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. [00:32.0]
James: Welcome to financial advisor marketing, I am King James, King of the ol’ financial advisors. No, no, that's not true. I'm just a regular guy who sits in front of a microphone once a week and yells at people. It's really yet and, I've got a cool blog, TheAdvisorCoach.com/blog got a bunch of products The AdvisorCoach.com/products, got a cool webinar and TheAdvisorCoach.com/webinar. So good, good, do all those things and producer, Jonathan yesterday I had a call with your boy, Brandon Neely.
Jonathan: Oh really? That's great news. I love that.
James: It was fast, very fast. I know you made a recommendation earlier this week and he sent me a LinkedIn connection request. And honestly, I thought we were already connected on LinkedIn, but whatever. And I gave him a call and he said, let's, let's set up an official appointment. So we, we did, we set up a cool official appointment and that was yesterday. And we talked about infinite banking in whole life and being your own banker and all that stuff. And by the way, financial advisors, your opinion is irrelevant. Please don't write to me about your whole life or whatever. [01:36.1]
Jonathan: Nice
James: Well, because it's it, it's a certain tool that is right for certain situations. And until you know, my personal situation and my personal goals, you have no place to judge whether or not infinite banking is right for me. I will admit that it's an absolutely terrible tool for some people. Whole life is an absolutely terrible insurance product for some people who have different goals or maybe they have a certain business mindset or certain life. But due to my decisions, my goals, my personal situation, this is an avenue that I'd like to pursue. And I'm really amazed at how the both Brandon and Amanda over at grandma's wealth wisdom, they really know their stuff.
Jonathan: They're sharp bro, they are sharp. I'm glad you got to talk with them. [02:23.8]
James: Yeah. And he told me some stories about it and he owned his coffee shop and he, he has business experience and that's one of the things I really appreciated about talking with him is because he understands, you know, the decisions that I have to make on a daily basis because he has been there, not necessarily as an, you know, running a business like the advisor coach, but because he's been a business owner, period. You know what I mean? Like he gets it.
Jonathan: Yeah. And that's one of the reasons, and this could go for anybody listening is like when you're out there pitching product, you don't use it. I think it comes off shallow and contrived. I like that they actually use their product in their business. And so it gave me way more confidence in them.
James: Oh my God, he was going on and it was, we had an amazing conversations or anyone who's even kind of interested. I don't expect financial advisors would be interested in that.
Jonathan: They're going to go burn down the site. [03:18.4]
James: Yeah, I told him like they probably, but that's the thing, there's so much dogma in the financial services industry where if you're a financial planner, you hate anyone who possibly can sell any type of insurance cause you're scum of the earth because you're ripping people off and it's a terrible product. But then you've got life insurance agents who are like those dirty financial planners charging 1% of assets over 40 years and in look at this table where it shows that they're charging way more than I'm charging in a commission.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: And they fight back and forth and you know, I wrote a low status update. It's like they're beefing. They like beeping rap groups from the nineties like it just really.
Jonathan: Nice. [03:53.8]
James: It all depends on your own personal situation. Like I said it, my personal situation is set up in such a way where infinite banking would bank on yourself and cash flow banking, whatever the kids are calling it these days where it would be beneficial to me, but about him actually using this stuff, my goodness. He was like, my mother-in-law's got a policy here and Amanda's got a policy here and I've got a policy here and we've got another policy over in Canada or something I don't know.
Jonathan: Ok. Crazy.
James: But they had policies on policies, on policies. I was like, holy crap. Like it's a whole new world. Not exactly a whole new world for me because I mean, I've been involved in this stuff and I know what it is, but man, he really does take his own medicine.
Jonathan: Respect
James: And I appreciate that.
Jonathan: Yeah. Respect for that. [04:38.1]
James: Yeah, and I tried to do the same thing with email marketing. I tried to do the same thing with content marketing and you know, I did stuff in email. A financial advisor emailed me and saying, Hey, I'm really interested in appointments on autopilot, which you can read more about TheAdvisorCoach.com/appointments and, but can I get a little snippet of the emails. Can you send me a sample of the email.
