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: Financial advisors, you are listening to the Financial Advisor Marketing show. My name is James Pollard. I am just some guy on the internet who yells at you and tries to give you advice. But I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. This is like episode 103 I mean, you only get to 103 episodes if you absolutely have no idea what you're talking about, you have no clue and you don't provide any evidence to back it up, that's the only way you get here. And I am with my host producer, Jonathan Rivera, who has worked with legendary people, such as Doberman Dan, Ben Settle, Taylor Welch, Chris Evans and like the list goes on and on and on and on.
Jonathan: Wait a second..
James: It's like you're working with people who are legitimately doing millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. Of course you don't know what you're talking about either. [01:14.8]
Jonathan: You forgot the name, James Pollard in there. I'm a little disappointed.
James: Well, yes. And then before that we got on the air right now, we were talking about how you did an interview with someone worth $50 million. So, nice try close, but no cigar.
Jonathan: Not yet. We're not there quite yet, huh.
James: No, I'm not. I'm . I'm not at $50 million, but I'm also very young and well, I'll just leave it at that.
Jonathan: Dude, this guy did a million dollar webinar last like two weeks ago. I just.
James: Well let them.
Jonathan: I can’t fathom it.
James: We'll let their minds wander. So the title here, I mean, everybody can read, I used to do the whole thing, like hype up the show and all that other stuff. And then I realized, duh, people can read the freaking title. They know what the show is going to be about. The title is how can financial advisors or How Financial Advisors Can Eliminate Rejection. [02:09.7]
So that's what it's going to be about. It's one of the most desired things in all of business, not just with financial advisors. So I decided to do a little Googling before the show and I typed in how to eliminate rejection.
Jonathan: Hmm.
James: And I started reading, so here's what I found - The advice on the interwebs is Look for the learning opportunity. That's a good tip. That's a good one. I mean, I think you can learn from rejection. You can figure out what you need to do differently, how you need to frame yourself in the future, what you need to do in order to like get the sale or get the client or get the appointment or get whatever you're trying to do. The real estate deal, the close, whatever. If you get rejected, look for their learning opportunity, I like that one. [02:55.4]
Face your fear was another tip and I get it. You want to face your fear is something that sounds good on paper, but it's not really a good idea in practice, especially if tens of thousands of years of evolution have made it. So you're supposed to have this fear. This is what people don't get. You are not going to beat rejection with some fancy tip trick or tactic. You're just not. 10,000 years are tens of thousands of years, I should say of evolution, Human development. Rejection hurts for a reason. It's because we are social animals. We want to be part of a group, we want to belong, we want to feel like we have a purpose within the grand scheme of things and rejection goes against, I'm sorry, but you live in your little three bedroom house and your little Mercedes and BMW were in the garage and like thinking you're hot stuff and you go into the sales seminar or whatever, you’re not going to beat that. You’re just not. [03:55.2]
Another tip online is to take some time to process it. That's not so bad either because if you're trying to run a business by having a bunch of prospect facing marketing, you are going to get rejected. It's going to happen, so you, you would get bogged down in trying to process all of it, but you can process a little bit of it, if you take some time to process it, just figure it out, like what, what do these things have in common? Like if you get rejected a hundred times, you don't necessarily want to process all 100 of the rejections. But if someone gives you a specific reason and another person gives the same reason, another person gets, gives the same reason, process that reason, instead of getting bogged down with every single individual rejection. And then another tip that I saw is remember that rejection is temporary and not permanent. Well, not exactly. Especially if you're trying to build a business, maybe the individual rejection is temporary. Someone rejects you and then like, they're not rejecting you again and again again, but if you're trying to build a business, that rejection is going to keep coming. You're going to get rejected again and again and again. [05:05.5]
Now, fortunately, I've got a much better, better way for financial advisors to lessen rejection. I say eliminate rejection because you're eliminating a whole bunch of it, but you're never going to get rid of completely. And it's all about setting up a mechanism to qualify prospective clients before they ever get to you. And in a previous podcast episode, I talked about how financial advisors filter themselves out of my marketing machine, because I would ask them to donate money to a charity before, or I would even talk to them. That's one of the campaigns I did a long time ago. It’s really important in the development of my coaching practices essentially cause I wanted to filter out everybody who was serious when compared to people who are not serious and didn't want to have the coaching and didn't want to pay for it and didn't wanna help the kids. That was my qualification mechanism and it's an, it's a phenomenal example of a qualification mechanism. [05:57.5]
Now, of course, you're probably not going to do this in your business, nor should you, but you want to have something. You want to have something to separate the people who are truly interested and serious from everyone else. And speaking of charity work, I've got a little bit, not an announcement, but fingers crossed, if anybody wants to say a little prayer for me, you can go ahead and pray for me because I recently officially ask First Book, which is a charity that donates children's book to different schools and people and children around the world. They donate books because it's just instrumental in their development. It's instrumental to making better human beings, is to give them the knowledge to do so. So I asked them if I could basically say in my marketing materials that I'm giving the first month of my inner circle newsletter, subscription fee, where somebody joins, they paid the $99. My, my goal is it hasn't happened yet. My goal is to be able to take that $99 and just give it straight to First Book and basically say financial advisors. I don't even get your money, it's going straight to charity. That hasn't happened yet. I'm not allowed to use their names and everything in my marketing materials. I'm not allowed to say that I do that. So don't assume that I do that. But I sent a letter to them, I sent a proposal basically saying, can I have permission to say that and make it legal, with everything about board, so. [07:23.1]
Jonathan: Nice.
