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.
James: Yo, yo, yo, financial advisors, in this episode, I'm going to talk with you about some things that high-growth financial advisors do differently and I'm going to back it up with research. There are so many coaches, consultants, gurus, lead gen agencies, and so on, who all have these opinions and all of these theories, and all of this so-called advice, but they rarely back it up with research. Proof. Prove your claims. Back it up. Juvenile would say back it up, and I'm telling you to back it up as well. [01:00.7]
If you tell me that Marketing Strategy X works well, then you need to be able to prove it with something you should be prepared to defend that position. For example, I'm constantly telling financial advisors that email marketing is the best appointment-setting strategy I've ever seen for financial advisors. It also has an extremely high return on investment.
But you don't have to take my word for it. That is the beautiful thing about what I am telling you here. You can google “average email marketing ROI” right now and tell me what you see, let me know. Wherever you have your money right now, is it getting that type of return on investment? You don't have to believe me. You can look stuff up yourself.
I've been helping financial advisors get more clients since 2015. Actually, before that. I started the Advisor Coach in 2015. I took my show on the road in 2015. I've been helping financial advisors since before that, if you really want to get technical. I have been right there with them. I've worked directly and indirectly with advisors. I've worked with them one-on-one. I've worked with them one-to-many. I've seen advisors from all walks of life and in all sorts of scenarios, and one of the things I've noticed is that some advisors mistakenly think they need to hustle super hard or work themselves to death to grow their businesses. [02:12.1]
Now, I don't want you to think that it's not hard. I am not telling you that it is not hard, because it is hard. However, it's not hard in the way you might think. The more I study archetypes in psychology, and I literally have a degree in psychology, by the way, but it's not worth the paper it's printed on because I learned far more after school than I did in school. I actually learned a little bit more on my own than I did in the classroom, but that's neither here nor there. The more I study archetypes and psychology the more I realize that some people are addicted to the Warrior archetype.
The warrior is the person who sets goals, overcomes obstacles and persists in difficult times. This is fine for a season of life. Sometimes you have to be a warrior, but not forever. Some people are addicted to being warriors so they constantly create obstacles and troubles for themselves. They are creating it. They are perpetually grinding and working and making things harder than they need to be, because they are addicted to being warriors. I have seen it firsthand with financial advisors. I have fallen victim to this mindset, this trap, back in the day. [03:15.6]
You need to realize warriors do things because the King said so. Kings and presidents and other leaders don't go to battle. They pull the levers. They make the cause. They are the real bosses, the kings. They represent leadership, order and responsibility. They are the father figures in history. They are focused on creating and maintaining a stable and prosperous community.
In the father figure role, a good father would create a stable and prosperous home for his family. The father wouldn't introduce all of this volatility and all of his struggle just to feel good. The father wouldn't say, “Okay, children, time to hustle hard. Time to grind,” just for the sake of grinding. He has to think of his family, and in business, the King archetype has to think of his organization and his systems. If he has employees, he needs to think of them. He needs to think about prosperity and stability. The buck stops with the King. I would much rather be a kingdom builder than a warrior. [04:14.1]
The warrior develops through tests of strength, endurance and will, just sheer willpower, but the King has someone else do it—and, no, this is not Who Not How. I know that book is super popular. Everybody's like, Oh, who, how can I find my who, not my how. Look, the concept of hiring people has been around for forever. This is not a new concept. Businesses have been finding who not how for forever. It's called hiring people, right? Kings have other people. Kings are the real “who not how” people, because they're like, Who can go into battle for me? Who can help me conquer this land? Because think about it, kings are people, too. It's just a guy, right? Kings can't do it. Kings are the original who not how.
In marketing, you could be the King and your email marketing system could be your warrior. Your email marketing system could be grinding for you, or your social media profiles could be your little warriors. They could go out, they could do your bidding. But enough about that. This is not about kings and warriors and archetypes. Let me get into the research. [05:10.4]
Last year, Nitrogen, which was Riskalyze, released their 2023 Firm Growth Survey. They surveyed 1,065 advisory firm executives and advisors, and they wanted to figure out which behaviors separated fast-growing firms from the ones that stay stuck. As defined in this survey, hyper-growth firms, that's what they call it, hyper-growth firms were those that grew by 21% or more in 2022. Slow-growth firms are defined as those that grew by 5% or less.
