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: Hello, and welcome the The Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast. We have had some really good episodes lately. I mean, we're really knocking them out of the park, and today is going to be no exception because I'm going to talk about why most marketing tactics fail financial advisors. And as always, I'm probably going to make some people upset but that's okay but it's for their own good, Jonathan. And speaking of producer Jonathan here, I want to give him a shout out. He actually does a call with his Podcast Factory family every Monday and we're recording this on a Tuesday, which means yesterday was the call. And Jonathan told us, the family, that he was reading You Were Born Rich by Bob Proctor and I wanted to mention that book because I think it can help a lot of financial advisors and it definitely changed my life. I mean, how far through are you? [0:01:21.0]
Jonathan: I just finished it, man. I just finished it.
James: Did you finish it?
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: What did you think of the chapter where nature abhors a vacuum because that's…
Jonathan: That's at the very end. It was so huge, man. I'm sitting there thinking, I've always known this but I didn't really know it. I didn't have words. I didn't know how to describe it and the whole… I mean, when was it - 1950s he did that and it's as relevant today as it was back then.
James: Yes. When you were talking about saying "no" to things, which is a lesson in and of itself. It's a whole other episode. But when you're talking about saying "no" and getting things out of your life, I was wondering if you got to that chapter or not. I was like that is exactly what you're doing, and that's why your life is better and I was just like, I'm not going to spoil it for him. I don’t want to say anything if he hasn’t gotten to that part of the book yet, but yeah, it's an amazing book. [0:02:06.3]
Jonathan: Absolutely.
James: Now you know what you got to read next, which is It's Not About The Money by Bob Proctor, and that will change your life too.
Jonathan: As much as this show?
James: As much as this show or more.
Jonathan: Or more - whoa.
James: And financial advisors, I really want you to write those two books down. I'll repeat them for you. It's You Were Born Rich by Bob Proctor and It's Not About The Money by Bob Proctor. And some financial advisors will think, oh, Bob Proctor - that's the guy that was in The Secret, The Law of Attraction, all this BS and we talked about that a couple of episodes ago.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: But it really is a good book. So, let's get into the show and it's going to take me a minute or so to set this up so people understand it because I plan on going deep today. And if just one person gets what I'm talking about, I've done my part to help humanity. So, let me start things off with this example with retirement planning. [0:03:00.0]
There are thousands of personal finance books out there, lots of different books and they all focus on things like 401K, insurance, Roth IRAs versus traditional IRA. These are all tactics and tactics are just tools. They don’t mean anything until you put them into a bigger context. Just like having a hammer is useless when you're trying to tighten a lug nut and just like cleaning out your car is the example that Jonathan and I are talking about - that's just a tactic. The overall strategy is to get things out of your life, to create a vacuum in your life. If you have clients, unprofitable clients or bad clients, if you get rid of them, you have created a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. That's one of the concepts that we're talking about and it will be filled, and so that's the overall strategy. And producer Jonathan is going to see this play out in his life, now that he's aware of it and he's going to do things with it. Right?
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely.
James: And I really want financial advisors to think about this: Let's say I have a friend and I've given you absolutely no information about this friend, about him or his financial situation and then I ask you this - I say, "Does he need life insurance?"[ 0:04:09.9]
If you can give me a competent yes or no without knowing the bigger picture, you're headed down a dangerous path because you're religiously following a particular tactic and a lot of people do this with index funds and Roth IRAs without knowing anything about the particular person. And people do this in the marketing world too. They just religiously follow a tactic. If I went up to someone who religiously follows funnels, and I say, "Hey, I've got this financial advisor here. Does he need a funnel?" and I don’t give any other information. If that person says, "Yeah, oh yeah. He needs a funnel," that's a very dangerous path because not all tactics apply to every single situation. As financial advisors, you see that all the time. You know that certain financial tools don’t work in every single situation. Someone may need term life insurance. Someone may need a different kind of life insurance. [0:05:00.6]
Someone may need a particular tax planning strategy that wouldn't even apply to someone else. Some businesses may need to be an S Corp, another may be a C Corp. There's so many different tactics but what really matters is the strategy, and I hope that by putting that in terms that financial advisors can understand with all the different financial strategies, that they can kind - or financial tactics I should say - they can understand that this applies in the marketing world too, that the strategies matter more than the tactics. I hope I've kind of made the connection there, Jonathan. I hope that you're following me and if you're following me, the audience is following me.
Jonathan: I'm certainly following you.
