That is the tactic. The strategy is to create an environment that reduces skepticism and speeds up the sales process. People need to see that you are the real deal and that you are who you say you are.
All right, let me share another big lesson with you about reducing skepticism. One of the best ways to reduce skepticism is to use something called metacognition. That's when you are aware of and understand your own thought processes, or in this case, you want your prospects to become aware of their thoughts. You want your prospects to do metacognition.
Let me explain something to you. The best asset you have in your life is not your house or your bank account, or anything like that. It is your mind. Therefore, if you want to realize your full potential, you must master your mind. But how much time do you spend each day thinking about thinking? How much time do you spend each week, for example, trying to figure out why you think the way you do? [13:12.4]
Here's something interesting about the mind. It's designed to keep you safe. Yet to get rewards in life, what must you do most of the time? Take risk. For example, there is usually a correlation between risk and reward in investing. If you want to take very little risk, you can leave your money in a savings account, and barring rampant inflation, you'll be, quote-unquote, “safe.” However, you won't receive any of the rewards that would come from investing in something like the stock market.
This is true elsewhere as well. You can't build a successful business unless you risk failure. You can't achieve greatness unless you risk stepping out of your comfort zone. The bigger rewards you’re aiming for, the more significant risks you'll need to take most of the time. [13:57.6]
Hiring a financial advisor feels risky to prospective clients. It seems scary. That's because our minds are designed to protect us from harm. When prospective clients are hesitant to hire you as their financial advisor, they are only doing what is natural to them. Of course, they're going to be skeptical. That is what happens.
If you want to reduce that skepticism, then one strategy is to get them to take a step back and think about what is actually happening when they feel that skepticism, because mastering your mind involves reprogramming your thoughts to focus on potential rewards rather than the fear of failure. It's about learning to trust your intuition, leverage your knowledge, and take action despite the uncertainty.
If people were a hundred percent logical, they would simply do the math and realize that good financial advisors are worth many multiples of what they charge. It would be a no-brainer. But people aren't logical. Their minds are holding them back. [14:53.4]
Think about it, your mind is set to keep you unsuccessful. Yes, that's right, I said that. Your mind is set up to keep you unsuccessful, because it's always averse to the thing that gets you the rewards you seek. It doesn't want to do that stuff. That's why you actually feel physical symptoms when you get close to making an investment in yourself. You feel uncertain. You might get hot. You might feel tingly. That's your mind trying to keep you safe. It is doing exactly what it's designed to do.
Your mind doesn't know that you can get more rewards or a return on investment or results far in excess of what you pay someone. It doesn't know that logically. It doesn't know that you are making the best decision for yourself. It screams out something like this, “Hey, you, crawl back into your comfort zone where you're safe.” The prospects who don't hire you are the ones who succumb to that feeling, so you need to help them overcome it.
Now, I've noticed this effect with financial advisors, too. The unsuccessful financial advisors are the ones who listen to their minds. They succumb to that feeling. They go back to their comfort zones, despite knowing intellectually and logically that they could get better results by changing something in their lives. It's wild to me. [16:07.5]
Oh, and by the way, it's a myth that successful people are fearless. They're not. They feel the same fear that everyone else feels when investing in themselves and making big decisions. They just do it anyway, because success is not reserved for the fearless. It's reserved for those who act despite their fears.
Every great achievement in your life so far likely involved a moment where you had to push through fear and doubt. That is not a coincidence. It's a pattern and it's one that can be replicated. Your prospective clients are no different.
I know this podcast episode was a little different from the normal stuff and a little bit shorter. That's because I wanted to give you two very high-level strategies that you can use to improve your business. This is the stuff that can make a far bigger difference than all the little tips, tricks and tactics that you can get elsewhere. I hope you use this information.
I am James Pollard, and if you want more information like this, you can go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and check out some of the resources on the site, and I will catch you next week. [17:07.8]
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