You're listening to Financial Adviser Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers 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 TheAdviserCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: Welcome financial advisers to another episode of the Financial Adviser Marketing podcast. This week, we're going to talk about some of my favorite productivity tools for financial advisers. And if you haven't joined my email list, make sure you join at TheAdviserCoach.com/57, the numbers it's 57 five seven, the actual numbers on your keyboard, where I will send you daily emails designed to help you get more clients and grow your business. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because when you subscribe to my email list, you get a free bonus called ‘57 Marketing Tips for Financial Advisers’. That's why the URL is TheAdviserCoach.com/57. And the very first tip and that 80 plus page PDF, I'm not giving you a cheat sheet, I'm not giving you a little checklist or whatever. Like a lot of people do. I'm giving you eight for real 80 plus page PDF with a bunch of stuff you can use immediately. The very first tip is embrace productivity. That tip is so important. I literally put it at number one. So there's a reason for that. And there's a reason why we're talking about three of my favorite productivity tools for financial advisers. But first we know we got to start this episode off with a little story, it's story time! [01:40.5]
Jonathan: Yes.
James: Yesterday, the Adviser Coach LLC got an email from a fantastic young lady who is an inner circle member who emailed and asked, I'm essentially, I don't remember word for word, but my assistant forwarded to me and she said, I'm going on maternity leave, can I pause my inner circle subscription for four months? Hmmm…What do you think our response was? Jonathan?
Jonathan: You are such a nice guy, even though you don't pretend you only pretend not to be. So you were like, yes, that sounds great. We'll do whatever you want.
James: No… Wrong. No,o well she responded back. She said, no, there are no pauses, but we can cancel it, if you'd like.
Jonathan: There you go..
James: No needy, no neediness, whatever, it's just like, no, you can't pause. You can keep paying for it. Cause it's a subscription and there's no pauses, but we can cancel you if you want to be blacklisted forever. And she said, sure, well, let's cancel it then. Gladly, gladly, gladly, gladly all within the course of like five minutes of her first email. Cancel her, she is gone, she is blacklisted. [02:49.8]
And it is kind of sad to see people go and it's just my business policy, I understand that. I probably could make more money if I pause and cause people move and they do all types of different things, but I know that I could make more money that way. The business could make more money, but I don't want to do that because it's not in the best interest of the inner circle member himself or herself. It is not for their benefit to pause it like it's just not, it's all good stuff coming to you every single month. The heartbreaking part though, is that you would think that having a child would put you in a different frame of mind. Like now's the time to buckle down now is the time to really grow my business. Now is the time to essentially, even, even though she was serious before, I mean, she I'm sure that she was doing well, but once you have a child, like you got to get on your grind, like seriously, you know, move, make different decisions, make bigger moves, market more, grow your business. [03:49.6]
Because it's for your kids, all of it is for your kids. It's so goofy to me to think that, Oh, I'm going to have a child, so I'm going to stop investing myself and I'm going to stop growing my business. Just like ultra-dumb ultra-dumb.
Jonathan: I’m surprised at this.
James: Now, when you got somebody, Jonathan, did you think like, okay, no more business, no more growth, no more moneymaking. Was that, did that ever go through your mind?
Jonathan: First I need to, I need to say something I'm surprised you did not reply to her. Well, what are you going to read to your kid? That's what I was really expecting. Right, and I do that. And you know that, you've seen, like, what I read to Hudson is like what, what does multimillionaires teach their kids or whatever that Steve Seibel book is.
James: Yeah.
Jonathan: But no, you ramped up. Guys that have kids ramp it up, if they care. [04:39.1]
James: That is so true, that is so...And honestly, people can learn a lot from you. And I remember he, he wrote like 77 Secrets of Mentally Tough People or something like that.
Jonathan: Yes, 77 Secrets. Yes, sir.
James: Yeah. That's all great stuff to read to your kid. Cause, even if they don't understand it, it's still getting ingrained, it's still deep in there, it's still… they’re picking up on the time that you're spending with them and the, the general topics they think, okay, this is important to Daddy! This needs to be important to me too.
Jonathan: Do you know what I call it James?
James: What?
