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: I want to start this podcast episode with a funny story that happened to me recently.
I had an advisor lead-gen marketer join my inner circle. You know the type of person here. You've probably seen a bunch of these people online. They pop up like weeds. One goes away, ten pop up. They're everywhere. At this point, I think there are more lead-gen financial advisor, “generate leads” whatever people than there are actual financial advisors and they all promise a gazillion appointments every month or you don't pay. Yeah, one of those. [01:02.8]
He canceled shortly after subscribing. These sorts of people always do. They just want to see what I do and why it's so different and so much better than what they do. That's why, when he canceled, this was my response, and I quote. I'm reading this verbatim to you. “LOL. OK, go generate some more of your little leads. Thanks for learning from the King of Financial Advisor Marketing for a month.”
It's funny, because I think these types of people have to be some of the biggest losers on the planet. What's the opposite of an independent thinker? A conformist maybe, a follower? Whatever it is, I can't imagine being so much of that as a marketer that I would go through another marketer’s materials in the same industry, especially not a paid newsletter. It's just weird to me.
I know I'm in the minority here. I know that my opinion is not shared by many other people. I get that, but I figure if you're going to become an Inner Circle member, maybe you could at least ask me a few questions about how to grow your business, or at least how to market to financial advisors. Hello. [02:07.2]
This guy could have been like, James, what are your most successful marketing campaigns? and I would have told him, but these sorts of people don't think like that. They probably don't even think at all. They just want to swipe and funnel-hack and see why advisors get such better results with me.
Here's what's even funnier. If this guy was actually any good at what he did, he could have attended the monthly office hours. He could have talked to the financial advisors in attendance about how he could help them. I'm all about helping my Inner Circle members, about elevating them, about taking them to the next level. If he was actually good at what he did, I would have wanted [him to]. I want to shine the spotlight on people who are good. If he was good at generating leads for advisors, I would have put him front and center and said, “Financial advisors, give this person some money so he can make more money for you.” That's what we do. That's what the community is all about. But he didn't. He funnel-hacked his way out of what could have literally been millions of dollars for his business. Dumb, dumb alert. Dumb, dumb alert. [03:01.5]
I'm sharing this as a warning for financial advisors. Be extremely careful when dealing with lead-generation companies or anyone promising to generate leads for you. Nearly all of them suck. They just do and the only reason I say nearly all of them is because I'm an optimist and I want to believe that there are some good ones out there. I just haven't seen any. I haven't met any. If you know of one, please let me know, make an introduction, because I'm constantly looking to help financial advisors. If there's actually a good one out there, then I want to make that available to my Inner Circle members.
Also, keep in mind that many marketers in the financial advice industry are really selling Pollard lite. I seldom name and shame, and I'm not going to do that here either, but the cold hard truth is this: if someone is helping financial advisors with their marketing, chances are that person is either an Inner Circle member or has been a member in the past, and I have the literal receipts to prove it. You know how people say they have the receipts? I have real receipts and I can show them. [04:02.7]
You'd also be surprised how many of these people out here promising to get you a bunch of clients and make more money and all that stuff, they have their credit cards declined for a $99 purchase, heck, for a $20 purchase. I see it. I see it in my payment processor that these people get their cards declined for such a small amount. How in the world do you expect a brokie to tell you how to grow your business? Come on now. Let me stop before I get myself in trouble again. All I'm saying is, be careful, financial advisors.
OK, let's get into the topic of this show, the secret ingredient many financial advisors are missing from their marketing, because a lot of financial advisors have all the right things. They check a lot of the right boxes. They have a niche market. They have good marketing assets. They have good goals. They have a whole bunch going for them. But the one thing they don't have is time, patience. That's the secret ingredient. [04:52.1]
I say this all the time, but a lot of business success for financial advisors comes down to thinking like a financial advisor. And what do financial advisors tell their clients? Be patient. Invest early and often. Wait for compounding. Yet what do unsuccessful financial advisors do? They want success right now. They don't want to invest early and often. They don't want to invest regularly. They don't want to wait for compounding. They don't want to do any of that stuff. They want to skip all of it. But they can't. It takes time.
Warren Buffett once said that you can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. That's a funny quote, but it illustrates a powerful principle. Some processes can't be rushed, no matter how many resources or shortcuts you try to apply.
