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: Hey Financial advisors, another week, another episode, I am so glad you're here. If you haven't shared this podcast with a fellow financial advisor who needs this information, go ahead and share it. Feel free to tag me on LinkedIn, if you do, I love hearing from you and I want to spread the love, so, help me spread that love. This week, I want to talk about one of the most impactful business lessons I've ever learned, and it comes directly from psychologist, Daniel Goleman. So, I give him all the credit in the world. This is not my original thinking. This is something from him that rocked my world. You may know him, if you recognize that name, Daniel Goldman, as the author of Emotional Intelligence. And he's basically the guy who founded the entire emotional learning movement and he single-handedly responsible for people figuring out how they learn and how they should approach other people in their lives and getting in control of their emotions and all that good stuff. [01:26.3]
And as a marketer, I have a huge amount of respect for him because emotional intelligence is important for both financial advisors and their clients, for marketers and the people consuming the marketing messages. It's important for financial advisors because it helps them handle the occasional hiccups and obstacles that occur when building a business, having strong emotional intelligence and understanding how you approach things and how you talk to yourself is extremely important. And it's important for clients because well, for many of the same reasons, actually it helps them keep their emotions in check, on the way to meeting their financial goals. This episode, isn't going to be about emotional intelligence. That's not the thing that advisors need to know, or at least in that I referenced in the title. So, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I will tell you, in case you're not familiar with emotional intelligence, there are five key elements to it. [02:18.5]
And they are number one is self-awareness. This is about knowing how you feel and having a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses. We'll we will talk a little bit about that later on. Number two is self-regulation. This is about staying in control. You don't let your emotions get the better of you and you have a commitment to accountability. You're regulating yourself. It's all in the name. Number three is motivation. Quite simply motivated people work consistently toward their goals and have high standards for their work. If you're doing something in my view is if you're putting your name on it, it's gotta be good. You want to uphold your reputation, that sort of thing. Number four is empathy. We're going talk about this a little bit too. This is the ability to put yourself in someone else's situation. And it is a really underrated skill for financial advisors. And then number five is social skills. This is about working with other people and knowing how to communicate with different personalities and deal with people as they experienced the spectrum of human emotion. I've heard from financial advisors who deal with clients who have spouses pass away, who bring new family members into the family who get married, have children who graduate. Has seen their children graduate. They're extremely happy, extremely sad when some things happen when tragedy strikes, so they need to be able to navigate that entire spectrum of human emotion. [03:40.6]
But I learned something even more impactful from Daniel Goldman, and it's the concept of triple focus. And when I first discovered this, it blew my mind. It explains so much not only for me and how I built the advisor coach and work with other people and work with financial advisors, but the financial advisors themselves and the ones I've seen come and go over the years, the ones who have made it, “made it” like successfully and have a super cool business. And the ones who have failed, unfortunately. It's the ones who have failed, didn't have this triple focus. And I was like, wow, this explains so much. And triple focus includes three things. First you have inner focus. Second, you have other focus. And third, you have outer focus. I want to break them down one by one. And I think this could be one of the best things you learned this year. This could be the thing that changes your life forever. I know this is the financial advisor marketing podcast. We're going to try to relate this to more marketing, but in business and life in general, having triple focus, it is huge. So, let's start with inner focus. [04:52.2]
Inner focus is being aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. This is tied pretty closely to emotional intelligence, but I want to view this with the triple focus lens. It's about connecting our sense of purpose and understanding what we want and why we want it. Having inner focus can help a financial advisor or prevent financial advisor from picking marketing strategy that doesn't align with his or her personality. I've seen it so many times and it's sad every time it happens. A new financial advisor will start following someone or get a mentor or something and be convinced that a particular marketing strategy is the only way to do things. Remember, dogma is dangerous. On the flip side with financial advisors, if you, if you're someone looking for a financial advisor right now, and that financial advisor tells you that a particular financial product or services is the only way you need to do things, you should run, turn away and run. [05:48.9]