Jonathan: It's programming time. Come on. It's programming time, lets read the chapter.
James: It's deprogramming time from all the government sponsored youth indoctrination camps.
Jonathan: Ahhhh, Doberman Dan!
James: I mean, seriously. I'm sure she's a great lady. I'm sure she's a great, going to be a great mother kind of, I guess, whatever. But I seriously like if you've got kids like get the freak on your grind. I mean, I understand. Yes. You want to spend time with the kids. Yes. But that's the whole point. You want to build a business so you can spend time with your kids. People don't think about the second order consequences. [05:48.7]
So people may intellectually sit down and say, you know what? Spending time with my family is important and they get it. They're like, yes, this is going to be a priority in my life. But then they do stuff where yes, the first immediate short term effect is to spend more time with your family. They say, I'm not gonna invest in myself as much. I'm not going to read as much. I'm not going to take as many courses. I'm not going to go to as many seminars or whatever to build my business because I want to spend more time with my family. In the short term, that makes sense. You don't read the newsletter for 20 minutes or 30 minutes a month, great. You have another 20 to 30 minutes to spend with your family, that's awesome. But the second order consequence is so devastating and so large after the course of years that the 30 or 40 minutes that you spend per month or 20 to 40 or whatever it is, however long if you're a slow reader, maybe a little longer, if you're a fast reader, little shorter. The long-term effect, it could be years that you don't spend with your child because you're not building your business as efficiently. You're not helping people as much. You're not making as much money. All this stuff adds up. It, people fail to view the second order consequences. So if someone cannot think like that, honestly, we don't want them in the inner circle, plain and simple.
Jonathan: Yeah. [07:01.3]
James: And I know that ruffles people's feathers. I know that upset some people, but that's okay. It is okay. It's just reality. It's not going to change anything. The second order consequences will be there. It's not just for me. It's for every single human being on the planet. If you, if you it's like tripping over dollars to pick up pennies, but you're doing it in an investment sense, in a self-improvement sense, it is spend time with your family sense. So enough about that. We're going to get onto productivity and in many ways that has a lot to do with productivity because you may have less time to spend with your family upfront, but you'll have a huge amount of time when they really need you as teenagers, as young adults and your job as a parent, essentially, is to form good adults. [07:46.3]
And people were kind and treat people respect, and basically fully functioning, fully actualized adults. And I know that all this stuff that we're going to talk about productivity is not as sexy as the latest marketing hack or what keywords you should be including in your YouTube video to get more engagement, but that's all beginner stuff. I've come to realize that the financial advisers who appreciate me the most are the ones who want to go above and beyond the beginner stuff. And after the beginner stuff, it's all about learning how to think. How to become a better person. One of the most important things to focus on when growing a business is productivity, especially as a financial adviser. Now let me read directly from 57 Marketing Tips and share what I say from tip number one, which is about embracing productivity. Here we go. [08:33.3]
At its core Productivity is about getting more output for the same level of input. As a financial adviser, your income is closely tied to how productive you are. Because of this effective marketing and business building as a financial adviser means you must be in a state of constant and never ending improvement. Thus speaketh James.
Jonathan: From the book of James.
