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: In this week's episode, I'm going to talk about a simple formula that financial advisors can use to get more clients. It will probably make a lot of you upset because one of the biggest criticisms I receive is that I keep things super simple and this will probably be the simplest formula you have ever encountered, so consider that your warning. If you're someone who seeks complex solutions because you believe you have complex problems, turn this episode off now. [00:58.2]
But first, I want to talk with you about one of my favorite psychological principles. It's called the endowment effect, and it describes how people assign higher values to items they own compared to identical items they do not own. Long story short, the feeling of ownership correlates with how much someone pays for something.
Don't believe me? Okay, try this on for size. You probably feel as if you own your home more than you own a gallon of milk in your fridge. Why? Because you have put more money into your home. That increases the strength of the endowment effect. Ownership creates a psychological bond between the individual and the item. You have a bond with your home. You have more of a bond with your home than you have with a gallon of milk in the fridge.
Let's try it again. Let's say you paid cash for your car. You would likely feel as if you owned the car more than a pair of socks, even though you technically own both. You are the owner of both the car and your socks. However, you feel as if you own the car more because you paid more money for it. That is just how our brains work. [02:07.7]
What I'm telling you here is that people don't value what they get for free. Instead, they value what they pay for, and that's one of the reasons why I charge so much for something I call “The Big Book Of Business-Building Secrets” over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/big. I also charge so much because I'm limiting sales to only 3,000 copies. By charging so much, I have effectively made it my slowest-selling product.
That's a good thing because it ensures it will only go to financial advisors who truly want it. And upon seeing the price, some financial advisors will undoubtedly get sticker shock. That's done intentionally because I know that paying more for the material and putting more skin in the game will motivate you to use it. I am using the endowment effect here, because if you use the material, you'll be infinitely more likely to benefit from it and have it pay for itself. If you don't use it, you don't get the benefits from it. [03:01.8]
Now, I could be wrong, but I don't think I've ever talked about the Big Book on this podcast. One reason why is because I've been quietly revamping it and making it better. You see, the old version was 429 pages, I believe, and it was amazing. It received fantastic feedback from the financial advisors who purchased it. I loved it. It was a source of immense pride for me. But now, the new and improved version is a whopping 517 pages, so it truly is a big book and it makes a nice little thud sound when you put it on your desk.
It's a physical book that you can hold in your hands, so there is no digital component whatsoever. It gets shipped directly to your door and shipping is free no matter where you live unless you live in a war-torn country or someplace where I literally cannot ship to you. But assuming I can ship to you, shipping is free. If you want it and you want to check it out, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/big, B-I-G. [03:55.0]
Now let's get into that super-simple formula that can get financial advisors more clients. Are you ready for it? Here it is. The number of new clients you get as a financial advisor will always be how many people know about you multiplied by your conversion rate. That's it. You can never get a new client if nobody knows about you, and you can know every living person on Planet Earth, but you will never get a new client if your conversion rate is zero. Does that make sense? I hope it does. It is how many people know about you multiplied by your conversion rate.
That means everything you do in business to get new clients needs to come back to those numbers. You can get as granular as you want. In fact, I encourage you to get granular. I help Inner Circle members get granular. But these two numbers rule all. Let's walk through them together. How many people know about you? How many people have seen your name, your face and your business? Start thinking about all the different ways people interact with your business and they interact with you. [04:59.3]
How many profiles views are you getting on LinkedIn? How many impressions are your social media posts getting? How many website visitors are you getting? How many people are you networking with? How many people do you know in real life? How many people attend your seminars or your seminars, or your live events? How many people do you have in your friends group? How many people have received a direct mail piece from you?
Here's what I want you to get with all this. I want you to realize that all else being equal, getting this number up will lead to more clients. Of course, it will, right? I mean, it seems so obvious. Again, a number one criticism I receive and one of the most common criticisms is that it's too simple. “James, you talk about super simple stuff. Give me the real stuff.” I'm telling you, this is the real stuff. There is no easy button. There is no magic bullet or silver bullet, or whatever you want to call it, and you don't have to make this complicated. You can start where you are. That's the good thing, but most people aren't willing to do this, which is why most people don't get amazing results. [05:55.7]
You could sit down with a pen and paper right now and think through each of your marketing strategies. Let's say that you're trying to get more website traffic. Right at the top of the page, what are 20 things I can do to get more website traffic? I like doing this exercise. I do it all the time, because it's usually pretty challenging to think of 20 solutions to a problem, but even if you can only get 10 or even five, that's usually more than enough to get a running head start.