But what happens in the marketing world when you get an extrovert and you have him or her do introverted marketing activities, well, it doesn’t end well. What happens when you get someone who is crippled with call reluctance and you force that person to make cold calls, again, it doesn't end well. Of course, you want to balance your strengths and weaknesses with what the market wants. A lot of times, people in business would say, oh, follow your passion. Or if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. But what if the market doesn't reward your passion? I mean, for example, I'm passionate about eating. I'm passionate about a lot of things that people won't pay me to do. I'm also passionate about marketing and helping financial advisors. So, this is a pretty sweet deal that ended up working out for me. But if I was passionate about, let's just say eating and cooking and eating and stuff like that, people won't pay me to just sit around and eat all day. Maybe they will. I could probably turn that into a side hustle, but you get the point. You want to align, your strengths, your inner focus with what the market wants. [06:51.0]
For example, I share so many statistics on this show about marketing and one of them is that 94% of financial advisors who see success with social media use the direct messaging capabilities on those platforms. If you're on LinkedIn, that's the LinkedIn direct message feature. It's pretty darn obvious. If you've got sales navigator, you can use the InMails again, pretty obvious 94% of financial advisors who see success, use those direct messaging capabilities. So, within that context, I don't care what your personality is. If you're going to be on social media and assuming that your strength is geared towards social media in the first place, and you don't use direct messaging, you're probably going to have a bad time. You're missing a vital component. But you can hit the jackpot, if you align your natural strengths with what the data supports. So, if your natural strength is social media and you're crushing it with direct messages, you're probably going to crush it in general. Your business is probably going to be really successful. I hope that makes sense. [07:52.5]
And knowing your purpose is also extremely important with inner focus because when you have rough days or when things don't go the way you expect them to go, you can dig deep down and remind yourself why you're doing it in the first place. A good example of this is when financial advisors have children and want to give those children the best life possible. It's an honorable thing. I respect it. I love that. If you're not doing good by your kids, then you're just a terrible human being. It's as simple as that, the kids didn't ask to be born. You're the one who brought them into the world. You better take care of them. Step up to the plate and do your thing. But assuming you love your kids and want to do the best that's for them, you can use that purpose to navigate you were business decisions. Because what's more important, think about this, right, for a second. [08:39.3]
What's more important? Investing in yourself to get a better return for you and your kids that will lead to a better the future or saving the little bit of money that you have and not doing anything with it. What's more important? Getting the best life ever, your kids working as hard as you can and making the most of what you have or not making any more calls because you feel rejected by the last person you talked with and you're just rejected and you can't handle it. Screw your kids, right? Oh, you can't handle rejection, you might as well just give up, right? No, your kids don't matter, of course not. Like get real, just align with your true purpose. If you really, truly honestly love yourself and love your family and love your kids, you will just do that thing. I mean, big things, popping, little things stopping, right? Just do the work. [09:26.9]
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. [09:49.4]
Let's move on to the next type of focus, before I go off on a rant here. The next type is other focus, and that's about attending to the needs of other people that. These people could be your employees, they could be your clients, your prospective clients, your family members, but we're going to keep it in a business context here. It's empathy, really, in a nutshell, that's what it is. And as critical for financial advisors. Let me tell you about this cool study. And this is related to other focus. It was done at the Princeton Theological Seminary and the students were told they were going to give a practice sermon because they're divinity students and that's what they're going to do is give sermons. So, they're going to give a practice sermon, right? Half of them were given the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped by on the side of the road to help the person who was in need the other half were given just random Bible topics, okay. So, you got half a good Samaritan, half random Bible topics and stories. [10:45.3]
Then they were both told that they had to go to another building to give the sermon. So, they went over one by one and as they went over to the other building, each student passed a man who was bent over and moaning in pain. Oh, I'm in pain. I hurt so much. I don't know what the guy sounded like. From what I'm reading, the guy was bent over moaning in pain. I'm trying to help you with your imagination here. The question is, do they stop and help the stranger in need? And does it matter if they're thinking about the Good Samaritan? So, they're trying to figure out if the people are going over to give this practice sermon and they just finish reading and practicing the good Samaritan story, because they're going to do a sermon on that. Are those people more likely to stop and help the stranger in need? I'll let you think about that for a little bit. Are they more likely to stop and help the stranger in need? [11:41.1]
