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: Let’s start this podcast off with a little story about two big mistakes you should avoid in business if you want to attract and retain more clients. The marketing world only has a handful of A-players, people who are dominant at what they do and have been dominating for years, and when you're in that category, you realize that everybody knows everybody else. It's kind of like marketing is a little small town. Maybe not directly, maybe they don't have the person's phone number or anything like that, but we're all connected in some way, shape or form. [01:02.3]
One such player in the marketing world is a guy named Stan. That's not his real name, but I want to protect his privacy, so we'll just call him Stan. Stan is a marketing legend. He has seemingly done it all from online advertising to organic marketing and more, and everything in between, this guy has done it. I have a ton of respect for Stan. I've learned a lot from him over the years, not necessarily anything marketing-related, but more or less the way he conducts himself and operates his business. I actually consider him a better business person than a marketer, but I don't want to get off topic. He's known as a marketer.
Anyway, two years ago, or about two years ago, Stan decided to launch a monthly membership and he charged $97 per month for people to learn marketing from him, and I thought that was pretty cool, figuring I have a monthly membership of my own. It’s the James Pollard Inner Circle. About a year after he launched, he crossed the 1,000-member mark, which is awesome, and I think he eventually reached more than 1,200 members, which is honestly incredible. I was so proud of him. But today he has fewer than 600 members. That's really, really bad. So, what the heck happened? [02:12.8]
I think he made two mistakes, or at least two. Mistake number one is, I think he severely underestimated how hard it is to run any sort of monthly membership or newsletter business. Legendary marketer Gary Halbert, who I consider and in my opinion is the best marketer of all time—lots of people might disagree and have their own Mount Rushmore. He is definitely on a lot of people's Mount Rushmore—so, Gary Halbert put it this way. “If you are thinking about going into the newsletter business, you should know that is ‘the’ most difficult form of information you can sell,” and he's right. It is incredibly difficult.
The reason it's so excruciatingly hard is you can't just sell next month's issue. You have to sell the issue coming three months from now, three years from now, and so on. You have to sell people on the idea of issues that you haven't even written yet. That is hard. [03:04.3]
Your subscribers, if you have a newsletter or a membership, they continually hold your feet to the fire every single month, making sure you deliver the goods or they will leave. I could make a lot more money by packaging up the information I share in my newsletter issues and selling it for a few thousand bucks in a course or a program or something. That would be fast, easy money for me. Yet I don't want to do that.
Why? In that very same seminar where I just quoted Gary Halbert, Gary also said, and I quote, “The people who buy newsletters are the most intelligent and dedicated and real players in the world. The reason the other people don't buy it is they don't understand that success is a process and not an event, and they want the miracle answer right now, and that's not what you get with the newsletter. They don't want it parceled out month after month. They want one $10 book that tells you where to find the magic genie and what spot on his belly to rub to make the money rain out of the sky.” [04:03.6]
That's been my exact experience. Financial advisors who subscribe to the James Pollard Inner Circle are far more intelligent, far more dedicated than advisors who don't. I know this to be true because I hang out with them during my monthly office hours every single month.
Here's mistake number two. We’re back to Stan. Stan never chose a niche. Since Stan is such a good marketer, he believed he could hang out his shingle and teach marketing to everyone. Ah, if only it were that easy. But the truth is that different industries have different nuances and idiosyncrasies that demand specialized knowledge. Medical professionals have their regulations. Lawyers have their state bar requirements. Accountants have their tax codes, and financial advisors have compliance and all sorts of constraints and unique marketing hurdles, and the list goes on.
Stan launched his membership with the idea that his marketing principles would work for everyone, and he wasn't necessarily wrong about that. Marketing fundamentals and principles do work across the board. However, if you're trying to serve a broad audience, you need to speak their unique language. Even small differences can mean big problems. [05:13.0]
For example, if Stan wanted to teach direct mail to chiropractors, that's different from teaching it to ecommerce brands, or if you wanted to show financial advisors how to do online lead gen, that's different from showing a personal trainer. It's not just about the tactics. It's about how the tactics are applied within that specific realm. When you try to be all things to all people, you quickly become nobody to everybody. That's why I've always been so focused on financial advisors.