James: Great. Now, you may find this hard to believe, everyone in the audience out there, all six of you. But one of the biggest telltale signs when a financial advisor won't succeed is when he or she focuses too much on these tactics. The minute financial advisors start asking you about the hottest, newest email marketing strategy, even though I've got an email marketing product coming up - when they ask about a particular subject line or should I use emojis in the subject line or something like that, then I know that they're headed down the wrong path. [0:06:10.6]
They're probably not going to succeed. And I recently talked with a financial advisor who is absolutely crushing it in the agriculture market. He was sending out information to family farms and he was helping with their estate planning because they're farmers. That's a whole different beast because they've tons of land and they tend to be net worth rich. They tend to be millionaires, but they're cash poor, if that makes sense because it's just a farm and it's some land. It's the properties, things like that. So he was sending this information. He was helping them with their estate planning, getting financing for farm equipment. He was giving them the right tax information because they have a lot of heavy machinery and different subsidies, a lot of different things involved with family farms. And that's a pretty good niche. Right? Well, I want you to imagine that this financial advisor started hearing the siren song of funnels and setting up a landing page and collecting their email address and so on. And all those are okay tactics for the right person, but do you think that this financial advisor would have had as much success? Probably not. And I'm not saying that any individual tactic is bad or good. Most of them are just straight up neutral. It's just that you need to combine them with a strategy in order to win. This particular advisor's strategy was simple. He would buy a mailing list of family farms and he would send them information in the mail. [0:07:28.2]
Hey financial advisors, are you ready to take your business to the next level and get more clients with less stress? I invite you to join the James Pollard Inner Circle of Paper and Ink Newsletter that gets delivered directly to your door every month. When you join now you'll also get a 90-minute instant download called, "Five Keys to Success for Financial Advisors", a $97 value for absolutely free. All you have to do is head over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/newsletter and join today.
James: That's a brand new concept, isn't it, Jonathan? Never been done before.
Jonathan: Direct mail - how about that? [0:08:04.2]
James: Direct mail. Brand new. No, I'm messing with you. It's been done for hundreds of years, people - hundreds of years. This strategy, this tactic, whatever you want to call it, in the overall picture, it's been around forever. And he is using it. It's proven. This particular advisor got it done and he would go attend some meetings. He would get published in different agriculture papers, different magazines, stuff like that. And this guy's referral marketing strategy was also very tight because it seems like all of these farmers knew each other. So, they talk and he benefits from that. When they get together, farmer Brown goes to farmer Smith and he says, "Hey, this guy just helped me out with getting financing. He helped me out with my tax planning." They talk and they get referrals from that. And please understand that even those this advisor is crushing it with farmers, it doesn’t mean that you should necessarily adopt his strategy for your market. You shouldn’t. You have to create your own strategy for your own market. [0:09:02.1]
And what's scary is that this addiction to tactics is like a drug addiction, and I know producer Jonathan knows about this because he's been working with Ben Settle, and Ben Settle talks about this quite a bit, the tactic addiction where people get their dopamine drip from buying the newest product or following the latest sexy tactic. And some advisors just go around looking for their next hit. They're looking for tactics and they need more tactics to survive. It just doesn’t work, and if you're taking notes, make sure you write this down: Strategy is king. If tactics that are like individual chess pieces, strategy is how you move them across the board. It's one of the biggest differences between successful financial advisors, the ones who get everything they want out of life, and the ones who watch their income stay the same year after year. And in fact, I had an Inner Circle member email me recently and say something like this - he said, hey, I see that you're helping a lot of financial advisors crush it on LinkedIn. [0:10:03.0]
I've been doing this, this and this. Do you think I should swap these tactics out for LinkedIn? And my answer was no. Even though I'm kind of known as the LinkedIn Guy, I help financial advisors get clients with LinkedIn. I've even got that product, but I told him no, you shouldn't swap it out. He should find a fine to incorporate LinkedIn into his overall strategy and make that even more powerful. He shouldn't swap it out and if he doesn't make his machine more powerful, then it shouldn't be used. He should add it. Instead of focusing on what you can switch out or what you can cut, if you can something that is working - don't do that. If something is working, keep it, but make it more powerful. My Inner Circle Newsletter is about strategy, not tactics, and I make that clear on the sales page. Essentially, if you're someone who's addicted to tactics, seeking those tactics out like a drug addict, hey, please stay away because you won't get your fix here. And would you agree that tactic seeking is like a drug addiction, Jonathan? [0:11:00.2]
Jonathan: You know what? You're being cruel, man. They just feel like they're getting something done by getting a new tactic. That's all.
James: Sure. They watch a YouTube video like how to set up a webinar, and then they never do it.
Jonathan: Right.
James: That's like, there's levels to this. There's I guess level one would be knowing that something exists and you're like, oh, I know this tactic that nobody knows about. Then level two is like, let me learn more about it. Simply by reading about it or learning about it, it feels like I'm doing something, but you're really not. So the strategy is really everything, and yesterday I think when you were talking to The Podcast Factory family, it blew my mind because your overall strategy, it's just you're doing the stuff that you enjoy and the stuff that moves your life forward, moves the needle forward and there you go. In one sentence, that's yeah, like that's your strategy. Does this activity move the needle forward? If yes, you do it and if no, you don’t. Is that a fair depiction?
