You're listening to Financial Advisor 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 TheAdvisorCoach.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 to another episode of Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I'm so glad to be here and I'm so glad to help financial advisors get more clients, it's what I love to do. I can't get enough of it, but I got an email from a financial advisor who explained that these podcast episodes were so good that he was worried about subscribing to the James Pollard inner circle newsletter, because he thought that it wouldn't be much added benefit. I hope that makes sense to you. And honestly, even honored that he would think that at all, because that's a compliment to me. Thank you for listening to the show. And thank you for saying that it's good, I appreciate that. But to be real with you guys, the newsletter is so far beyond the content discussed in this show, it's not even close. I hate hyping it up or whatever, but it's true. It's just not even close. It's so much better. It's next level. It's actually higher level, if you can think that, I mean, it really is. A lot of marketers do this strategy where they want people to think something like, wow, if this is what he gives away for free, I can't imagine what's in the paid stuff. And I don't really like that strategy, but it does apply here. [01:37.9]
So, what's you’re hearing on the podcast, it just, it is not even in the same ballpark in the same universe as what's in the newsletter, it's just not. And every month that goes by that you don't have the information you're losing money. I know financial advisors who will sit there and they will tell people that they need to start early when it comes to investing, because of opportunity costs. But they will sit around the wait a few months, they'll wait a year, wait a couple of years when it comes to investing in themselves. And they completely ignore the opportunity cost there. Honestly, it's pretty hypocritical. When I pointed out to financial advisors, sometimes they get a little angry or they get embarrassed. I totally get it because you're getting called out on your BS, essentially, that's what it is. And at the end of the day, subscribing to the inner circle newsletter, I can't make that decision for you, but it really is a business decision. And I'm going to get off this in a couple of seconds. We'll get into the podcast episode, but I just want to bring this up. If you have a business owner mindset, you're going to understand what I'm about to say. If you have an employee mindset, you will not understand it. It's just the way it is. So here it goes. [02:42.5]
According to a recent report from the Bureau of labor statistics, financial advisors make on average $124,140 per year, which means even if you're a drop dead average financial advisor, you can cover an entire year's subscription to the newsletter with a measly, 1% increase in income. And quite frankly, if I couldn't boost a financial advisor's income over the course of the year with 12 information pack newsletter issues with the bonuses that you not only get when you sign up, but I have some bonuses that I sprinkle in throughout the year as well. And then you get email access to me for questions. If I couldn't increase your income 1% over the course of a year, and that's assuming you've dropped that average, well, I wouldn't be in business. Like I don't know what to tell you. So, ask yourself this question. Assuming you are an average financial advisor, do you think I can help you boost your income by more than 1% per year? If you do then join, it's pretty, it's pretty easy decision. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching and sign up. If you don't believe that after like a 100+ podcast episodes and if you honestly think these podcast episodes are good, if you hate them, I don't even know why you're listening, but if you think they're good and I'm telling you that it's nowhere near what's in the news newsletter, and you think that I could boost your income by more than 1%. I don’t know. So, I can't make the decision for you. [04:04.8]
Now let's get into these daily marketing habits that can get financial advisors, more clients. The very first one is engaging on LinkedIn. And this is all about finding people in your niche and putting your beautiful face in front of them. And this is one of those things that seem so simple. That's like a theme that's going to run through these activities. They seem very simple, but most people, they don't do it. They don't engage on LinkedIn. They just don't. And I wonder if these people are there like gluttons for punishment, or maybe they just want to stay poor. I don't know. Never before in the history of the world, has it been so easy to talk to someone and collect money? We have the internet; we have messaging tools. We have social networks. We have connections with people. We have email. It is incredible. And I'm so sick of people, whining and complaining about how hard it is. Like it's not hard, it's just that you don't want to do the work. Stop using automation services, stop paying thousands of dollars to these ridiculous lead gen companies that same copy and paste scripts to hundreds of people that they don't help you stand out. They don't help you build your business at all. [05:05.4]