People ask me every so often, “James, why don't you teach marketing to someone else, like dentists or insurance agents, or real estate agents or whoever else?” Because that's not my lane. I'd rather be the go-to person for financial advisors who want better marketing than the “sort of okay at everything” person with a bunch of random generalities that anyone could find with a Google search. My newsletter content, my office hours, my emails, they're all designed specifically for the challenges financial advisors face. I don't water it down for the masses, and people like my Inner Circle members love that. [06:12.5]
Getting back to Stan, he lost over half his business in a year, and these two mistakes—underestimating the difficulty of month-to-month value delivery and not choosing a niche—have cost him dearly. He learned a painful lesson. Fortunately, you don't have to, because I'm going to share a few lessons with you and explain how you can use these lessons to strengthen your business as a financial advisor.
First, client retention is key. Yes, this is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. Yes, I specialize in getting financial advisors more clients. But I'm also a business person and I realize that it's goofy to try to fill up a leaky bucket. If you're having any sort of client-retention problems in your business, you need to fix those before you scale up your marketing. The good news is that client retention tends to be fairly high for financial advisors compared to other industries, because the financial advice industry is relatively sticky and it also has high switching cost, meaning, it's painful for clients to leave. [07:08.7]
Depending on the study you read, the annual retention rate is about 95% for financial advisors. It's lower for advisors who serve lower income and lower net-worth clients. It's higher, slightly higher, for financial advisors who serve higher income and higher net-worth clients. I think the reason is that financial advisors who serve a bunch of smaller clients stretch themselves so thin, whereas the financial advisors who focus on larger clients, the larger clients get a better client experience and more service, so that kind of makes sense. It makes sense when you look at the data, too, because the number one reason clients leave their financial advisors is poor communication. If your actual business structure can't support regular communication, then that's something you should fix first. Otherwise, you're just trying to fill a leaky bucket. [07:56.6]
I would actually go above and beyond regular communication. I really don't like the term value-add, but I think it describes what I'm trying to tell you here. I would think in terms of monthly or quarterly value-adds, like special webinars or emails or newsletters, or something that you can do to deliver ongoing value to your clients lives or at least let them know you're providing value on an ongoing basis. But just remember, value is in the eye of the beholder, and it's up to you to figure out what your clients value and what they don't value.
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.
I think the second lesson you can learn from Stan is that you can and probably should charge more. But again, it all goes back to structure. If you want to charge premium prices, more often than not, you have to provide premium service, or you at least have to be a specialist. Stan was charging $97 a month for his membership site, which isn't terribly expensive. [09:49.7]
One of the issues that comes from charging a low price is that you inevitably attract low-quality clients and you need a lot of them to make decent money. In his case, he needed 1,031 customers to make $100,000 per month in revenue, and when you have that many customers, you inevitably have a ton of support tickets and things to deal with. But if he doubled his price to $200 per month, he would only need 500 customers to make the same amount of revenue. This is a win-win-win, because he can make more money with fewer customers, and those customers will almost certainly be players with money, which I talked about in last week's episode, which means they will be higher quality and better to deal with, and they will get better results. Actually, I think it's a win-win-win-win.
This has huge carryover to financial advisors, because when you're one of the few advisors who truly understand a niche’s unique challenges, you become the go-to person and you can charge premium fees. I actually did an entire newsletter issue about raising your prices, raising your fees, back in December, and people told me it was life-changing for them. [10:56.0]
It was actually something I didn't mention in that newsletter issue because it didn't occur to me at the time. Just being honest with you, I didn't think about it—but charging higher prices leads to better referrals, because when your clients see you as the premium service provider, like the best in the business at a certain thing, they'll enthusiastically recommend you to people just like them.
On the flip side, if you're viewed as a generic one-size-fits-all advisor, your clients will be less certain about whether you can truly help someone else, and anecdotally, I can confirm this is true, too, because I've noticed that Inner Circle members who charge more and have niches tend to get more referrals. It's just another example of the rich getting richer, I suppose. Don't ask me for any specific data or anything like that, because I don't have it. I just noticed it through the advisors I help. I notice when they tell me, when they email me, when they talk to me in the office hours. I noticed that the ones who have niches and the ones who charge more tend to get more referrals.
Another lesson that carries over for financial advisors is this—if you're going to promise ongoing value, commit to providing it. This applies to building your business. It applies to marketing. It applies to everything in between. For example, if you're interested in doing content marketing, commit to it. Don't just do it for one or two months and give up. Stick to it. [12:14.0]
I recently read this story about Thomas Carlyle. He was a philosopher who wrote this huge book about the French Revolution. He spent a ton of time and effort writing it. This was hundreds of years ago. He toiled away. He poured every ounce of scholarly energy into this massive project and, finally, he finished his manuscript, his only manuscript, mind you, and he gave it to his friend, another philosopher named John Stuart Mill. I guess philosophers all know each other, kind of like good marketers do. It must have that small town vibe.