Jonathan: Yeah, it's taken a while to figure it out, but that's what I am doing today. Who knows what tomorrow brings. [0:12:02.4]
James: If you're talking, would you say talking and …
Jonathan: Talking, recording, or writing.
James: Yeah - the big three. There you go. And financial advisors, once you find your prospecting strategy that you enjoy or a particular method that matches your personality and that you want to use, keep doing it. And if you're not doing it and it's not getting you results, why bother? Keep the thing moving. Move the needle and that's also why I include the mp3 download, Five Keys To Success for Financial Advisors when people join the Inner Circle Newsletter because those five keys, they're about as far away from tactics as you can get. I mean, they're five fundamental things every financial advisor must understand on a deep, unconscious level. This is just one big idea that I want to get across to you in this podcast, so I will leave you with this: You can always pick and choose your tactics later, but focusing on tactics without strategy is a recipe for disaster. [0:13:02.9]
If you're a financial advisor who is focused on tactics, I hope I've reached you, and I hope that I've helped you in some way today because you've got to stop all that in order to get to the next level. I want to throw in there that even when you use a tactic, you want to make sure that you're using it correctly. There's an Inner Circle member that emailed me and sent me a photo of his direct mail and he was sending out these pieces, fire emoji, fire emoji, fire emoji - and I love this guy, I really do. I love all my Inner Circle members. They're amazing people. And this is what I'm here for. This is why they're in the Inner Circle. So he sent me that. I was like, man, you're sending out nothing but brochures. You're sending out this big like thick pamphlet brochure thing and I imagine it was nothing except information about him and his company and all that…
Jonathan: That's crazy.
James: … and just me, me, me, me. So I appreciate this guy's hustle and his drive and that he's actually taking action. That's awesome, but it's a perfect example of a tactic that is misused because if you're going to send direct mail, you want to focus on the prospect - what's in it for that prospect. [0:14:07.5]
How can you improve the prospect's life? For example, I'm putting together - well, by the time you listen to this, it'll probably be out, but I'm putting together an email marketing product called Appointments On Autopilot, and every single day in the month of July, I have just been going hard on this because I want to get results for financial advisors. That's the most important thing to me in my life, to get results for these advisors. So that's my north star. That's my true north. That's what I use to make decisions: Will this help financial advisors get results or not, and then I act on it. That's my strategy, and this guy, he missed that with this particular tactic. He wasn’t thinking about getting results for the prospects. He was just focused on getting his name out there and getting his company name out there, and it's well intentioned. I'm not bashing this guy or anything because he's an awesome person and otherwise his business is cranking, but it's just with that particular tactic, it was being misused. [0:15:01.1]
So think about that and sometimes the most valuable information you get has nothing to do with marketing. I mean, we talked about You Were Born Rich at the beginning of this episode and in a lot of ways, that is a marketing book because it will help you get through a lot of the mental blocks to let things come into your life. I want to leave you with this as well - an Inner Circle member of mine, he sent me an email a few weeks ago, and this is a crazy story, Jonathan. So he sent me an email explaining that I prevented his house from burning down.
Jonathan: What?
James: His house. It would have burned down. In one of the issues several months ago, I included a bonus and the bonus mentioned the fact that you should have a fire extinguisher on every floor of your home. I can't remember all the details, but essentially, that was the gist. You know, a lot of people have fire extinguishers but they only have one in their kitchen. They're afraid of a stove fire or something like that. People have fire extinguishers, but they keep them in the kitchen. In the newsletter, I basically said, hey, you want to have one in every floor of your house. Well, this guy had an office in his basement and he had a little mini fridge and a microwave, I suppose. He said he had a microwave. And he said that the microwave started burning because it malfunctioned. [0:16:18.8]
Jonathan: Yikes.
James: And because he had that fire extinguisher handy, he was able to quickly put out that fire. Crazy story, but it goes to show that some of the most important information you'll ever get has nothing to do with what you expect. So keep your eyes open and keep your ears open. Pay attention and let the information come to you. So I thought that was nuts, Jonathan. Like, this guy's house, it literally could have burned down. And I'm like…
Jonathan: Saving lives, James - like, you're really making an impact.
James: So I'm humbled by that because I can kind of - it didn't rattle me to a deep level, but it shook me a little bit. I was like, wow - like wow - like what an impact I'm having. Like I can't even fathom it. Like I'm getting chills right now. Whoa. This is something that I put out there and it really did save this guy, or could have saved, this guy's life. So, awesome stuff. [0:17:10.9]
Jonathan: So James, what do you have coming up for us next time?
James: In the next episode, I'm going to talk about how to overcome skepticism because one of the biggest reasons prospects don’t work with financial advisors is because they're skeptical, and I'm going to share a few ways to completely demolish skepticism so you can get more clients than ever before.
Jonathan: Man, I cannot wait to hear that one. So that is a wrap for another Financial Advisor Marketing. We'll be back in your ear buds next time. Thank you for tuning in.
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