Then do it for your next marketing strategy. At the top of the paper, write, “What can I do to get more LinkedIn profile views?” and start writing. I can comment on more people's posts. I can view other people's profiles. I can message more people. I can optimize my profile to get found in more searches. I can post more frequently. I can create a company page and tag myself in company page posts. I just gave you six potential solutions—or at least I think it's six, it could be five or six—to help you with that specific strategy. All you have to do is implement in order to get the number to go up to get that part of the formula to improve. [06:56.8]
I talk about marketing on this podcast, and rightfully so because this is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, because the truth is you could be the best financial advisor in the world, you could be a technical expert, but it doesn't matter if nobody knows you. You have to get yourself out into the world. There is no other way around this, especially when you consider that most people either can't or won't do business with a financial advisor. There are some people out there who will still refuse to work with you, even when you’ve clearly demonstrated your value and they understand and they agree that you're valuable. It is wild, but they walk among us.
Now, the second part of this formula is your conversion rate. This requires a little bit more digging, because while it's true that you will have an average conversion rate across your entire business, it's a little misleading, because your conversion rate will likely vary quite a bit based on the source of the conversion. For example, people who are referred to you will probably convert at a higher rate than people who visit your LinkedIn profile after seeing you for the first time. [08:02.5]
Email marketing also converts fairly well, but that's because email marketing works in the background to build trust, credibility and rapport with the people on your email list. You have to look at the context. Email also usually converts more than financial advisors’ websites, especially because a good source of email subscribers is the website itself. So, of course, the email list will convert more, because it is just sending an email every single day to talk to people and build trust, credibility and rapport, and ask for the appointment, and it just goes so hard and does so much amazing work for financial advisors.
Let's just take a moment and break down the conversion rates from the strategies I just threw at you, just so you get an idea of what the conversion rate across the businesses and why that's a little bit misleading. This is what separates amateur marketers from professional marketers, because amateur marketers will just say, “Oh, your conversion rate is this,” and they'll help you run with that and it could be disastrous. The professional will look at each subset of your marketing and help you think about those subsets in isolation. [09:03.4]
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.
Let's say that 20% of all your referrals end up becoming clients. Now, you don't have to keep track of this. I'm just going to give you an example. Don't worry about trying to think about all these numbers. I'm just going to give these to you and I'm going to explain it, okay?
So, 20% of all referrals end up becoming clients. Let's say that your LinkedIn profile converts 1/10 of 1%, meaning, one out of every 1,000 people that view your profile, becomes a client. Let's say your email marketing conversion rate is 2%, so 2% of your email subscribers become clients, and let's say that your website converts at one half of 1%. I'm trying to be conservative here while also assuming that you're somewhat of a decent marketer. Your numbers will obviously vary for all of these. [10:09.3]
But let's add them up—20% for the referrals, plus 1/10 of 1% (0.1%) for the LinkedIn profile, plus 2% for the email, plus one half of 1% (0.5%) for the website is 22.6, and 22.6 divided by four, because I just gave you those four strategies, means your average conversion rate across your entire business is 5.65%. The problem here is that you can't run your business based on that number, because you need to weigh them accordingly.
Even though it's true that your average conversion rate across your entire business is 5.65%, in the real world, you might only get two referrals a month and your website might get 2,000 visitors, so you also need to think about how much effort it will take to improve your conversion rates. Can you feasibly get your referral conversion rate from 20% to 40%? Can you double it? Yeah, I guess you could, but it would take a lot of work and maybe a lot of time, and even then you would only go from two referrals a month to four. Maybe you're doubling it, okay, for just two more referrals or two more clients from referrals. [11:16.0]
Could you double your website's conversion rate from 1/10 of 1% (0.1%) to 2/10 of 1% (0.2%)? Probably, and it would probably only involve changing the language or the structure of the website. It would be a heck of a lot easier. I talk about this in my video program “The Client-Getting Website” over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website.
I explain that the secret sauce a lot of financial advisor websites are missing is that they do not do a good job on their “Home”, “About Us” and “Contact” pages. Those are some of the most, if not the most visited pages on a financial advisor’s website, so it is critical that you do a good job on them.
What's wild is that many financial advisors completely miss the fact that prospective clients are likely to bounce around between them, meaning, if someone gets to your homepage and is intrigued, that person will likely go to your “About Us” page to learn more about you and your business. So, why not structure your website with that in mind? [12:11.6]
It kills me when financial advisors don't do this because it's such an obvious win. Why not make that as natural and as seamless as possible? That's what I talked about in “The Client-Getting Website,” but I don't want to talk on and on about it. If you're interested, you can check it out at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website.