Start making real connections based on something that cannot be copied and pasted, make this a cornerstone of your marketing activity, like really engaging where people forming real human connections, make that a cornerstone of what you do. I love marketing automation as much as the next person, but doing this, being a real person on a social network, like LinkedIn, where people in your niche are hanging out, it's like adding gasoline on top of a fire. You can literally go to someone in your niche on LinkedIn. Look at the activity part of his or her profile and leave a comment on something that person has done. I told a financial advisor to do this, and he was like, well, what if the last time they posted was like a month ago? Wouldn't that seem kind of stalker-ish? Hmmm…. I don't know, maybe, but it shows the person that you went and looked for or her specifically. And that means a lot more than spraying and praying all day long. Just, it is so crazy how simple it is. You can go to the person's profile, look at their activity, scroll through the past like five or whatever. Find something that you can contribute to and leave a comment. It is so nutty. I want you to go through some basic math here and let's be super conservative because this is the podcast and you're probably doing something else so, I'm going to keep it super-duper simple. [06:26.1]
I'm not even going to add anything to your plate. I'm going to, I'm not going to stack this into your calendar. I'm going to stack it on top of your calendar. I'm going to put it on top of what you're already doing so, it doesn't “cost” you any time. Let's say it's going to sound silly, but this is what we're doing here. But let's say you go to the bathroom and you're doing your thing for 10 minutes per day, 20 if you're ambitious, that may seem gross. But I know a lot of you take your phones into the bathroom anyway. Pull out your phone, bring up the LinkedIn app and leave a thoughtful comment on five people's profiles, just five. You can do more, but I'm trying to tell you what to do during your bathroom time. So, it's not costing you additional time. So, you do this everyday cause hopefully you go into the bathroom every day. That means five times 30 days is 150 thoughtful comments left on profiles. And here's what's going to happen. Some will engage with you and some won't, it’s that simple, but they will see you and people in their networks will see you. There's no downside whatsoever to doing this, it's not costing you any additional time. What do people going to do? Are they going to hate you because you left something insightful or ask a question and get over your stupid fear of rejection and start doing it. This is something that can literally change your life forever. And if you want more help with LinkedIn, I am here for you. I do have a product called how to get clients with LinkedIn. You can go to TheAdvisorCoach.com, click the tab that says, ‘Get Clients with LinkedIn,’ buy that it will change your life, if LinkedIn is something that you want to do. [07:53.3]
Let's get on and say the next marketing habit though. That's handwritten notes, like sending handwritten notes to people. This is something that it will, we'll help you stand out. Everybody loves digital these days and I do too. I'm constantly using digital marketing tools, but I also understand that you need to Zig while everyone else Zags. And handwritten notes, there's things that they require such a small-time commitment and such a small cost of money and time and resources, but they have a potentially huge payoff. And this is especially true with your existing clients and relationships, because if you're not nurturing them, they're dying. I know a lot of people get complacent with where they are. They think everything's fine; they don't contact their clients. Then one day wham, the client leaves. And according to a study done by price metrics, financial advisors lose an average of 10% of their clients every year. And anecdotally, I think that's a little high, but I can only give you the numbers that I see in the studies. They also point out that households with 100,000 in assets, which is admittedly pretty low, or like on the lower end for financial planning and financial services, they fare even worse because they have a 13% chance of leaving their advisors in any given year. And a big reason why these clients leave is, is a lack of attention and a lack of communication. They don't feel appreciated. So, one of these handwritten notes can go a long way. [09:19.7]
My personal accountant, he is a beast of this. This guy saw how many Kindle books I bought, like he went through my records and my bookkeeping, and he saw like Amazon Kindle, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Kindle. Cause they're all business-related books and for training and stuff like that. And he bought me a freaking Kindle. He bought a Kindle and a nice one too, it wasn't just the entry-level Kindle. He bought me a nice Kendall, didn't say anything. It just showed up in the mail one day. How's that for a gift. He also sent me like a nice serving tray, he sent me some other cool gifts as well. To be candid, I have sent him gifts too, but my gifts are nowhere near as cool. One of the gifts I sent him was the, if you watch Family Guy, they make a joke about the wacky. I'm going to see if I can get this right. The wacky inflatable arm flailing tube man or something like that. Wacky inflatable arm flailing tube man, God it's just tough. If you’d go to YouTube and you type that at family guy, wacky inflatable, it's going to come up. So, I sent, I sent him that I'm being serious. I sent that to him as a gift and it doesn't compare to a Kindle, but he sent me a Kindle and a whole bunch of other gifts. And if he can do that, then you can send a card. And one particular tactic that works well is sending postcards. So, the next time you're on vacation, grab a stack of those postcards in the hotel lobby or in the CVS or Walgreens in the area where you're vacationing, grab those postcards and fire them out to your clients. [10:41.2]