Anyway, Mill read the manuscript and left it in his home, where it was thrown in the fire by a careless maid. In the blink of an eye, Thomas Carlyle's countless hours of research, writing and revision literally went up in smoke. Can you imagine? Oh, my heart hurts just thinking about it. All that work gone. There were no digital backups back then, no copies, no fancy iCloud storage or Dropbox. Just ashes in the fireplace. [13:16.8]
Most people would have taken this devastating loss as a sign from the universe to find a new hobby, to do something else, but not Carlyle, instead of surrendering to grief and self-pity, Carlyle rolled up his sleeves, picked up his pen and started over. I know that pen had to feel heavy. That had to be a 500-pound pen, knowing you just lost everything. But he picked it up and he rewrote the entire thing from memory and his scattered research notes. That is dedication. That's the kind of relentless commitment you need if you're going to offer real, ongoing value to your clients.
Obviously, you're probably not going to have someone throw your entire marketing plan into the fireplace, but there will be unexpected setbacks. You'll have days, maybe even weeks or months, where you get so busy, it feels impossible to keep creating content or delivering that extra something, but if you want to cement yourself as the go-to advisor in your market, you have to stay the course. You have to take your own advice. [14:13.7]
You know how you tell your clients, “Stay the course. Stay the course”? You have to do that, too, because that's what your clients want—consistency. They want to see that you're there for them, month after month, year after year, good economy or bad economy, no matter what. Showing up consistently builds trust. It fosters loyalty and it elevates you above all of the mediocre advisors who quit. They give up and you just stand head and shoulders above the rest when you do that.
Here's one of the most powerful insights I've ever learned about trust, because the financial advisor marketing ecosystem or industry or sphere really can be boiled down to trust. Not all of it, but a lot of it can be boiled down to trust, and trust is built through consistent action, not one-off events, because trust has a lot to do with reliability and consistency and repeatability, like in the firearms world. [15:02.8]
When people are looking for an everyday carry firearm, something that is going to protect themselves and protect their family and when they're out and about in the world, they want to have something that will be an equalizer. They want something that is reliable. They want something consistent and they will 500 rounds through it to make sure that they can—here's the key word—trust their lives with it. Trust that's both through consistency, repeatability, and so on, so it’s the same everywhere.
This means, if you're going to be an advisor who hosts a client webinar each quarter to review economic trends or whatever, do it every single quarter. If you're going to promise your niche market emails or newsletters, send it out on a regular basis. Don't skip one because you're busy or you don't feel like it. It is your job to figure out how to make it happen. Build out processes. Set reminders. Batch your content, whatever it takes. [15:59.3]
There's nothing sexy about consistency, but it's what the top 1% of financial advisors do to remain in the top 1%—and in the event something happens, like the modern-day version of your entire marketing plan getting thrown in the fire, have the resilience to start over and do it again.
The advice I would give for Stan is to try again. Keep going. Don't give up. No excuses, because if you said you’d deliver something, people are going to hold you to it. Just like Stan's members held him accountable for new marketing lessons and new materials, your clients are going to hold you accountable, too. They want you to fulfill your promises. Your prospective clients, too, so people on LinkedIn, your email list, your direct mail list, when they go to your website. They're paying attention, too. Keep that in mind. [16:40.7]
Speaking of Stan, let's bring it back full circle. If you're a financial advisor with a recurring service, like AUM or monthly, however you charge, if your clients stick around, which the overwhelming majority of them should, you are essentially running a mini-membership in your business. Your clients are members, even if they don't use that language. They renew your services month after month, year after year, so you have to keep delivering at a high level. You can't treat them like an afterthought and you definitely shouldn't assume they'll stick around if they're not getting the value that you promised. [17:14.3]
So, niche down, because you need to specialize in your client's world so they see you as indispensable. Price with intention to charge what you're worth. Then deliver more than they expect and commit fully. If you say you're going to provide ongoing value, make it happen, no matter what. Just stick with it.
That's it for the day. I hope you avoid Stan's mistakes. I hope you apply these lessons to create a thriving business that keeps your clients for the long haul. Until next time, remember, don't just talk about success. Do the things that make it inevitable. If you want help applying these lessons directly to your financial advice business, stick around. I've got more episodes and more actionable ideas coming your way. Next week looks like I'm going to be ranting a lot. It's been a long time since I've done a rant-style episode, so if you're easily offended, you probably don't want to come back for next week.
So, stay disciplined, stay focused, and I will catch you, if you're not easily offended, next week. [18:07.6]
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