Jonathan: Can you get a taste?
James: Yeah. Yeah. Well I get that. I get that people want to see, but I was like my daily emails if you, if you're on my list, you know the style, you know, cause I just, I do exactly what it is. Like I'm not doing one thing with my emails and then telling financial advisor to do something else, it's literally the same thing. [05:17.0]
But any, the reason that financial advisors can't just copy my emails is because there's stuff in there that they're not seeing. And it's kind of like the matrix, the red pill versus the blue pill. Once you take the red pill, which is in the form of the course, it's, it's what it is. I show you exactly what it is and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It's kind of like once you learn a language, like if you don't know Spanish today and somebody speaks Spanish, it's just gonna sound like gibberish to you. But once you know it and someone speaks Spanish, you can never ever go back to gibberish. You will always hear the language in exactly the way that it was intended. So I think it's something to think about. And here's interesting concept. A lot of financial advisors, now we're going to get into the show today. They intellectually understand that when it comes to investing, emotion plays a huge role. But if you want to maximize your success over the long term, you have to control those emotions. [06:15.8]
For example, you can't just sell all your investments when there's a market downturn. If you're invested for the long term, you probably want to ride it out. But emotion plays a huge role in investing primarily the emotion of greed and the emotion of fear. People want to make, as humans; we've got this tendency to want to make a lot of money in a short period of time. So we let our greed to take the reins or we can be so scared of making any moves whatsoever after like we've been conditioned to think that way and that's important to note. We're so scared of making any move whatsoever that fear dominates us. One of the ways financial advisors can, oh here we go, add value to their clients is to help them manage these emotions. That is a huge value add. They can “talk them off the ledge” so to speak. [07:08.9]
They help clients overcome their own emotional biases, so in a sense they really managing emotions, not money and today the role of emotion in investing it is seemingly more involved in, for lack of a better term, worse than ever before. People can get stock updates on their phone. The TV is always on. Social media is always on. I remember this study put out by Raymond James, it said something like 70% of investors admitted that the news like CNBC or Fox or whatever news station you're watching the news played a significant role in investing decisions. Think of that.
Jonathan: Oh yeah.
James: They make a serious financial decision based largely on emotion from what they see on the news. [08:01.8]
It's crazy, but here's the thing. Some financial advisors let emotions run their business. They are victims of emotion in their business and investing in their business, investing in themselves. Their emotions run their business and it's killing them. So here are some of the emotions and some of the ways that emotions take hold and financial advisors business, they get that vice grip and they bring you down into hell. Emotion is, it can be a good thing. Like I said, I, I use this analogy all the time. It's like surgeon's knife. It can be used to save someone; it can be used to kill someone. But here's how it affects them. Holding onto clients who should be fired, this is a common one and I want to approach this from two different angles. Holding onto clients who are profitable. They may be jerks or whatever, but they're profitable. Then you're holding on to clients who are unprofitable. They can be the nicest clients in the world or they could be complete a-holes, but there are unprofitable. If a financial advisor is holding on to a profitable client, even though that client is downright terrible, it is almost certainly because that financial advisor has a scarcity mentality. [09:12.6]
That advisor doesn't truly believe that there's abundant wealth out there and that he or she can find another client. They, they kick the client to the curb. They can always find another one. They don't have that belief. They don't realize that they are the scarce resource. Their expertise is scarce, their personality is scarce, not the client. And I know you know about this, Jonathan, because you read the book, ‘You Were Born Rich’
Jonathan: Yes
James: By Bob Proctor, great book. But I've discovered through that book that nature abhors a vacuum and it's perhaps the most important concept I've ever gotten from Bob Proctor. And the simplistic example of this is that when you clean out your closet, it tends to fill up again. When you get rid of bad clients, you create a vacuum for new and better clients to come in. Don't ask me how this works. I have no idea. I cannot explain it, but I know that it does work. Even if it takes a little time for the backend to be filled. [10:13.1]
If you're focused on it and you want it to happen and you want bigger and better clients, you will get them. Like I said, don't ask me how it works, I just know it does. Now, time for some personal questions. Have you producer Jonathan ever had to fire a client?