The first thing I want to share is that hyper-growth firms are twice as likely to rank lead generation as most important to firm growth. This does not mean buying leads necessarily. It means lead generation. You can generate your own leads. Lead gen is the lifeblood of your business. How many new people are you getting into your business each and every day? Do you know? Do you know the number? Can you tell me? [06:06.6]
I also want to make it clear that lead gen, again, once again, does not mean you are going out and paying for leads from a lead-gen company. You are not paying hundreds of dollars per lead, when when you call these people, they don't even know who you are. Personally, I think lead generation, when you buy leads, is just dumb. It is not King behavior.
Can you imagine a king going to another kingdom, another business, and saying, “Hey, can you build my kingdom for me?” It doesn't happen. I study history. This is not something that occurs. Kings do not go out to other kings and say, “Hey, help me build my kingdom,” and the King says, “Absolutely. Just give me a couple 100 bucks or whatever per unit of land and I'll help you build.” The king would be conquered swiftly. When the lead-generation company is vacuuming money out of your business, who is really conquering who? Who is really the king there? You should be focused on building your kingdom. [06:57.0]
The hard truth is this. When you hire a lead-gen company to funnel leads directly to you, then you are giving up control. Besides, there is nothing, absolutely nothing that a lead generation company can do that you can't do some version of inside your business. It may not be at the same level or the same scale, but you will have control. People don't think like this. Would you rather have $100,000 in your bank account with complete and utter control, or would you rather have $200,000 in someone else's account and that person simply says he or she will let you have the money? Would you rather rely on hope or control?
our answer will tell me if you're a king or not, and if you're a female—if you're a woman, listening to the show, thank you so much—if you're a queen or not. You can be a king, it doesn't even matter, I don't know. Identify however you want. Lead gen is about getting people into your business. My Inner Circle members crush it here because I'm constantly telling them to focus on what? Multiple marketing strategy. Say it with me, multiple marketing strategies. [08:04.0]
What ends up happening here is, in the real world, they might have something like this. They might have 300 people visit their website each month, 100 people subscribe to their email list each month, 250 people view their LinkedIn profile each month. They might have multiple thousands of people viewing their ads each month. They might have meetings with clients each month. That opens the door to referrals. They might have an event or a seminar or a webinar once a month. I could keep going, but you get the point. They have multiple things working for them and multiple sources of leads into their businesses. I didn't even mention direct mail or any of the other cool marketing strategies that I have up my sleeve.
I also want to point out, you might call this by another name. You might call it list building. How many people do you have on your list right now? Is that number growing? Is it growing the right way? Meaning, you're getting more qualified people onto your list, not just people for people’s sake. Your list growth should not be “Oh, number go up.” It should be “I'm extracting more money from this list.” It is not just “Hey, I have a bigger list for a bigger list’s sake.” [09:08.5]
I actually have an entire video training about this called “How Financial Advisors Can Build Bigger and Better Lists.” I think it's one of the most underrated things that I have and I don't talk about it as much as I should. I really should promote it a little bit more. You can check it out over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/lists. It has more than two and a half hours of video content of me walking you through exactly which list you should have and how you should think about them. That's super important as well. Even if you have lists, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're thinking about them the right way. Once again, that is TheAdvisorCoach.com/lists. That's plural, L-I-S-T-S. It could be the most valuable thing you do all year.
Again, hyper-growth firms are twice as likely to rank lead generation as most important to firm growth. That is not my opinion or my theory. That comes directly from Nitrogen. [10:00.0]
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 $1,000 worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren't available anywhere else. Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more.
The next thing I want to talk about—this is also from the survey. I'm going to back all this stuff up, like I said at the beginning—is just under a third, so 31% of hyper-growth firms spend more than 11 hours per week growing their firms, while almost two thirds of slow-growth firms, it's actually 61%, so 61% of slow-growth firms spend only one to two hours per week growing.
