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: Hey, welcome to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. If this is your first time listening, thank you so much. You are in an amazing spot. I have a ton of episodes for you to listen to. If you're coming back for the second time or the third time, or the 100th time or the 300th time, thank you so much for listening. As always, I'm your host, James Pollard, and today's episode is about something so fundamental that if you master it, you'll be virtually unstoppable, not just in your business, but in your life, too. [00:59.7]
It is not luck. It’s not connections. It’s not even intelligence. It's two things, actually—it's massive confidence and tremendous competence—and today I'm not just going to tell you what these are. I'm going to break them down. I'm going to give you some examples and stories, mistakes I've seen advisors make, and so on.
So, why these two? Why confidence and competence? Because confidence gets you in the game and competence keeps you there. Without confidence, without being sure of yourself and able to put yourself out into the marketplace, you don't show up, and without competence, the ability to actually do the thing that you say you're going to do, you can't stay. If you lack confidence, you hesitate. You miss opportunities. If you lack competence, you get exposed eventually. Think of it like this—confidence is the key that unlocks the door and competence is what happens when you walk through it, and it's a package deal. Both are needed if you're serious about success. [01:54.8]
I want to tell you about an advisor I worked with a few years ago. We'll call him Tom. That's not his real name, but we'll just say it is. Tom was brilliant. He had alphabet soup after his name, CFP, CFA, enrolled agent. You name it, he had it. He would explain the most complex financial strategies backwards and forwards. He was a wizard with planning. If you put Tom in front of another financial professional, he shined. If you ask him technical questions, he could go toe to toe to toe with anyone. The guy was a brainiac, seriously—but here was the thing, Tom couldn't get clients, and that's actually why he came to me. That's how I got to know Tom, because I'm the Financial Advisor Marketing guy.
He would second-guess everything he did. He would panic before doing something. He would start a marketing campaign and then backpedal. It wasn't a knowledge issue. I could provide him with the knowledge. I could tell him everything that he needed to do. I could say, “Tom, look, do this. Do this. Say this in your direct mail piece. Say this in your emails. Post this on LinkedIn. Do this.” It was a confidence issue. [02:53.5]
I remember one time he told me that he spent a whole bunch of time during his discovery meeting explaining a prospect’s situation and simulating the future, and showing all these charts and graphs, and he never once even asked the person if he wanted to move forward. So, you can probably guess what happened. The prospect just said, “Hey, thank you for your time. This is awesome. You've been very helpful,” all the niceties that prospects give, like, “This has been very wonderful, but I'm not really sure what to do,” and just walked out the door and that was it.
That's the curse of high competence with no confidence. You can know everything, but if you can't present yourself powerfully, if you can't give that oomph behind it, you lose. By the way, shameless plug—if you really want to learn how to do this well, how to have better discovery meetings, where you can present with confidence and competence, I actually have a two-and-a-half-hour video training called “How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings,” and you can check that out at TheAdvisorCoach.com/meetings. [03:56.7]
So, that's high competence, but low confidence. Let’s take a look at the other side. There's a different kind of advisor, and I know you've seen these guys out there, and these girls, too, they are full of confidence. They’re hot stuff, right? But they have no real substance.
I met this one advisor. Let's see, we're going to call him Jake. Not Jake from State Farm. It's a different kind of Jake. Jake was very smooth. He had charisma. He could talk your ear off. He made you feel like you were the most important person in the entire world for the five minutes he was talking to you. But he just didn't have the competence to back it up. He could have been great if he just put his nose down to the grindstone and learned his craft. He didn't have the skills to really go above and beyond for his clients and truly improve their lives.
Not to go off on a tangent here, but I've noticed this in the marketing world, too. One of the things that sets me apart from all the other marketing choices that financial advisors have, it's just this wellspring, this deep, huge library of knowledge that I have, not just in my head, because, I mean, I've forgotten more than most people have learned about marketing, but I have resources. [05:04.8]
I know people. I have access to the books and the courses in the programs. I have a literal archive in my house. It's my storage room, but I call it the Pollard Archives, and it's got stuff in there where, if a financial advisor in my Inner Circle asks me a question about something and I just know I have the answer somewhere, I can go into my archive and find it for him or her, and that is just something that cannot be it cannot be gained quickly. Yes, you can buy it, but you have to buy it. It's very expensive and it takes a long time to get it. It's just hard to get that competence. But once you have that competence, and you add confidence on top, then, again, like I said in the title, you are virtually unstoppable.