James: If that happens and if they say, yes, that's a big deal. I hope they say yes. We'll see. What do you think about that?
Jonathan: That's awesome, man. Excellent.
James: Well, I sent the email, let's see eight days ago. And I called before I sent the email and said, Hey, you know, I'd rather just speak to a human being and just get this done. I don't want to say that I'm giving money to charity without having written permission and making it official. So I'd like to get written permission please. And she said, well, email us here. She gave me a little secret email address and I sent it off and she said, it will take quite some time for someone to get back to you.
Jonathan: Wow.
James: So eight days I understand and play in the waiting game, but fingers crossed. Hopefully they get back to me and they say, yes, James, you do have written permission to use this charity and to tell financial advisors that you just going to give the first month to us. So that's something I really want to do. It hasn't happened yet. So I'm not saying that I'm doing that because I'm not. But when they give me the written permission, it's going to be official. So that will be really cool. [08:27.6]
But back to rejection, what rejection and Hey, I might get rejected here. They might reject me. But rejection is when somebody just tells you flat out, they're not interested, they're not serious. You take it hard because they tell you directly. So the feeling of rejection that you face is them just telling you no super directly. So the key to eliminating that feeling of rejection is to not face it, head on. It sounds so simple. Now, I don't want you to think of that this is about running from your fears or anything like that, it is not that. What I'm saying is, as a business owner, you should have assets and systems in place to do this stuff for you, your machine, your marketing, your systems should take the rejection, not you. It shouldn't be you directly. If you don't have these systems in place, you're nothing but a glorified salesperson who is just going from one person to the next. You do not have a real business. [09:27.5]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [09:50.1]
James: And one way to have something else separate you from this rejection is operating your business through referral. Now, if you're a longtime listener of this show, you know that while I like referrals, I do not like depending on them. I think it's the business equivalent of playing with fire, but referrals can eliminate a lot of rejection in your business because when you get referrals, the people are already warmed up to the idea of doing business with you. They enter the appointment with an open mind, the more receptive to your ideas and your suggestions. So that's one way to do it. But my favorite way to eliminate rejection in a financial advisor's business is to use email marketing. Now talked about how powerful email is on previous episodes, specifically, episode number 32, which is titled How Financial Advisors Can Get Clients With Email, not a very creative title, but that's what it is. [10:43.4]
Email is a filtering mechanism. If someone isn't interested in hearing from you anymore, that person can just unsubscribe. It's a beautiful thing, it really is. A lot of people get hung up on the unsubscribes. People unsubscribed from my email list, every single day. That’s simply because I've got a lot of people on my email list and a small percentage are always going to unsubscribe. I get them every single day and it's amazing. It's all done without you being involved, physically involved, or without you investing any of your time. You can send out a sequence of emails trying to send an appointment and if someone doesn't want to send an appointment, that person doesn't have to. It's awesome. And if the person doesn't want to hear from you anymore, that person can opt out. Now, is that still rejection? I don't know. Maybe. I guess it could be. But it's not as severe as someone's saying no to your face. Again, I'm talking about eliminating the pain of rejection. [11:41.2]
You’re feeling of the pain when someone says no to your face, when you're at the appointment and you say, Hey, do you want to become a client? I mean, you say it nicer than that, but Hey, do you wanna become a client? And they say, Hey, no, go, go to heck. Right? So, but this type of rejection, when it comes to email and your marketing systems and your machines, it allows you to use your time elsewhere. If your email marketing machine is the thing that's going out there and it's talking with people and it's qualifying them for you, that means a lot of the time spent one-on-one prospecting that you would have used, or you would have done, that can be used elsewhere. Now, does it have to be used elsewhere? Absolutely not. Because if you add your email marketing machine inside of a marketing ecosystem, that's already working. It's like pouring gasoline on a fire. But if you want to do something else, even if that's taking Fridays off or going golfing, you can do that. You can do that. You are separating yourself from the rejection. [12:40.4]
And before we wrap up the show, I know this is not an earth shattering concept. This is really nothing new, but so many financial advisors don't do it. They continue to put themselves out there and just get beaten upon the head, just whap, whap, whap, every single day with rejection when they could put these barriers, not necessarily their barriers. Yes, but they're not necessarily like pushing you away from your clients and prospects. They're just taking the rejection for you. But before we wrap up the show, I want to take a minute to talk about why email unsubscribes aren't a bad thing. They're a good thing. They're really good thing. And for several reasons, first unsubscribers are usually the people who aren't engaging in the first place. This means when people are unsubscribing, they're cleaning up your email list for you. They are working for you. And when this happens, your deliverability has helped. Now obviously huge numbers of unsubscribes aren't going to be good for deliverability, but having people who don't engage prune themselves is a good thing. [13:45.3]