Let me say that again. I don't know if I was super clear. 31% of hyper-growth firms spend 11 hours per week or more growing their firms. 61% of slow-growth firms spend only one to two hours per week, trying to grow. [11:04.8]
Look, stuff takes time. There's no formula for overnight success. If there was, then I wouldn't have a business. I'm just being honest with you. A big part of my business is getting financial advisors to understand that good marketing is like building a wall, brick by brick. One of the reasons my Inner Circle Newsletter gets such incredible results for financial advisors is because a monthly newsletter is the perfect medium with which to grow this sort of business, this financial-advice business, because each month is like another brick being added to the wall.
Some people mistakenly believe that I want them to use everything in each newsletter issue, and that is absolutely not the case. It has never been the case, probably will never be the case. I don't want you to use everything because that will be overwhelming. What I want for you to do is to pick one thing, maybe two, and implement that one thing right away. Put one more brick into the wall, and over time, you will have a beautiful masterpiece. But it will not happen overnight. [12:04.3]
Also, money likes attention. Are you paying attention to your money? Are you paying attention to the things that bring in the money for your business? What I mean when I say that is if you only spend one hour per week on things that bring in the money, chances are you don't even know your basic metrics. You probably don't know how much cash you have in the bank right now. Can you tell me? Do you know it down to the penny? I can tell you. I can tell you the exact dollar amount that I have in my bank account right now. Can you tell me how many people visited your social media profiles? Do you know if that number is better or worse than last week or the week before, or the week before or the week before?
Advisors who spend more than 11 hours per week growing their firms simply have more time to focus on these numbers. Duh. They have more time to bump into their email list and see, Oh, my email list grew a lot more this week than last week. Did I do anything differently? Then, when they do a little bit of digging, they see something they did that worked really well, and they can do that again. That is where the magic happens. It happens in the digging. When you see things that worked well, you can do them again. [13:12.8]
It also helps you see things that didn't work. When you're spending 11 or more hours per week digging into your marketing, you can evaluate your behaviors. You can see things that did not pan out, and you can stop doing them. If you're only spending one or two hours per week trying to grow your firm, you're just simply not going to see as much. You don't have that much time to notice these things.
Eleven hours per week, assuming a five day workweek, is 2.2 hours per working day. That's honestly not that much. The average American spends more than that watching TV and the average American also spends more than that mindlessly scrolling social media, so don't tell me you don't have at least an extra hour or so per day that you can put toward growing your business. If we assume that you do a little bit every single day, all seven days of the week, it is roughly 90 minutes per day to get your 11 hours per weekend. Can you do 90 minutes? [14:03.2]
The third thing I want to share is that hyper-growth firms consistently placed greater emphasis on communications and networking activities, including marketing, social media, referrals, events, and client feedback. I've been talking about this stuff for years. It's wild to me that financial advisors and other people will push back on this despite it being proven again and again and again. Marketing is communication. It's all about how you communicate your message to the world.
The financial-advice industry is a relationship business. Building relationships is largely about networking, so why is it so difficult to believe that advisors who focus on communicating well—ahem, marketing—and networking—ahem, relationship building—are more successful? Most of the on this podcast are about financial-advisor marketing, so I won't spend too much time on the ideas of marketing here, but if you want to learn about communicating your message and marketing well, you literally have hundreds of other episodes at your fingertips. [15:05.4]
The fourth thing is that hyper-growth firms invest more aggressively in their marketing. 40% of hyper-growth firms report spending more than 6% of gross revenue on marketing annually, and it bugs the heck out of me when financial advisors ask what percentage of their revenue they should spend on marketing, because if you think in terms of a marketing budget, then you have the wrong mindset, because if you are investing in marketing strategies that aren't working, then you are wasting your money, and that is irresponsible. If you're investing in marketing strategies that are working and you're artificially capping it, you're putting a limit on it, then you're costing yourself money. Both of these are terrible business behaviors.
But if you're someone out there who can't help but want to compare yourself to everyone else and you absolutely must have a number, then the number is 6%, at least 6% of your gross revenue on marketing per year. That's what hyper-growth financial advisors do. I would caution against that, though. I wouldn't want you to artificially limit yourself. [16:10.1]
Let's bring it back to the King archetype. What king says, “I want to limit my kingdom’s success”? What father or father figure says, “I only want my children to grow by a set percentage each year and no more”? That's goofy. You should figure out what marketing strategies are profitable for you and you should run those things until the wheels fall off.