Jake had all this charisma. He had all this conviction, but underneath, I mean, to put it nicely, it was just fluff. His advice was generic. His marketing was sloppy. His business systems were nonexistent. People like Jake with a ton of confidence might start strong, but eventually, everything is going to fall apart, because while that confidence gets you attention, competence is what gets you paid. [06:07.2]
Okay, so you might be thinking, All right, James, I get it, I need both, but how do I actually build confidence? I like to spend a little bit more time on confidence, because a lot of financial advisors are competent, but here's the secret about confidence—it's built through action. I mean, you can't just sit around waiting to feel confident. You earn confidence by doing things, even when you're scared, even when you don't want to do them, and seeing that you survive, everything is okay, and in fact, stuff might work out very well for you.
Especially when it comes to marketing and sales, a lot of financial advisors were trained to analyze portfolios, but nobody ever taught them how to market or how to sell. Nobody taught them how to confidently ask, “Would you like to move forward with me? Would you like to set an appointment? Would you like to become a client?” Nobody taught them how to do that, and confidence skyrockets when you master these simple but crucial skills. [06:57.8]
Knowing how to run an effective discovery meeting, for example, knowing how to transition naturally into discussing next steps, knowing how to handle objections without turning defensive, all things that, again, I know shameless plug, I talk about in “How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings” over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/meetings.
Now, what about competence? I know I want to talk a little bit about confidence, but I'll go back to competence for a bit. Competence is all about mastering your craft. That's really what it is. It's committing to lifelong learning, not just technical knowledge, right, but also behavioral finance, also emotional intelligence, also leadership skills, and, yes, marketing, too, because this is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast.
Here's a quick tip. This is just something very simple that I think can apply to everyone, especially financial advisors. Every quarter, pick just one skill to go deep on. Maybe this quarter is about improving your discovery meetings. Next quarter, it could be about learning tax efficient withdrawal strategies. The quarter after that, it could be mastering client-communication techniques. Over time, these skills stack up and you become more competent. You become the advisor who actually knows what you're talking about, not just the advisor who sounds good. [08:08.3]
I don't want to keep flip-flopping, but I want to go back to confidence, okay, because I just think of so many things I want to share with you and I'm just so excited to help you. I'm like a little dachshund running around the room, right? One of the most common things with which financial advisors struggle is being confident in their pricing and what they charge in their fees.
You might have two equally competent financial advisors, both identical in experience, both technically solid, but one is charging twice as much for a comprehensive financial plan. The difference is the more confident advisors believe in the value. They own it. They present it without flinching. The unconfident advisors, on the other hand, dance around the topic. They overexplain. They hope that the prospective client doesn't push back. They hope the prospective client connects the dots and says, “Oh, wow, this is very good. I'm going to pay this. And, oh, why don't you pay more?” No one is going to come out and say, “You know what? I want to pay you three times more.” I guess maybe some people do. I've had some. I've actually had some financial advisors tell me that I should charge a lot more, but that's a story for another day. [09:12.0]
The lack of confidence in the pricing realm communicates a whole bunch, because here's the truth no one wants to say out loud—when you sound unsure about your pricing, your client becomes unsure about you. Now that I think about it, advisors aren't really afraid of pricing. They're afraid of the conversations that follow their pricing. They're afraid that prospects will raise an eyebrow and ask, “Why so much?” They're afraid that they'll have to start listing bullet points and rationalizing everything. They're afraid of the silence that follows a fee reveal.
And shameless plug again. I have a solution for that, financial advisors, and I call it “The Profitable Pricing Blueprint.” You can check that out at TheAdvisorCoach.com/pricing. I created it not just to help you raise your fees even though it does that. I also created it to give you the confidence to state your price clearly and shut up. [10:08.6]
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.