James: This one you have to learn seriously. If you take it to heart, it can revolutionize you, but revolutionize your business seriously. Because it leads to a compound effect. It's incredible and in this episode, I'm going to share some of the tools that can help you along the way. So let's get started. The first tool is a time tracking tool and the very first productivity tool that I recommend in the time tracking space is toggle. I track my time religiously. I've been doing so for a few years now. I can literally go back two years, I can see exactly what I was doing, how long I spent doing it, it's pretty mind blowing. [09:32.8]
And it means I have a detailed log of what gets me results and what doesn't. Because I can see where my time is going. This particular tool is so important that back when I did one on one coaching, I made it a requirement. I told my clients to track their time. And if they didn't, I would know they weren't really serious about getting help. If they didn't do that simple thing, they were not serious. They just wanted the tactics. Tell me what keywords to use in my videos. Tell me what titles do you use to rank in Google? Like none of that, none of that matters. You can get all that for free. You can go to YouTube. You don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars to learn the tactical stuff. You really don't. But tracking your time, it's something that affects you on such a deep level is something that grows your business over the long-term at such a deep level, because it gives you an accurate view of what you're really doing. [10:23.5]
You cannot be as yourself because the data is right there in black and white. You can't lie to yourself. You can't say that you only spent two hours on marketing activities when you can go back and you can see that you only spent 20 minutes. This is an arena that is definitely more strategic and tactical because you can listen to all the free podcasts, you can read all the free blog posts. You could get all hyped up to do something, but if you don't actually dedicate the time, it doesn't matter. But the real power behind a time tracking app is the ability to go back and optimize yourself. Because you can track your time for a month or so, or years like I've done and go back and eliminate the task that didn't move the needle, which means you can fill the empty space with even more productive tasks. So you can have that time free. You can insert it, you can insert marketing in there. You can insert prospecting in there and do whatever you want. It's yours. [11:21.4]
Now I personally work between four and five hours every single day. And I don't mean existing in a chair in front of a computer for four hours a day. I mean, actual high value work that contributes directly to moving my business forward. It's management, it's recording this podcast. It's writing the newsletter. A lot of my time now is focused on the newsletter because that's the probably the most important thing that I offer. It's the thing that's making the biggest difference in the world and, you know, managing people, managing things, managing ads. So it's like what I do. That's the real work. [11:53.0]
Hey, financial advisers, 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 advisers can get more clients with email marketing. Go to TheAdviserCoach.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 advisers, three fatal mistakes nearly all financial advisers 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 TheAdviserCoach.com/webinar and register today. [12:33.1]
James: There's a lot of people here when, that work four hours a day and you think I'm lazy or they think I take a bunch of time off. That's not true. It's just those four hours are really dialed in and they're hyper optimized as a result of tracking my time for years, literally years. Now I could stop tracking my time because I've got the process pretty much dialed in. You don't have to track your time forever. I just do it because it's a habit and it does help me keep staying on track. It's something that I've been used to, it's something that I'm comfortable with, but let's hear from producer, Jonathan, who has stopped tracking his time entirely. How do you think that this has helped you? Or what have you done differently since you've stopped tracking your time?
Jonathan: Well, I'm going to terribly disappoint you now that I am tracking my time. I'm not using toggle. I am using a sheet where I write it down. Cause I like that, that feeling of connection. But what it reminded me of, even when I wasn't tracking my time, I've always been journaling and it's the same thing, looking back and, and, and the optimization thing saying, well, I was doing this during this time and I didn't get any results. So what could I do differently? And so that, that's something that, however you do it, you need it. Or you just like, you'll roll around with no purpose with no direction. And so, however you track, you have to do it. [13:50.8]
James: Yeah. I just got back from vacation. And for the first time, typically I take my journal and stuff with me and my planners on vacation. This time I didn't, for whatever reason, I just totally forgot. It did mess with me. I could feel the difference. I don't know how to explain it on the show, but it definitely made a difference. I didn't have my planners. I didn't, even though I wasn't going to do anything, I still write down my goals every single day. And I did not do it for the course of the vacation. And I was just like off and I was off further like a day or two when I got back and they started writing my goals down, started writing down when I was thankful for what I was grateful for the gratitude stuff and got right back into groove. So it does make a pretty big difference. Now…[14:33.8]
Jonathan: I can tell you how it feels, James. I don't know if you've ever done it, but when I was preparing for Huddy to come home, I wanted to do some things that got me out of my comfort zone. One of them was jumping out of an airplane at 15,000 feet. And there's a part where you jump out of the plane for me, at least and I wanted to just please, please, please…. I want to go back in. Oh my God, I'm so helpless. That's how I feel without the journal, without the goals, without the planning.
James: Sky, skydiving man! Hmm, that's pretty popular in Florida, I bet. Cause you got all the, the water places. There's one in ocean city, Maryland. We didn't do that one. We did one in, there's a place in Laurel Delaware that we did. We went skydiving there. And my wife makes fun of me because I got what the, we did the tandem one because….