Jonathan: Yeah. Gleefully, in fact.
James: I know that you've talked about firing prospects where you've got people who reach out to you and say, yeah, I'd like to start a podcast, but then they don't really, they don't really take themselves seriously or take you seriously and you say, yeah, I don't think this is a good fit.
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. Well, there's also clients that don't value or don't do the things that they should be doing, and it really, and you know this, like, I'm sure you fire people too. If they're not, if they take your email course and don't send an email, then they need to be fired.
James: Yes. Amen. And by the way, financial advisors, if you want to start a podcast, reach out to Jonathan over at ThePodcastFactory.com [11:06.3]
And cause I get, I get a lot of emails from financial advisors. Well not a lot. I would say maybe one or two a week cause it's not a super popular topic, but it is because I have a podcast date, they pick up on it and it is not right for everyone. I will admit, but if you are a good fit and I would say either if you already have an audience, well even if you don't have an audience, if you, if you have the dedication and you have the commitment and you're willing to do this for the long term, this is not something where you do five episodes and then give up. I'm actually writing about this in the March, 2020 inner circle newsletter. I'm writing more or less about compound interest in marketing. I've noticed that the majority of the most successful financial services type podcast, they've been around for many years and or they have tons and tons and tons of episodes. And there's a reason for that. So if you're interested in doing a podcast, you really should get some help like from producer Jonathan because, and not necessarily because he has all the podcast answers or whatever. [12:09.7]
Even though that helps, it's because he can help you have that consistency. The dimensionally leads to result because I promise you that if you try to do it yourself, you're not going to be as likely to do it for years. You're not going to be as likely to do it every single week or maybe twice a week, maybe once every two weeks. Whatever's right for you, you will not be as likely to have that consistency. So as my podcast rant for the day.
Jonathan: Well, thank you. Tell him James sent you or telling me James sent you.
James: Please, please do.
Hey, financial advisors, if you're looking for a way to set more appointments with qualified prospects, I invite you to sign up for James' brand new webinar about how financial advisors can get more clients with email marketing. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/webinar to register today. On this webinar, you'll discover why email marketing is able to generate upwards of 4400% ROI for smart financial advisors, three fatal mistakes nearly all financial advisors make with their emails, and the proven three-step process for converting prospects into booked appointments using email. All you have to do is head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/webinar and register today. [13:16.6]
Back to the firing clients thing. I don't care how profitable the client is. If a client disrespects you or your staff that clients should be going. Kick him or her to the curb. And we talked about this in a previous podcast episode, the whole idea of not tolerating bad behavior.
Jonathan: Yeah
James: Don't do it. It's one of the worst things you can do, not just for your business but for your psyche. Because you will begin viewing yourself as the type of person who puts up a crap, which makes it easier for other people to walk all over you and it's just a vicious cycle. If you believe that you're the type of person who puts up with the BS from clients, you're like, Oh yeah; maybe I am that type of person. And then they do it again and then you let them get away with more and more and more. [13:56.1]
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: Now, if a financial advisor is holding onto an unprofitable client, it's almost certainly because the financial advisor has some deep rooted fears or insecurities. Because if you're, if you think about it logically, you realize that when you have an unprofitable client, you're working for free. Well not even that, you're not even really working for free. You're literally paying these clients for the privilege of doing work for them.
Jonathan: Thanks.
James: I'm not a psychologist or anything, but it seems to me that these advisors are secretly craving acceptance from other people and they just want to be around, or maybe unconsciously they feel guilty about charging money for their services. So they put themselves in a position where they work for free, or maybe they don't. They don't feel worthy about the money they charge. Who knows? But if you've got clients in your business who are straight up unprofitable, I beg you, get rid of them. [14:52.4]
Examine your emotional attachment to keeping them on board and work through whatever issues you have.
Jonathan: See a psychologist.