Let me give you a different example. Let's say that someone wants to become a bodybuilder and studies all the greats. You know these names. You know Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know Jay Cutler. You know Ronnie Coleman, all those guys. He finds out that they all worked out, let's say, four hours a day, so he thinks to himself, Gee, that means if I work out for 12 hours per day, I can get there three times faster. Nope, doesn't work that way. Again, some things take time. [06:07.2]
What if you're baking a cake? The recipe might say it takes 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Does that mean you can get your cake in 15 minutes, if you can somehow triple the temperature, if you can get your oven to over 1,000 degrees? No, of course not. The only thing you'd have is smoldering, burnt goo that is just the most unappetizing mess. You wouldn't have a delicious cake.
This makes me think of Jim Rohn. I love listening to Jim Rohn. I listen to all of the recordings I have from him at least once per year, usually in December, but I'm listening to them a little earlier this year, and I'm at the part in one of his programs where he talks about life having seasons. That's a powerful metaphor and it shows up in a lot of areas, and especially in marketing. Each season represents a different phase in the cycle of growth in a business, in your life, in everything, right? But this is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, so I'll tie it back to financial advisor marketing. [07:03.8]
Spring is the time of what? New beginnings. It's where you're planting seeds. For a financial advisor, this could mean starting new marketing campaigns, reaching out to new prospects, building their brands, creating content, just getting started. This is a time of optimism. Just like planting seeds in the spring, you won't see immediate results, but you need to put in effort and you need to trust the process. You cannot have a harvest unless you plant the seeds.
Let's say that it's the first day of spring. Can you somehow fast-forward to the harvest season? No, you have to wait it out. You have no option, no choice. It must be this way. You'd be a fool to try to fight the seasons. Summer is when the seeds you planted start to grow, but they need consistent care. You're not done yet. You have to keep going. In this phase, you're getting more leads. You're building more relationships. You're building relationships with the leads that you have. You're demonstrating your value to the leads you have, your prospective clients. [08:00.8]
It's not just enough to have leads, to have people in your funnel. You need to cultivate them. Hmm, that's a funny word, I wonder where that came from. Maybe marketing is a lot like farming and you're cultivating these relationships through follow-up, by letting them know that you're the real deal. You're building trust. That is what happens in the summer.
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
Fall comes after summer, right? That's where everyone wants to be. They want to have the leggings and pumpkin spice of marketing, but you have to earn that pumpkin spice. You can't just waltz in and grab it without putting in the work. Pumpkin spice is for winners.
Fall is when you begin to see the results of all the work that you put in during the spring and summer. This is when prospects turn into clients. You start to get referrals because you built the trust. You are reaping the rewards. “Reaping,” there's another funny word about farming and cultivating, and being someone who is reaping the rewards, the harvest of the hard work that you put in. That is what happens in the fall. [09:56.8]
Winter is when you service your clients. It's the time for reflection. You can assess what went well, what didn't. You can plan and you should plan for next spring. You can think about what you're going to improve. Lots of people don't like winter, but winter is necessary. You cannot change it. It is just the way it is.
I'll give you a specific marketing example. I do a lot with email marketing, and while it is possible, it's unlikely that someone will set an appointment with you after receiving the first email in a sequence, because think about it—when someone subscribes to your email list, that person already knows you're a financial advisor, but chances are that person has not set an appointment. Duh, seems obvious, right? Your job is to get rid of the reasons why that person hasn't set an appointment and that happens through follow-up. My recommendation is one email per day, automatically. Each email builds a little bit more trust, and before you know it, the recipient will be far more likely to set an appointment with you. That takes time. [10:55.7]
Also, let's say that you don't have any credibility whatsoever. You don't have a lot of experience. You don't have certifications. You haven't been featured anywhere. Basically, you have no compelling reasons why someone should trust you enough to hire you as his or her financial advisor. Can you just snap your fingers and have those reasons pop into existence? No. You have to build them. You have to put in the work. If you don't have any credibility, it is springtime for you. Get to planting. Then you can continue working your crops in the summer, and then, eventually, you will harvest in the fall. You have to go through the process.