My point is that doubling your conversion rate is sometimes a lot easier with certain marketing strategies than others, and because I don't like working harder than necessary, I'm a big fan of going for the low-hanging fruit first. If your website is converting very little, then doubling that would probably be easy, so start with that.
In last week's episode, I talked about how many financial advisors are addicted to what is called the warrior archetype. That is so true. They're addicted to the process of grinding and hustling and working so hard. They unconsciously make things more difficult than needed because they want to continue being warriors. They want to just be the person that works so hard. I'm far beyond that. I am lazy. I would rather just get my results. [13:11.6]
Like I've said many times before on this show and in my emails, my bank doesn't deposit extra money for me just because I worked hard to get it. They also don't deduct money from me because it was easy for me to get. So, why not begin with the easy stuff?
The same is also true with getting in front of more people. It's wild to me, wild how many financial advisors will immediately think they need to make hundreds of cold calls that won't get them anywhere, join all of these groups and chapters and organizations, when they could literally just run ads. Now, I get it, not all financial advisors can run ads, I understand, but assuming they could run online ads, they should.
I had a guy the other day, I was talking to him about some things and he asked me, “James, how come I don't see you at any of the financial advisor conferences?” and, actually, there are a few answers to that. The first answer is that I have some stuff that kind of requires me to stay home for right now and I just strongly prefer doing that. [14:06.5]
The second answer is that a lot of these conferences are on the West Coast, which requires a five- or six-hour flight just to get there. That doesn't include time driving to the airport and sitting at the airport, having the TSA get all up in my butt because I'm too poor to fly privately. It also doesn't include travel to and from my hotel once I'm there. It might take me eight or more hours just to get there, then eight or more hours to get back to my house. Since I only work about four hours per day, that ends up being almost a full work week for me in lost time. That is a big price to pay.
The third answer is that, logistically, how many people can I possibly meet at a conference? Thirty? Fifty? A hundred? I'm sure there are wonderful people and I’d love to meet you, I'd love to shake your hands, give you a hug, get a picture with you, shout out. I would want a picture with some of the financial advisors. I'm not saying they will want pictures with me. I would want pictures with some of these amazing people. [14:58.8]
Let's say that I'm speaking and 100 people show up to see me speak. I could run an ad today from the comfort of my bed and reach 10 times that many people, especially when you consider travel costs. Why would I spend 1,000 bucks and travel costs to go speak somewhere with 100 people when I could spend the same 1,000 bucks to get in front of 10 times that many people, at least that, without ever traveling, without ever getting probed by a handsy TSA agent, and without ever risking getting my baggage lost by unscrupulous airline employees? Thank you so much for AirTag, Apple. I love that you made AirTags that can take an AirTag and I can drop it in my luggage and I can track that thing. I'm super OCD about that.
Now, of course, a smart man that I really respect, this guy, he told me, “James, that's how you build real relationships. People are more likely to do business with you if they can meet you face to face,” and that's true. That is a hundred percent true. But let's go back to our formula. What is the formula? How many people know you multiplied by your conversion rate? [15:59.2]
If I get in front of 100 people and 10 people say, “Wow, this jeans guy is so amazing. I must show him my appreciation by giving him some money,” then that is a 10% conversion rate. My front-end ads right now might convert at 2%. Some might be 1%, some might be 3%, but let's just say it averages 2%. If I show my ad to 1,000 people, 20 of them might give me money. That's much better, in my opinion, especially because I wouldn't even have to get out of bed. I could do stuff that I want to do. I could walk around the house. I could work. I could get other things done. I could talk with financial advisors over Zoom. I could do whatever.
If I fell victim to the warrior archetype, I would be addicted to the hustle. I would think that the long hours were just part of the game. I would post wheels up or something goofy online and have a whole bunch of other warriors pat me on the back for being such a grinder, like “You're a good little hustler.” But I'm not in the game for applause. I'm not in the game for other men I don't even know to think I'm cool. I'm the game so my family thinks I'm cool. I'm the game so my last name is cool. I'm the game so I can live my life to the fullest, and if you're not down with that, I've got two words for you: “See ya.” [17:10.0]
And on that note, this is an episode I want you to take seriously. I know I joke around a lot about different topics and things, and I get kind of goofy. I want you to think about how you can systematically and intentionally increase how many people are in your world, how many people know you, how many people see you, how many people you get in front of, and how you can convert more of them. I know this was a short episode, but it's very impactful. I hope you take it to heart, and I will catch you next week. [17:36.5]
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