James: Get on that couch. Can, can I help you? Tell me about your childhood. What is your relationship with your mother like? Your father was he domineering? Moving on. The next way, financial advisors let emotions control their business is by eliminating marketing ideas too soon. And when I say this, I always think of the financial advisors who stomp their feet and cry that seminars don't work or direct mail doesn't work because I can promise you that seminars work. I can promise you that direct mail works. I can promise you the email works and social media works or content works. It all works. It's you who isn't working. And last night I had a financial advisor email me and say he was interested in purchasing appointments on autopilot and I don't want to keep mentioning it again and again. [15:51.0]
But he said he tried email in the past and it didn't work. And I was like, okay. What’s that got to do with me. Did you try my way of doing email or did you try your way of doing email or did you try some stock market commentary way of doing email? Because my way works, like if that's the one you tried and it didn't work well first of all, please let me see your auto responder because I'm going to have to investigate that because it can't be that you're the only one is not working for. Anyway, I'm like, did you try that? This guy probably tries to get anyone and everyone to join his email list, which is a mistake. He probably sends them boring stock market commentary emails loaded with HTML, loaded with images loaded with all this crap, or he probably sends a little monthly email with, they'll call it a monthly e-newsletters. I know if read the news.
Jonathan: Ooh. [16:46.7]
James: Where he's just talking about himself. If that's the case, he's the one that's not working because he's choosing to follow methods that don't give results, and in this case, his quick emotional response to email marketing will guide him in the direction of never trying email again. Because he tried something once and says, oh no, that doesn't work. It won't work for me. That's a quick knee jerk reaction. It's a quick emotional judgment and he'll be like, okay, we're never doing that again. We're never trying this again. We're never split testing. His bad experience with email in the past is now dictating his decision in an area where he could make a positive change in his marketing, his experience and his emotions are sabotaging him and he likely doesn't even know it. What's even crazier is that that product comes with a 100% money back guarantee because if I can't get you more clients, I don't deserve to keep your money period, but this advisor's emotions are holding him back even though it's literally risk-free to try. [17:43.3]
Either it works or costs nothing. That's how powerful emotions can be when they want to destroy your business. They can take something that is literally guaranteed, literally risk-free, and they can drive you away from that and drive you away from even trying. Another fine example of this is when financial advisors make rash decisions with all marketing, like the split testing for example. That's where I want to go with this. Let's say, and for those of you who don't know, split testing is where you just change one variable in a marketing piece and tested against something else. You can split test Facebook ads. So let's talk about that. Imagine a financial advisor who spends $20 on Facebook and thinks he can make a statistically significant decision on what works. He can’t, $20 isn't enough. You've got to have lots of data to make the right decision. [18:34.5]
But if the advisor thinks he or she knows best than he or she is likely to pull that ad before getting the proper amount of data, they can't make a statistical significant data driven decision. They can't do it. That leads to the wrong decision. Rather than just waiting, waiting it out, spending some more money, letting your emotions run free somewhere else and in making the right decision. Think about that. When you're split testing, all you've got to do is wait and let the ad run. The more data you get, the higher the certainty of finding a winning ad. This is not emotion whatsoever. This is literally math and when financial advisors in their split test early, they're essentially telling themselves they don't want to know the right answer. They'd rather gamble or guess, and that's crazy to me and another way emotions are destroying your business. [19:31.0]
Number three is comparing yourself to others and feeling down on yourself. And I'm guilty of this producer, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Aren’t we all?
James: I can tell myself to other business people all the time, all the time. So I've got some work to do in this regard and maybe you do to make me feel better about myself. A little bit, right? We all do it. We're all guilty of it.
Jonathan: Of course.
James: Because let's say that you go from 30k in one year and you take it to a 100k in personal income in one year, that's a good thing. You're making progress and you've more than tripled your income in a year. But the thing is if you're looking at people who make $1 million per year, you're going to feel like crap. Total crap! And when I was talking with Mr. Neely yesterday, he was asking me about my financial goals and basically did a whole financial analysis on me. He did a like a financial diagnostic, like complete checkup and he was asking me about my goals and I listed my goals off and this, as soon as we got off the phone I was like wow, those goals kind of suck. [20:39.5]
Jonathan: I told him, I didn't have any.
James: Aww that’s sad. You're like, man, I don't, I don't have any goals in mind.