People love getting postcards and they're so rare these days, it's almost like vintage or retro. I recently sent an email out to my email list about someone in Las Vegas who used postcards to generate $12,500 worth of leads every single week. And that's one of the gifts you get for being on my email list, I should say, but postcards are so cool. People are so used to social media, photos and Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook and seeing not only what people have for dinner and cute cat photos, but also where people go on vacation. So, postcards have kind of lost their touch, but people still love them. [11:17.8]
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. [11:40.5]
Number three, find one thing to test. And this is if you have a huge business. So, for the small percentage of financial advisors, listening to this show who are making millions of dollars per year in personal income, this for you. Thinking of things, you can test every single day is that CEO level work that's business owner work. This is high level stuff. If you have a smaller business, you most likely won't be able to test one thing every day because you just don't have the resources to do it. You don't have enough going on. You don't have enough on your plate and you don't have enough people to carry out the things you want to task. You. Can't just easily delegate like someone who's making multiple millions per year, but you can still do one thing a week. Maybe one thing every two weeks, you can figure it out. So, what does this look like? [12:23.3]
It means testing your email subject lines. It means testing your email signature, it means sending a new direct mail piece, trying a new voicemail, tweaking your LinkedIn connection request approach, testing a new message to people on LinkedIn. You could even try a new marketing strategy entirely. But I do want to give the caveat that you should not give up after one week or two weeks or one month, you want to make sure you do any new marketing strategy long enough to get statistically significant resorts. So, if you have a big business and you're making millions of dollars per year, the CEO level work that you're going to do is figuring out one thing per day, at least one thing that you can test that you can get someone else to tell for you. If you have a smaller business, you can bump it down to maybe one thing per week or one thing every two weeks. And you will slowly, but surely get to the point where your business is growing, where you can get to maybe two things a week and then once every day. [13:15.6]
Number four, update your CRM because good records are critical. And people sleep on their CRMs. I mean, I wrote the ultimate financial advisors guide to getting more clients back in 2016. And one of the sections in that book was about CRMs and record keeping and keeping good records, keeping good notes and using it as a follow-up tool because that book is essentially a condensed diversion of my old outbound marketing coaching program. And one of the things I used to stress was keeping good records. Technology solves the record, keeping problem in financial services. We have cloud-based CRMs, they can be updated from anywhere. We have apps on our phones that they can automatically log calls, they can log emails. You can just forward an email to your CRM and it will automatically tag it to your client. It tags and keeps records of text messages and more, but still, I see financial advisors who don't keep detailed records and it's mind blowing. It's like they hate money. Like they don't understand that keeping track of their clients, keeping track of prospective clients and prospecting activity, it's the way they're going to improve. [14:22.1]
I mean, what is that old saying? It's something like what gets measured gets improved or you can't improve what you don't measure, something like that. That's what this is all about. And I don't want to talk too much about CRMs, if you want my recommendation for which CRM to use, I wrote an entire article about it, which you can find by Googling the advisorcoach best CRM and it will be at the top of the search results or at least it should be otherwise we're not doing our job. I like to keep things simple for financial advisors because I've learned the simple tool is the one that gets used. Sometimes finance users will get intimidated by CRMs because they're just, they're so darn complicated. They get intimidated with social media sometimes, they get intimidated with email marketing and auto responders because they, they think email is super complicated, but it's actually not. But when financial advisors think their CRMs are complicated, they, they might be right because there are some out there that are just so darn complicated. [15:15.7]
I wouldn't tell a financial advisor to use certain CRMs cause it's just too much. If you're intimidated the very first time you use it and there's no clear work workflow and they don't have instructions on like, step-by-step here, do this first, then do this, then import your contacts here. If they don't have that, like you're just going to be lost, you shouldn't do it. But if you want to figure out the CRM, I recommend by the way is Capsule. And if you want to learn more, like I said, Google, the advisercoach, best CRM. I do want to leave you with this. If you're not using a CRM to keep track of your activity and you're not stressed out, you're not doing enough. You quite simply, don't have enough activity going on in your business, if you can manage it all without a tool. I know some people might get offended by that, they might take it personally, but it is true. If you can do it all without a CRM and your businesses operating smoothly, you quite literally do not have enough activity. You are not doing enough. You are not making a big enough impact. So, get a CRM and use it religiously. [16:19.5]