Next, if you happen to have a certain email that has a lot of unsubscribes, you can examine it. You can say, okay, I've got five emails in this sequence. For some reason, email number four is getting a whole lot of email unsubscribes. What can I change there? Is there anything different that email number four has that one, two, three, and five don't have? Now this is one of the reasons why I advocate having an email auto responder sequence, because you can go back. You can examine all the emails to see what's working and what's not. If you have one email that just gets a huge open rate compared to everything else you can say, Hey, what did I do with this email that maybe I can replicate in the others? You go back, you change the other emails. You get higher open rates, which means it's a proxy for appointment set, which is proxy for clients. You just gave yourself a raise easily, easily. You can go back and examine all the emails, you can see what is working and what's not. And I'll tell you just from personal experience here, and just from helping thousands of financial advisors with this two appointments on autopilot and my email marketing stuff, the first few emails in a sequence, they tend to get higher than normal unsubscribed. So if you've got email number one, two, and three, and you're getting a bunch of pens of subscribers, don't worry, it is unless it's like five or 10%, then you got really worried. You got a big problem on your hand, but they get more unsubscribes than normal. [15:08.6]
This is because the freebie seekers they'll opt in, they get the free thing, and then they're unsubscribed right away. But those people are like the bottom feeders anyway, you don't want them there. But if you're five or 10 emails deep and you see a higher than average unsubscribe rate, you want to take a look. It's a symptom. It's a clue. It's saying, Hey, something's wrong, look at me. This is just another way for you to improve your marketing machine over time. All of these little fixes will compound. One day, you change an email and get a higher open rate. The next day you change them and you get a higher click through rate. The next day you changed them and you get more appointments sets, the next day you change it and you get few unsubscribes. They compound. And then finally unsubscribe saves you money because you have to pay for whatever email software you're using to maintain your list and as your list grows, it costs you more money. [16:02.5]
If you're going to pay for each subscriber, you need each one to be as qualified as possible. When people voluntarily unsubscribe, it saves you money. I'll go back. I'll go back through my email list. I will manually delete people who aren't engaging because I don't want them there. I don't want to pay for them to be there. And I almost forgot a word of warning about surveying people after they unsubscribed. Sometimes people will put up these cute little surveys asking people why'd you leave us. So why did you unsubscribe? I think this is a bad idea because most people are going to say what they're going to say, what financial advisors they're going to say, ‘You send too many emails.’ But I have never seen something like a weekly or a monthly email sequence, be it a daily one, assuming the same type of content is used ever, like ever. I've never, ever, ever, ever seen it done. So if you were to listen to the people who say, you send too many emails, you would be hurting your business. [17:07.1]
And that's an entire lesson by itself, watching what people do instead of listening to what people say. But I think that's about it for this episode. So let's recap. Rejection is a natural thing. There are so many books and seminars and motivational speakers out there who will try to help you to overcome rejection. And yes, those things can help, but they'll never eliminate the sting entirely because it's part of our makeup. It's part of our biology. But if you're serious about lessening, the pain of rejection, you need to separate yourself from the rejection itself. You need to play something in between you and your prospective clients to where they qualify themselves. So the two examples I gave in the show were referral marketing and email marketing. And both of these can work. I personally have a preference for email marketing because it can be done on autopilot and you can scale it and you can make it a lot bigger and a lot faster than virtually every other marketing strategy out there. And if you're interested in learning more about email marketing and how I make it work for financial advisors, I encourage you to register for the free webinar over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/webinar, it's called ‘3 counterintuitive ways. Financial Advisors Can Get More Clients With Email Marketing. It's where I detail like literally I give it to you, my three step process for helping financial advisors get more clients with email. That's it for this week. Before you ask producer Jonathan, next week, the show will be titled Stop Introducing Yourself to Prospects. [18:36.4]
Jonathan: All right, this guy is ahead of the, head of the game here. That is a wrap for another Financial Advisor Marketing. Thank you fan for tuning in, we'll be back in your ear buds next time. [18:46.0]
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