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: Howdy, y'all and welcome to Financial Advisor Marketing. Oh, I tried.
Jonathan: I don’t interrupt.
James: You're like, not again. No, don’t do this again. Whatever. So Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, podcast for financial advisors who want to get more clients. That's pretty much all I do. I'm the guy who helps financial advisors get more clients. Now of course, here on the podcast, we talk about all types of cool stuff because it's just more casual. It's not like a classroom. It's not just strict lectures. It's two guys flapping their gums. [0:01:06.1]
But today I'm going to talk about three skills which I think are absolutely essential for financial advisor to master if they want to be successful. I want you to keep in mind that no matter how successful you get, there will always be people who hate. I recently saw a Facebook ad for someone and I'm not going to name any names, but this guy is, he is legit, like he makes multiple millions per year and he was getting lots of hate in the comments section of his Facebook post. Now here are some of my favorites.
Jonathan: Surprise.
James: Yeah, right. Surprise! You know, lots of hate in Facebook. So here are some of the comments and I took a list here. So one of my favorites was "Oh, god, not another internet con." If you know anything about the guy, and I'm not going to name the person, but if you knew anything about him, you would know that he is 100% legit. He actually helps people so the commenter is limiting belief. It keeps him from seeing the benefits because he's like, oh not another internet con. It's like, dude this guy - this guy does more in a month that you do in a year or more in a week than you do in…[0:02:14.5]
Jonathan: A lifetime.
James: He makes more of an impact. He helps more people. It's just … it's crazy. Another one of my favorites was "Why does this spam keep showing up in my Facebook feed?"
Jonathan: Why do you keep watching the videos, sucker?
James: Why do you… it's like a retargeting ad or something. You obviously interacted with him first and I get this one every so often on my own ads. There are always people who want to take the time out of their day to write on someone else's ad, like you're the loser in this situation. It's like, and I know that that may sound harsh, but like, if you really hate it, don’t take your time… like you are giving that person energy and you're giving them more engagement and Facebook's algorithm is going to be like, oh yeah, more engagement. This …
Jonathan: Yeah, you're going to get more.
James: Right. Right. You're going to see more of that stuff because Facebook essentially thinks, oh, you engaged with this - you must like it - let me show you more. [0:03:05.1]
I know it might bother some people to see the same ad again and again and again, but just click the little button at the upper right hand corner to let you stop seeing the ad. Problem solved. I'm sure this guy isn't going to stop running his ad simply because two or three people are being whiney babies about it. I have another one, which is "Does anybody have any testimonials?" The reason this is funny is because the ad - now this is not my ad, right - this is someone else's ad, but it was just funny for me to see. The ad was actually promoting a free plus shipping offer. This guy is literally giving a book away. All you have to do is pay for shipping and people want testimonials? Like get freaking real. For a $7 product, $7. It was like $6.95. People are like, do you have any testimonials?
Jonathan: For $7. They don’t believe in themselves. That's the part that's funny about it. [0:04:00.6]
James: Yeah. Like go to the guy's Facebook page, go to his website. YouTube the guy's name. There's your testimonial. You know. And I used to have a lot of testimonials on my site. I took them down or most of them down. There was no change in conversions. Everything stayed the same, which tells me that some people would just stay skeptical forever. Now with that being said, you can be skeptical about the stuff I talk about in this episode, or you can stay stagnant. It's your choice. I'm going to sleep fine either way. The financial advisors that I help are going to grow their businesses either way. So here are three skills that the best financial advisors master. These are not the only three skills. There are a bunch of important skills, but these are the three we are going to talk about today because we don’t have all the time in the world.