Jonathan: Money doesn't matter.
James: No, not that it doesn't matter. But I was like, yeah, those goals kind of sucked. Well, because we were talking about some business philosophy and we kind of got off track for a little bit and I explained that one of my, my one of my peers is he does about $10 million in revenue per year. And all of his friends that he used to hang out with in high school and in the military and in, well he didn't go to college. All the people that he was hanging out there, I mean he's just trying to show them like, screw you, cause he got bullied in the military. He got bullied in high school. It didn't have a good time. [21:23.7]
So he said, you know what, I'm just going to get, make a bunch of money, I'm going to show you and everything's gonna be cool. But like this, the heartbreaking part was that he found out nobody in high school was really checking on him. And that's what happens in life. And nobody, even in the military when he was in the military, nobody's checking on him. Nobody gives a crap that he's made $10 million. It's kind of sad if you really think about it. But hey, that's life and I mean you can't, you cannot let your own goals be dictated by, by comparing yourself to other people. Cause that's the trap that he fell into. And I wrote about this guy in the December 2019 in our circle newsletter, there was a section in there called beware of financial substance abuse. And if you've got that, you know what I'm talking about and it can destroy not only your business but your life. [22:13.6]
And number four, fourth way that emotion can wreck an advisers business is when they chase bright shiny objects or as Doberman Dan calls them. We're going to keep this PG 13 but bright bulldukie, shiny objects, bullet proof
Jonathan: Yes Sir
James: And I've talked about by the financial advisors who are just copycat advisors in other podcast episodes. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but it breaks my heart when I see financial advisors just going around copying other people without knowing whether or not the stuff works. Like when an advisor hires an SEO expert and ranks for a term that gets five searches a month, all the other copycat advisors start screeching and how willing and think they need to rank too. It's just absolutely asinine. They say, Oh, Joe over at XYZ financial was ranking for this term. Yay. He's like; do you understand that that term only gets five searches a month? [23:10.4]
Do you understand that this only gets 10 searches a month and it's not even from qualified prospects? Like I could rank for a term, literally right now that gets 10,000 searches a month, but not a single person would do business with me. Is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. But if you're a financial advisor who wants to make more money ranking for all these terms, for people who are searching that don't do business with you, probably not a good thing. Or you've got people who feel they need to do a website redesign and it could be good to do a website redesign. There are some people out there who are doing amazing stuff in the website space, but I'm talking about the people who feel they need to redesign the website simply because another financial advisor did it without realizing that when you do a website redesign, you lose virtually all your conversion data. [23:56.7]
You lose all the analytics data. Not that it goes away, but it's just it as meaningless now because you don't have the set variables. You essentially have to start over. You have to start from scratch and that you should focus on conversions to begin with. Not just looking pretty, they don't realize that I like the not the bright shiny objects. I like those doll unpolished objects, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Yeah.
James: The ones that have been proven to work, the ones that will continue to work like email. I know we're getting back to email. It's not really sexy. It's not some new life hack or whatever, but it gets appointments for financial advisors better than virtually everything else I've ever seen. And I think that's going to be it for this week. With that said, and we're pretty much done. I'm going to go over these four things again and none of us are totally immune to this. I am definitely not immune to this stuff. Emotion. It doesn't rule my business but it definitely has an influence and because I recognize it has an influence, I can fight back. [24:52.9]
So there's four things we're holding onto clients who should be fired, eliminating marketing ideas too soon, comparing yourself to others and feeling down on yourself as a result. And number four, chasing those bright shiny objects. We're done.
Jonathan: Yes. Yes. What's coming up for us next time James,
James: I'm going to let the people decide. So if you have an idea, please send it to James at TheAdvisorCoach.com. I can't promise that I respond, but I do read all the emails as Gary Halbert famously equipped. You have to read your white male and I do that. And if you've got an idea, send it to James@theadvisorycoach.com. Love the hearing from you. Be shorter rate and review leash and feedback and I'll catch you next week.
Jonathan: All right. That is a wrap for another financial advisor marketing. Thank you fam for tuning in. We'll be back in your ear buds next time. [25:45.2]
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