Another reason you have to respect time as the secret ingredient as part of your marketing equation is because you cannot control when people are ready to hire a financial advisor. You can do everything right, but if your prospective client isn't ready to make a decision, there's nothing you can do to force it. That's why consistency in your marketing is key. You have to stay top of mind so that when your prospective clients are ready, you're the first person they think of. This is part of the process, and it's where patience really pays off. [12:05.3]
Not to go off on a tangent here, but that's why, one of the many reasons why I love LinkedIn so much, because when they're ready, you're already in their social media feed. That's also why I love email marketing so much, because, again, when they're ready, you are showing up in their inbox. You will have been skating where the puck will be instead of where it has been. Lots of advisors skate to where the puck has been.
Also, lots of advisors get frustrated because they want instant results. They think if they send out one campaign, run one ad, or post a few social media updates, they should see immediate returns. But that's not how marketing works. You have to give it time. It's like Jim Rohn said, just to go back to Jim Rohn, “You cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself.” In other words, you can't rush the process, but you can make sure that you are putting in the right effort at each stage to ensure your marketing blooms when the time is right for you. You can change yourself. You cannot change the seasons. [13:00.5]
This is a long-term approach. That's why a lot of people don't like it. A lot of people will tune out this podcast. They'll say, “No, no, I want the quick, easy, magic button to make money rain down from this guy.” That's goofy. This is what you have to do and I know that can be uncomfortable. You might not see results immediately. Actually, you probably will not see results immediately.
That's where many advisors lose heart. They pull back on their marketing efforts just at the precise moment when they should be doubling down. It's like they get excited about the planting that they did in the spring and get disheartened right before the seeds start growing. But if you understand the seasons, you'll know that your hard work will pay off as long as you're doing the right thing, as long as you stay consistent. You have to plant the right thing, too. You cannot plant corn and then get upset that you wanted soybeans. No, if you plant corn, you get corn. You have to make sure you're planting the right thing, just throwing that in there. It's like a disclaimer, kind of. [13:58.2]
I feel bad for the advisors who start putting in the work only to get discouraged and give up, because then it means they'll never see results from their hard work. There's an old story about being three feet from gold and a lot of financial advisors have been in that position. Even with stuff like online advertising, they don't realize that most campaigns simply do not work. That's the way it is. It's extremely rare to start a campaign and have it be a winner right off the bat.
I'm reading a book right now about old direct-mail winners. It has 71 controls in it. These are campaigns and pieces that have been winning and winning and winning and winning. These are called controls in the marketing world. Everybody tries to beat the control. This book has 71 of these in there. I would be willing to bet a ton of money that none of them happened during the first iteration. They had to test and test and test, and pretty much the entire book is like, We tested this thing and then we tested this and this, and then we finally had a winner, and then it started to fatigue a little bit, so we had to test some more. [15:05.2]
They're always trying new things. They're always improving, especially because the winners won't last forever anyway. When it's summer, you need to think about the winter, because winter is coming. When it's harvest season, harvest season will not last forever. You have to keep going.
That's one of the reasons why I love doing the office hours every month for Inner Circle members, because we can get together, we can hang out in the very same Zoom room. Think about how cool this is, our financial advisors who have been crushing it for a decade or more, as well as advisors who are at the beginning of their marketing journeys, and they both get to learn from each other, because the people with experience can say, “This worked for me. This did not work. I can help you shorten your learning curve. I can help you not make the same mistakes that I did.”
The newer advisors, even though I don't have that many newer advisors in the Inner Circle, simply because it's more of a commitment, but the newer advisors bring a lot to the table, too, because they have a fresh perspective. They have fresh eyes. They can see things that the experienced financial advisors can't necessarily see because they're too close to their businesses. That fresh perspective is incredibly valuable, too. [16:06.3]
In the past few meetings, I've been doing a lot of talking. I've been answering a lot of questions, and that's fine, I love to do that, but I also love learning from other people. I want to do a better job of getting the successful advisors, who I know are there because I see them in the room, to speak up more and share from their wealth of experience to help the entire community.
Oh, and speaking of the Inner Circle Newsletter, the price will be increasing to $199 per month on January 1, 2025. All subscribers prior to that point will be grandfathered in, meaning, if you're subscribed before that date, you will continue to pay only $99 per month. You'll pay that in January 2025, February 2025, March 2025, and April 2025. You will continue to pay $99 per month, while the new subscribers, everyone who comes in after January 1, 2025, will pay $199 per month. [17:01.8]
I figure keeping the price the same for existing subscribers is the least I can do to say thank you for taking a chance on the community and investing in yourself. If you want to check it out, then you can visit TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. Either way, I'll catch you next week. [17:17.4]
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