Let me tell you, one of the most powerful things a financial advisor can do is deliver a fee with confidence and then say nothing. No rambling, no over-justifying, no awkward chuckles, just “My fee is $6,000. Here's what that includes,” pause, wait for the response, because when you believe in your price, you allow your client to believe in you.
Actually, all that justification and stuff should have happened before the fee reveal. I mean, marketers know that. That's like Marketing 101. If you've ever attended a webinar where something is trying to be sold to you, the justification, at least the good marketers will justify before presenting the price.
Clients are always looking for signals and heuristics. I mean, heuristics help them make decisions. They're scanning for certainty. They're not looking for the cheapest advisors. They're looking for the right ones and how you talk about your fee is one of the first clues they get. If you sound unsure, if you try to ramble on after the fact, where you try to justify after, you sound defensive, then it's a signal that maybe you're not so confident in your own offer, and if you aren't confident, why should they be? [12:14.0]
So, what do we do instead? Inside that Profitable Pricing Blueprint, I break down the exact psychology behind confident pricing. I show you how to shift the conversation from “Why does this cost so much?” to “How soon can we get started?” I give you the exact phrases to use, literally, word for word. I just give you the phrases so your pricing can land smoothly and powerfully. Will it work every single time? No, nothing does. Nothing is guaranteed to work every single time, but the marketing stuff and the psychology stuff that I give you in all of my products and services are designed to increase the odds in your favor. [12:46.6]
I teach you, this is really cool, how to reposition your price as a form of reassurance—ooh, that's really high-level. That's advanced. I love it—because your fee can actually increase trust in your service, not increase resistance, because here's the bottom line: if your confidence in your fee increases by just 10%, your revenue can increase by 30%, 40%, or even 50%, without working a single extra hour. And guess what? The best clients respect you more when you do it this way, and you attract fewer tire kickers. Goodness, that's always nice, because the last thing we need is just more tire kickers.
Now I want to give you two scientifically-proven ways, this is really cool. Two scientifically proven ways to increase your confidence, so if you want to become more confident, this is what you can do. This is about the psychology of self-efficacy. There are two research-backed concepts I want to introduce to you today and both come from psychologist Albert Bandura, the godfather of self-efficacy theory.
The first is called mastery experiences and that's the number-one confidence builder you can have, doing stuff right. Bandura found that the strongest source of confidence is not wishful thinking. It's not “fake it till you make it,” but real psychological confidence is just successfully doing something and seeing it work. That's called “mastery experience.” [14:12.5]
So, how does it apply to pricing? If you're a financial advisor who wants to raise your fees, but you're nervous, maybe you worry about scaring clients away. Maybe you're unsure about how to justify your value. The best way to fix that isn't just to think positive thoughts. It isn't just to repeat affirmations and meditate and go crazy hog wild with all these mantras. It's to do it once and see that it works, and actually, this applies to marketing, too. So many financial advisors are like, Oh, I'm scared to do this. I'm scared to do that. I don't want to do this—just do stuff.
Get off your butt and do stuff. Do things once and see that they work, and then keep going, because the first time you confidently present your new fee and the client says, “Oh, sounds good,” that's a mastery experience, and it rewires you. It changes you, because now your brain has evidence. You're no longer guessing. You're no longer hoping. You have done it and it's worked. That becomes the foundation of your confidence moving forward. [15:10.7]
So, the question becomes, how can you create more mastery experiences, especially if you're nervous to try them? I think the best advice I could give you here is to lower the stakes. Start small. Try it with a new prospect. Try a small price increase. Test a new pricing script. You don't have to go from $2,000 to $10,000 overnight. You can start with a single confident fee presentation and build momentum from there.