The answer is, No. It, it didn't matter. The biggest predictor of, if the students stopped was the time pressure, they were under. The story of the good Samaritan and having that fresh in the students' minds, it did not matter. They walked right past the person if they were under tremendous time pressure. And such as the story of our lives. If we're under a lot of time pressure, we're rushing to get things done, we cannot be very empathetic. If these divinity students, the people who are studying religion to give sermons and help people follow Christ and whatnot with their lives, that's what they're doing. That is their purpose, right? If these people didn't stop and help the person in pain, I don't know, if, you must think pretty highly of yourself, if you think that you'd be the one to stop, right? But if you're under a lot of pressure and you're just rushing, rushing, rushing, constantly trying to get things done, you can't be very empathetic. And this is one of the many reasons that we at the advisor, courage, we went back and revamped 57 marketing tips. So, if you go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/57, you can opt into my email list and that is the gift you get. We revamped that. And we put embrace productivity as the number one tip. We went back and we said, what is the most important thing that we want financial advisors to know? If they just opened this PDF and they start skimming and they just get the first tip and nothing else, what do we want them to know? And it's to embrace productivity. [13:09.7]
Because it spills over into so many areas of growing a business. It helps you make more money. You can spend time the way you want to spend it. And yes, it can help you feel more empathetic, which causes a virtuous cycle that improves on itself, it compounds on itself. Because if you're more empathetic, you can understand your clients better and you can serve them better, which helps you run a better business, helps you make more money and then it’s just rinse and repeat, right? And being a better servant and a better business owner go hand in hand, never forget that. And the last type of focus is outer focus. This is the big one that not many people have. It's about paying attention to what's happening in the world that might require a change in business strategy, or even a rethinking of your entire business model. There are some financial advisors out there who are blissfully unaware of what's happening in the overall world and how it will impact pack their businesses. [14:03.8]
Let me give you an example, so, I can solidify this in your mind. Back in April, 2021, apple launched a new version of their iOS, that, it basically wrecked Facebook targeting for a lot of advertisers. I know there are workarounds. I know people can try to improve their tracking and they can do all the little tweaks and tricks and stuff like I'm I'm way ahead of you, right. But in the months leading up to it, there was so many people who recommended retargeting as a viable marketing strategy without realizing is that A) Many browsers like Firefox and safari, they've already killed off the ability to track their users. It's been gone for a long time now, and people are still saying, He he, re-targeting, that's the way to go, bro. Like you have no idea what you're talking about. You have no freaking clue. What you're talking about. And Chrome is going to do it soon as well. They're going to get rid of the ability to track people with cookies. And B) They didn't realize that apple was going to have this update. [15:00.3]
So, I don't want to ramble on too much about this story, but Facebook cut their pixel length from 180 days to 7 days. So, if you're a financial adviser, I'm sorry, but you're not going to be able to effectively retarget most people to get them to set an appointment in only 7 days. You can get some people to do it, I'm not saying that it's impossible. You can get some people to do it, but what you were able to do before with a pixel that was six months is it's just worlds ahead of what you can do with a pixel it's only a week. You might be able to send people back to like a piece of content if with a seven-day pixel and maybe get a little bit more conversion that way. But even then, your only option will be some sort of endless retargeting loop where you retarget sending through a piece of content. And then you retarget the people who were at that piece of content. And then you retarget the people who you re-targeted like, it's just, it's goofy. My point with all this is I warned my inner circle members about this in the October, 2020 inner circle newsletter issue. Yeah, an entire six months. Well, actually more than six months before it happened, I want you to imagine being six months ahead of everyone else, even the so-called marketers who were screaming about how awesome your targeting was and how it was still okay and you could just get on the bandwagon. Like retargeting has been around for years, for years, and people were just getting on the train and like 20, 20 and 2021, it's like, well, it demonstrates that you don't have much of an outer focus if you are just now figuring out about a marketing strategy that has existed for literally years and people like me have been using it for years and helping financial advisors with it for years. [16:44.1]
And it also means the inner circle members have a much better sense of outer focus than other financial advisors, because I'm literally giving it to them. Let me give you some questions. These are going to be some rapid-fire questions. I want you to think. What's going on in government right now? Are there any new regulations that are being introduced? How do those regulations impact you? Are there any better technologies out there that you can use? What tech is your competition using? What is going to change in the next six months? What's going to change in the next year or the next five years, the next 10 years? What won't change? What most stay the same? Do you know? Is there anything that you can think of? Do you have any ideas because these are all things you should think about in order to have an outer focus. [17:29.2]
And that's it for this week's episode. I want to recap. I want to give you the three types of focus again. They are inner, other, outer; inner other outer; inner other outer There you go, so that is a wrap and you need that all three of those to succeed. Don't you forget it. I'll catch you in next week's episode. [17:48.4]
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