I want you to imagine that your clients think this way about investing. Let's say that you have a client who earns $100,000 per year after taxes and invests 10%, so that's $10,000, so your client lives happily on the other $90,000. Now, let's say that client doubled his income to $200,000 and said to himself, “Okay, I'm still only going to invest 10%,” which is $20,000 now. That means there's $180,000 left over that the client has available to spend on lifestyle creep and all of this other stuff that comes with it. [17:08.5]
Do you really think that's a smart decision? Of course not. You would tell that client he should probably invest more than 10%, and the same thing applies to marketing. Why would you artificially limit yourself? I also bring this up because many advisors are afraid to invest money into their marketing. Heck, there are grown men and women out there who legitimately give financial advice for a living and they're listening to this podcast right now, and they can't invest $99 per month into themselves and something like the Inner Circle Newsletter.
Think about it, these people wake up every single morning, look in the mirror and think to themselves, All right, time to go out there into the world and ask people to give me thousands of dollars for my advice, when they know darn well they can't even cough up roughly $3.26 per day to invest in themselves, and it's ridiculous. [17:56.6]
Another study, I'm going to pivot from the Nitrogen study to this one from Broadridge. It was called Driving Client Acquisition. They use the term “growth-focused advisor” and they’ve defined it as spending $5,000 or more on marketing each year. 43% of growth-focused advisors successfully acquired 20 or more clients in the previous year, whereas only 16% of other advisors onboarded at that rate. The bottom line is that growth-focused advisors who spent money on marketing got a lot more clients. Whoa, what a revelation.
If you want a number, another number, there is another number for you. They spend at least $5,000 per year on marketing. To be fair, that's only $416 per month, and I have to be honest with you, I think that is still pitifully low. I guess it depends on how much you want to build, how much you want to earn, how much you want to grow.
If you want to earn a few hundred thousand bucks per year and be the coolest guy in your little small pond, the more power to you. There's nothing wrong with that. There are so many financial advisors that I help that just want to earn $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000 per year and just live their life and have a lifestyle business. I get that. That is very admirable. I respect it. If that's the case, then keep investing the $416 per month and grow your business slowly and steadily and that's awesome. [19:13.8]
Let's move on to the fifth and final thing that high-growth financial advisors do differently backed by research. This is also from the Broadridge study. They found that the top four channels in terms of marketing investment were—are you paying attention? Here they are—website, in-person events, social media, and a CRM. Maybe they know something you don't know. Hmm . . .
How much are you investing in your website? I think your website is one of the best employees you have. It never gets sick. It never takes a day off. It never gives you an attitude. It is constantly working to introduce you to visitors and build relationships with people. Sadly, most financial advisors have terrible websites. Even if they look pretty, they're typically not designed to convert. People land on them, scroll a little bit and then they bounce. I know this because I've done hundreds of website reviews for financial advisors. [20:08.1]
I’ve created something called The Client-Getting Website because I wanted to help financial advisors focus on response, aka getting people to do things, not just say, “Oh, wow, that's a really pretty website,” and leave. There are tons of books, videos and services out there that will help you make a website look good, but they don't give you much detail about how to turn a visitor into a client, how to get a response. That's my specialty.
My approach is not about web design. It is not about fancy widgets. It is not about tools and gadgets. It's about the psychology behind what causes a website visitor to convert into a booked appointment and/or a paying client. One of the keys to making your website convert is to give people what they want.
For example, did you know that more than half of millennials say they're likely to work with a financial advisor because they're concerned about not being on track to meet their financial goals? Maybe your website could talk about alleviating that concern. [21:03.6]
Also, a huge chunk of people say they are likely to work with an advisor to reduce their financial stress, which means that maybe, just maybe, if you talked about how your process reduces financial stress, you could get more clients. This isn't complicated stuff, but it is effective—and if you would like my help and making your website better, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/website.
That is all I have for you this week. I will catch you in next week's episode where I'll discuss a simple formula financial advisors can use to get more clients. I'll catch you next week.
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