Confidence is not built in a classroom. It is built in conversations, one client at a time. The same is true in marketing. You don't have to send out 5,000 pieces of direct mail. You can send 50 and see what happens. Now, you want to make sure that your list is extremely targeted, because 50 is very small. I'll give you another example, because direct mail is probably not the best one. You don't have to spend $500 per day on online ads. You can spend $50 a day and see what happens. [16:00.4]
You don't have to go all over the place on LinkedIn. You can select a couple of people that you want to connect with every single day and send real, targeted, meaningful connection requests to them, and real, targeted, meaningful, genuine conversation-based messages to them. Do not just copy and paste. Don't be lazy. Don't send these long, long, long messages. Just have real conversations with people. You're starting small so you can get these mastery experiences.
Now, here's the second powerful confidence builder. This is scientifically proven. This is empirically backed. This is also from Albert Bandura. It is the classic monkey see, monkey do. It's the “If they can do it, so can I.” It's vicarious experience. When you observe someone else, someone similar to you—I mean, it doesn't have to be someone similar to you, but if someone is similar to you, it helps a lot—when you observe someone doing something successfully, that success gives you confidence. It's why testimonials and peer stories are so powerful. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of testimonials, I believe that you should think independently. You should not rely on what other people say. [17:01.3]
This sounds so weird to some people, but I rarely, if ever, check out reviews for products. If I try to buy something on Home Depot or Amazon or somewhere, I purposefully try not to look at reviews, because I don't want to be influenced by what other people are saying, right? I want to think independently and make my own conclusions. I know, I know that's weird. I know I'm in the minority, but it's just how I think.
This is why mastermind groups work really well. It's why my Inner Circle office hours work really well, because you just get to hear the questions that other financial advisors are asking. Financial advisors ask questions like, “Hey, how can I improve my email marketing? How can I improve my LinkedIn marketing?” How can I do this? How can I do that? “How can I improve this script?” The answers that I give those financial advisors and their responses and us working together, that is a vicarious experience for other financial advisors.
It is the classic example of if a child asks a question in a classroom, chances are other children have that same question, so it's smart for a teacher to take a step back and really dig deep into answering the question for the child, because it's going to help other children. It's the same exact thing in the office hours. That's why I love doing them. [18:05.2]
For pricing, specifically, if you hear about another advisor who is, let's just say, the same age of a similar background in the same market who raised her fees by, I don't know, it doesn't matter, but 40%, and not only kept clients, but got more clients and got more referrals, then you start to think to yourself, Wait a second, if she could do it, maybe I could do it, too—and that belief, that mirror of possibility, it's one of the most underutilized psychological tools in the entire world, let alone the advisor world, because most financial advisors just try to white-knuckle everything.
They try to operate in isolation. They don't talk about things. They don't ask what other people are thinking. They don't ask what other people are doing. They don't learn from their peers who have already paved the path. Heck, I have the Inner Circle. It's a monthly membership. It's $199 per month. People sign up for that thing all the time, and they don't ask me questions. Even though I give direct email access to me for their questions, a lot of people just don't. Even in the office hours, 1% to 2% to 3% of Inner Circle members even attend the office hours. Isn't that kind of sad? Isn't that really, really sad? [19:10.5]
Now, I understand that some of the really, really successful financial advisors are doing other things and they're having meetings, but, honestly, I know this might sound biased because obviously I'm the person running it, but I can't think of a better use of your time, something that would give you a bigger return on investment than not just learning from me, but learning from the questions that other financial advisors ask in the experiences that they're going through right now, because again, this is not just me. This comes from psychologist Albert Bandura. This is by vicarious experience. This can give you that confidence, and if you build your confidence, then that leads to a tremendous ROI by itself. Forget the marketing strategies. Forget me telling you exactly what to do and how to do it. Just building your confidence is going to make a tremendous result. [19:55.2]
With the vicarious experience thing, if you immerse yourself in stories of other people who have done it, even reading biographies—you read stories about people who have done the things that you want to do—that causes your belief to grow. That is an amazing thing. You stop thinking of things that you want to do as what other people do or what other people have done, and you start to see it as something you can do.
Enough rambling. That's enough for this week. Remember this, if you can increase your confidence and your competence, you can become virtually unstoppable. I hope this has helped you. Thank you so much for listening, and I will catch you next week. [20:37.2]
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