Jonathan: Yeah, of course. [15:22.5]
James: I just know I'm not going to do it myself. You know, I'm sorry. I'm too big of a whus for that, well, maybe not now, maybe I'm manly enough to do it, right. But this was years ago and the instructor called me crazy legs because when he jumped out of the plane, my legs went crazy. I wasn't able to make, I wasn't able to maintain the position or whatever. I don't know anything about skydiving. I just went and did it. It was like two hours and we're done. But I was crazy. Like my legs were like going all over the place, like a little doll. So that is my legs that's my nickname now for life- crazy legs.
Jonathan: Yikes.
James: So yeah. Interesting stuff, but it was cool. I like skydiving. If anybody wants to go skydiving, I highly recommend it. But try to do it at the right time, do it when it's like sunset on the water or something. That's pretty cool.
Jonathan: Yeah. [16:08.1]
James: Now sleep system, that's number two. My number two productivity tool is a sleep system. Again, this is not a sexy hack, it's not anything like that. It's not even a single tool, really. It's a collection of tools and it's designed to help you reach peak performance as a human being. Because if you're not sleeping well, you're not operating at a hundred percent, I promise you. You're not making the best possible decisions that you could be making, if you're not well rested. And since businesses are built by making good decisions, you're sabotaging yourself, if you don't do this. You could have all the tactics in the world, you can know all the little things, you can follow all the influencers online and you could just get it. By the way, social media has called it news feed for a reason. You ever think about that? Why it's called a feed Jonathan?
Jonathan: Cause they're spoon-feeding you crap.
James: Hmm…there's like a, it's true. It's like, I I'm picturing like a horse with the feedback.
Jonathan: Oh yeah….right… just stuffing it in. [17:04.9]
James: They had no choice, but to eat the stuff that's in that bag, they just eat it and eat it. It's called a newsfeed, people! Wake the freak up. There's a reason anyway. By the way, with the coronavirus thing and wearing a mask and all that, I've always wanted to put like Skittles or M&Ms in my mask.
Jonathan: Too good.
James: So I can munch on the Skittles or whatever, while walking around. I haven't done it yet though, but maybe I will. But, here's some of the stuff that I use to get ridiculous sleep. First of all, I use an aura ring is what I use to track my sleep. You don't have to obsess about this stuff, you do not have to wear it every single day. But what you want to do is you want to wear it to at least get a baseline, to see what your normal score is. And then you can start tweaking it. At this point. I still wear it out of habit. I like wearing it. I like seeing my activity scores, but it's not the best activity tracker in the world. So I don't put too much weight on that. But it is arguably the best sleep tracker in the world. [18:05.5]
And my sleep score hasn't changed in a long, long time. Like I'm, I, I can't really do anything else to get better sleep. So I use that, I used the bed jet for heating and cooling. I use a red light system. It is expensive, if you want to get a red light system, it is expensive. There's, don't be swayed by the cheap ones on Amazon, the cheap ones that come from whatever Wayfair or whatever. It's like a 200 bucks for a panel like, don't get those. You get, you get what you pay for it, when it comes to a red light system. I've got warm lights in my bedroom. This essentially red lights are like low orangy type colors, warm colors. And I've got a weighted blanket. But to be honest, the weighted blanket, it personally doesn't work for me. I like it, it doesn't improve my score but it's just fun. A lot of my friends swear by them though, this is why you need to test. You need to figure out what works for you. What is unique about you? What is unique about your business in every aspect of your life? You need to figure out what works for you versus other people. [19:04.3]
Because weighted blankets, according to science and studies and empirical data, they improve sleep. But I'm just telling you from anecdotal evidence or it just didn't, it didn't help mine. So think about that. Something to think about the sleep system is definitely something you need to implement in your life to improve your business, cause you want to make better decisions. And if you're interested in my entire process, go to TheAdviserCoach.com/sleep and moving on. Number three, the third productivity tool, I think financial advisers should be using is an Email auto responder, an email auto responder. It's a system designed to deliver your emails in a predetermined sequence and frequency. [19:46.7]