And number five, the final daily marketing habit that you should have, if you want to get more clients is looking for opportunities. And this is, it's a bit of vague advice. I know, but I mean, for it to be vague because opportunities are everywhere. I'm talking about within your niche. Are you regularly reading the blogs that your niche is reading? Are you following the people they follow on social media? Because if you are, you will begin to see opportunities. Every so often I'll hear from a financial buyer who says, I don't know what to write about in my emails. Okay. Are you following people in your niche? Are you following the people they follow or are you reading the blogs they read? Are you subscribed to YouTube channels that they're subscribed to? Are you listening to the podcast they're listening to? No, no, no, no, no. And no. Hmm. It's it's very funny because it's almost like that's the exact reason why you don't have content ideas. Are you regularly connecting with people in your niche? Are you taking notes as we've already discussed in this episode? Because if you are, you will begin to connect the dots on how to help other people. [17:24.2]
You'll see what they're interested in, what they're not interested in. You'll begin to get content ideas. I mean, if you're a financial advisor and you specialize in working with positions, okay, you could go to YouTube right now, look at whoever the popular physician YouTube channel is. I honestly have no idea, but I imagine there's gotta be three or four that are just crushing it in the physician space. You go to their YouTube channel and you sort their videos by most popular and you take a look at the five most popular YouTube videos that they posted, and you look at the titles and you figure it out. Actually, you know what, since I'm recording this podcast and I can pause and stop or whatever, I'm actually going to do that right now. So, I am going to pause this podcast and I'm going to come back when I get these videos. [18:09.4]
Okay. I am back, ain’t technology great. So, I actually paused my recording, went to YouTube, well, first I went to Google and I typed in most popular physician YouTube channels and got a list of the most popular channels. And one of them was a channel called Strong Medicine. So, I went on over to YouTube, typed in Strong Medicine and clicked on the channel and it is a channel that specializes in helping medical, trainees and professionals. They've got free on demand videos that they can watch. So, I went to their channel and I sorted by most popular and the most popular videos number one, two, and three. The most popular on the entire channel is a video called how to interpret a chest X-Ray okay. Now you've got an idea that you can use for an email. How do people interpret a chest X-Ray? This is similar to how you, as a financial planner, evaluate their net worth statement or evaluate their financial life. The second most popular video is an approach to acute abdominal pain. You could do something with this. You can write an article about acute abdominal pain, how they know something is wrong, but they don't know exactly what in sometimes in the financial life, people know something's wrong, but they don't know exactly what I meant. Number three, the most popular video on this channel is what is a normal well heart rate? So, you could say the normal heart rate is this, is one of the first things you learn as a medical trainee. And one of the first things I learned as a financial advisor is a normal rate of return or a historical rate of return, I should say, or a, a normal savings rate, something like that. Is the normal savings rate enough? What is the “normal” amount of student loan debt that medical professionals have? There's so much that you can do if you were in the niche and you honestly care about them, like you're going to get content ideas like this. [19:55.9]
I just gave you like gold, right. And this is one reason why you should love your niche because then this won't feel like a chore to you. It will be something you do anyway. One of my most successful inner circle members, he specialized in the agriculture industry. And I've mentioned him before on the show and him looking for opportunities every day, it wasn't a chore. His family had a farm. He grew up on a farm. He loved farming. He loved cows. They had a dairy farm. He was constantly around it. He saw opportunities. He read the magazines. He was subscribed to all the stuff. He went to their meetings and whenever new laws came up or regulations or price changes happened, he knew about it and he could bring it up with his clients. He was ahead of the curve in a way that no generalist financial advisor could ever be. [20:41.9]
So, to recap, these are the five daily marketing habits you can use as a financial advisor, get more clients. They are number one, engage on LinkedIn. Number two, handwritten notes, they are gold. You should send them. Next time you're on vacation grab the postcards and send them out. Number three, find one thing to test, if you've got a huge business, this is every day. If you've got a smaller businesses is once every week, every two weeks or every month. Number four is updating your CRM; good records are critical. Again, if you want to learn more about Capsule, the CRM that I recommend for financial advisors, just Google the advisercoach, best CRM, and then number five, look for opportunities, they are everywhere and they are abundant, if you have a niche. So, I will catch you next time. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you. [21:28.6]
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