The first skill that you want to master as a financial advisor is prospecting. There shouldn't be any surprise here. Now at this point, I'm basically repeating myself. You have to get good at prospecting. [0:05:02.7]
In the last episode, I broke down exactly how a financial advisor can get to $1,000,000 per year in revenue and a large part of that involves prospecting. The bottom line is this - the more you prospect and the better you get at it, the more money you make. Financial advisor marketing, it involves going out into the market place, identifying a group of people who are good fits for your services and then getting in front of them. You want to do that. You want to get out there. You don’t really need to overthink this stuff. Now there are a bunch of different ways to market yourself and your services as a financial advisor and I talk about them in depth in Financial Advisor Marketing Mastery. That's my 11-hour course, which you can get at the TheAdvisorCoach.com. There are a lot of different ways you can grow your business. Both you getting in front of prospects and prospects getting in front of you. [0:05:50.7]
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, a 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: Now, the second skill. We're rolling right through these. Is Critical thinking. You have to learn to think for yourself. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of an issue to form a judgment. For example, you need to be able to navigate tough decisions such as deciding which niche you're going to target, to know how you're going to grow your business, what you want to do, how to navigate the growth essentially. This requires critical thinking. You have to judge what you're good at, who you like working with, how you can do it, and so on. A large part of being a successful advisor is solving problems. [0:07:03.3]
That's pretty all you're doing. You're solving problems. That's pretty much all you're doing. You're solving problems for you. You're solving problems for your clients. You're solving the problem of how can you grow your business, how can you get in front of more people, how can more people get in front of you and you're solving how you can minimize taxes for someone, how you can help them invest properly, how you can protect their legacy, how you can protect their family in the event of a loss. You're solving problems all day long. The good thing about doing it all day long is that you get really, really good at it. So a lot of the financial advisors that I work with, they have tremendous critical thinking skills but they have at least up to a certain point, they only applied it with their clients. They've never really stepped back and said I am going to use my critical thinking skills to grow my business. But when they do that, they realize that they can think faster than most people. They can think more clearly than most people, especially if their health is in check and the business just takes off. I found that the best thinkers are the people who are constantly learning and constantly growing. [0:08:04.1]
They're not afraid to invest in themselves. They're not afraid to go out and get the results they're after. I want to use your critical thinking skills everywhere because some people shut their critical thinking skills off in certain environments. One example of this is guru worship. Some people will … I mean, yeah - it's a real thing. Some people will literally pick a guru and follow everything that person says down to the letter and that's dangerous. I mean, some people even do it with me and while I'm flattered by it, I want the people to know, it's not a good strategy because it's possible that not everything I say applies to your exact situation. There are some people who let their gurus do their thinking for them. You can't do that. Do your own thinking. Yes, use your guru as a guide. If I'm your guru, even though I am not really comfortable with that, you know - I don’t want you to follow everything, every little thing I say, but I mean, let me at least be your guide. Don’t blindly follow every little thing. Do your own thinking and come to your own conclusions. [0:09:04.5]
Very important. If you've ever read the book Log Success by Napolean Neal, it's a big book, and it was written before he wrote Think and Grow Rich. If you've read that, there's a chapter in there called Accurate Thinking. In my opinion, it is the most important chapter in the entire book. It basically encapsulates what I'm trying to tell you here. If you get that book and even if you don’t like reading or you don’t want to read the whole thing, just read that chapter - Accurate Thinking. It will change your life. It just will. It's the most important chapter, in my opinion, in the entire book and it's one of the most important skills you can develop to be successful in any area of your life, not just business, but with your personal life, everything.
The final skill, the third one is self-management. Now because financial advisors have tremendous flexibility in how they operate their businesses, they literally have the ability to craft their workday. Now unfortunately, this flexibility is both a blessing and a curse because some people can't handle it. [0:10:08.4]
You have to be able to put your own marketing campaigns together and develop your own prospecting plan. Of course, I can help you with a lot of that and there are a bunch of other people in the marketplace who can help you with that, but you still have to do the stuff yourself. I am of the opinion that you should never delegate marketing. When it comes to the day to day inner workings of your business, you want to have complete control. You can either screw it up or you can make it yield a tremendous lifestyle for you. You want to be in the driver's seat. You don’t want to be in the backseat. You want to control, control everything. It's good that you have this control. It's good that you're working on your business and that your decisions and your moves impact it directly. There's no middle man. You don’t have to go through anything. You don’t have to send it to a higher up who sends it to his higher up and then his higher up. You don’t that. you make the decision. You are driving the truck. Your business goes where you steer the wheel. [0:11:01.2]
There are some financial advisors who, and this is an example that I like to give, while they could work from home, they still lease offices somewhere because they know they won't be able to get any work done at home. That's kind of what you want to think about. Is there any area in your business where you could create a new environment or force yourself into a better place? When you lease an office, you're controlling your environment. You have the self-awareness, the self-management skill to say that I'm not going to get any work done at home. I'm going to be distracted so I'm going to use my foresight, use my critical thinking skills to lease an office because I will be more effective there. Some people will try to make things better at home. They would bang their head against the wall trying to change things. They would exhaust all of their willpower fighting against their lazy urges and the urges to become distracted, while the smart people just change their environment. They get out. You have to know yourself. You have to be honest. In my case, I can't have any noise in the background when I'm working and about a year ago, I thought that I would put audio books on in the background while I was working so I could absorb some of the knowledge. [0:12:09.4]
Jonathan: Multitasking, eh?
James: Multitasking didn't work for me. I mean, I either listened to the audio book or I didn't, and I talked about this a couple of episodes ago where people go in and out and they don’t get all that. I know that because I've done it. Our brains are literally wired to focus on one thing at a time. When you drill down onto that one thing and you find it and you know what you want to focus on in the moment, do nothing but that. Learn how to manage yourself to get effective results. Those are the three skills that the best financial advisors master. There's no shortcut for these. They are prospecting, critical thinking, and self-management.
Jonathan: There it is. What do you have coming up for us next time? This was a little bit of a short episode/
James: Yeah. It is a short episode, but it's an important episode. Don’t judge it by its length, Jonathan. Size doesn’t matter. [0:13:01.6]
Jonathan: That's what you tell all the girls.
James: Isn't that what your ex-girlfriend told you? The next episode is going to be called My Number One Secret for Getting More Clients and I'm wanting to do this episode because I'm always getting asked to give like an elevator pitch or something on how to get clients. So in the next episode, I'm revealing my absolute favorite client getting method of all time.
Jonathan: Wow - the number one, folks. That means you better come back next time. That is a wrap for another Financial Advisor Marketing. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week.
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