For example, I have my responders set up to send out daily emails. When someone joins my email list over at TheAdviserCoach.com/57, that person will automatically get daily emails with no involvement from me whatsoever. All I had to do was write the emails and insert them into the auto responder sequence. And we can do an entire episode on auto responders and we probably will because there's a bunch of information out there about them. But what you want to do is you just want to pick whatever company you want to use. You can use MailChimp, Constant Contact, Drip, whatever, and use them to set it up. Lot of financial advisers get intimidated by this process because they think it's super complicated. It's really not. And even if it is complicated for you, even if you are a complete technophobe, you got to realize that the customer service is there to help you because they don't get paid unless you use the service. [20:38.9]
They have such a strong incentive to onboard you correctly, to make sure everything is working, to make sure that you're happy to make sure you keep paying them. They want to get your $99 a month or your $79 a month or whatever you're paying them, so don't be afraid to use the customer service. A lot of them have email customer service, a lot of them have live chat. I know Drip has live chat that I use pretty frequently and they've always been good. I tend to recommend MailChimp and Constant Contact to financial advisers because it's very simple to set up and their customer services is also good. But I personally use Drip cause I need a little bit more fire power, let's say in my email marketing, but most financial advisers don't. And if there's one type of automation, I wish that I could implement in every financial adviser's business it will be an auto responder sequence because it's, it's a drop dead easy way to set appointments on autopilot. All you have to do is know what to say in the emails. And that's something that I help with because anyone can help you set up this stuff, anyone can help you set up an auto responder, anyone can tell you to send daily emails. Anyone can tell you that stuff. [21:42.6]
The trick though is knowing what to say and think about it, an auto responder sequence handles the follow-up for you. All you gotta do is get people on your email list. And there's a bunch of ways to your email list I, I do talk about that in other episodes, and maybe I can talk about it in the future. Essentially, anybody with a pulse and a credit card can buy traffic. It's very, very, very easy, you can get it from social media, you get it from forums. You can get it from your website, whatever you can build it. Building an email list is the easy part and the auto responder follows up with people in your email list automatically. And one of the biggest ways for financial advisers to immediately increase revenue is to simply follow up more, that's it. Most financial advisers don't follow up nearly enough and auto responder sequence does it for you. You don't have to do anything, it does it automatically no exaggeration sending up an auto responder sequence and inserting it into a financial adviser's business is the closest to straight up putting printing money I've ever seen. [22:42.6]
Jonathan: Woo-hoo.
James: Which is interesting. I say that on my webinar, I say, is this like printing money? It's pretty darn close and heck, even if you're not allowed to use an auto responder, you should still use email marketing as a way to set appointments with your prospects because nothing else comes close in terms of real appointment set. Not all those vanity metrics that the other amateur marketers love to doubt, the open rates and click through rates and impressions and website visitors, I'm talking about real appointments that lead to clients. Because once you have the appointment, it's up to you. The marketing is what gets you the appointment, but after the appointment, it's up to you. You're the one who is in control there. But in terms of actual appointments set for real financial advisers, nothing comes close to email. So those are three of my favorite productivity tools for financial advisers. Number one is a time tracking software like toggle. Number two is sleep tool, its like a sleep system with an aura ring and the bed jet, the weighted blankets, the warm lights, the whole stuff. You can go to TheAdviserCoach.com/sleep to learn more. [23:45.9]
And number three, an email auto responder. And by the way, I want to plug another article here and all this other stuff is free. Go to TheAdviserCoach.com/tools because I have an article listing 10, not just three but 10 of my favorite productivity tools for financial advisers. So if you're interested in reading that article, go to one more time TheAdviserCoach.com/tools and read it. It's just a discussing 10 different tools. I mean, this episode will be like an hour long and I don't want to do that. I want to keep these short and sweet for the listeners as always make sure you subscribe, leave a review, send me your testimonials, your success stories. Send it to james@theadvisercoach.com and I will catch you next week. [24:26.0]
Jonathan: Boom. Printing money, I love it. What's coming up next week. James.
James: Next week's episode is probably going to be a popular one because it's something a lot of financial advisers are interested in. The title was going to be ‘the easy way as if there's ever an easy way, right? ‘The easy way financial advisers can generate leads with LinkedIn.’
Jonathan: Boom Boom Paaaoo. Can’t wait for that. Fam, that is a wrap, we will be back next week with another financial adviser marketing. Thank you for tuning in. [24:55.8]
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