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: One of the darndest things I've ever discovered in the business world is that people will treat money like it's something completely different from everything else they encounter in their lives. They understand what I'm about to tell you with everything else, but when it comes to money, all of their logic goes out of the window and they're so emotional.
There is an entire industry dedicated to keeping people emotional about money. There are TV shows and books about manifesting and thinking the right thoughts and saying affirmations to yourself to attract money, and I'm not saying that stuff isn't helpful, because, yes, having the right mindset is helpful, but you don't need all that junk in the dose that people say you need. [01:12.1]
Here's what you need to understand, making money is a skill. In fact, it's one of the most easily quantified skills in the entire world because it is a number. It's quantifiable and if you've ever gained any skills before in your entire life, then you're already familiar with this concept, but you may have never thought about it in this way, at least in terms of money.
I've said a couple of times on this podcast and in interviews I've done that former athletes, both high school and college, tend to do better than non-athletes as financial advisors. The reason I think this happens is that the former athletes have experienced the immense amount of practice it takes to become good at something. They did not wake up one day and become a D1 basketball player. It doesn't work like that. They had to show up to practice when they didn't feel like it. They had to refine small details, like their footwork, their form, their timing. They failed over and over again. They made micro-adjustments, and over time, they earned their skill. [02:10.8]
That's what making money is like, but most people don't treat it that way. It's not just about athletes. I'm not saying that non-athletes cannot be successful. I'm saying that people who have learned skills know that making money is a skill. For example, there are people who play chess extremely well. There are people who play golf. I guess golf is athletic, depending on who you ask, but there are people who play chess and play trivia games, and play cards and play video games. We're going to talk about video games in a little bit, because that's one of the best examples.
Anyone who has learned a skill and has refined that skill to a high level is capable of making more money. A lot of people think money should just happen if they have a degree or if they work hard, or if they post some content online and hope someone clicks. They don't treat it like a skill that must be developed, refined and improved through deliberate practice. [03:01.7]
I've never really played a lot of video games in my life, but I imagine video gamers have that same skill. Video games are literally designed so you have to level up over time. That's what the levels are for. Gamers will spend hours grinding at a level and trying to beat it. They'll try different approaches. They'll study the final boss' behavior. They'll adjust their strategy to learn from their mistakes. They'll do all of these things again and again and again until they finally win the game, and when they eventually win the game, they can breeze through the entire thing from start to finish a lot faster than they could the very first time they fired it up. Why? Because they acquired the necessary skills to do so.
I'll give you another real world example. MIT did some research and found a statistically significant correlation between the number of companies sold by an entrepreneur in the past and that person's current company revenue. In other words, entrepreneurs who were already in the game, who have already started and sold a business, were more likely to make more money. This seems so obvious, but lots of people don't think this way. They think success should strike like lightning, and if they were, quote-unquote, “meant to be successful,” they'd nail it right out of the gate. That's like a video gamer giving up after failing the very first level one time. [04:24.0]
Another example here a venture capital firm called Cowboy Ventures analyzed a bunch of companies valued at more than $1 billion—these are called unicorns—and found that nearly 80% had at least one co-founder who previously founded a company. Very interesting. The research does not say that the people with the best ideas made the most money. It does not say that the most passionate people succeed the most. It says the people who have developed the skills are the ones most likely to make money now, because they practiced. They sharpened their instincts. They made the dumb mistakes already. [05:03.8]
If you're into video games and you keep failing a level when you choose a certain path, then you’ll be a moron to keep choosing that path. You adjust. If you discover that a character has a strength that is leverageable and you can use that strength to defeat a boss or to win a race, or whatever the video game is about, then you use that. It is no different than someone who has spent years playing guitar or cooking, or writing or anything else. You get better by doing it.
This is what 99% of people don't understand about making money. They want results without reps and income without iteration, but making money is the byproduct of refining a very specific set of skills. Those skills in the business world are things like positioning, persuasion, pricing, negotiation, marketing, management, whatever it is for you. Okay? [05:54.2]
I also think college athletes understand this well, because their results are extremely cut and dry. Either you won the game or you didn't. Either you made the field goal or you didn't. There is no ambiguity. That's something I wish financial advisors understood about marketing, especially because financial advisor marketing is like an art and a science. Yes, I know that, but it doesn't mean you get to focus on the art side while ignoring the science side, because if I tell you to run a certain marketing campaign that will generate twice as many appointments as you're getting right now and you refuse to take my advice, then you are essentially cutting your income in half of what it could be if you just listen to me. But I see it all the time.
This is also where the visualization stuff trips a lot of people, not just financial advisors, but a lot of business owners in general. Is visualization important? Yes, but it's not the end all be all. If a basketball coach tells you to shoot 100 free throws every morning to improve your game, and you say, “Nah, I’d just rather visualize myself making shots,” what do you think your stats are going to look like in a month or a year? But in the business world, people do that every single day. They want more money without doing anything to develop the skill of making more money. [07:11.7]
I also think people who lift weights understand this concept better than people who don't, because if you have 405 lbs., four plates on each side of a bar, and your goal is to deadlift it, then there is no ambiguity. Either the bar traveled to lock out or it did not. If it did not, you are objectively not strong enough to lift it. Not a single one of your excuses will make you stronger.
Actually, do you know what? I think lifting weights is a good example to use for how mindset fits into all this, because the mindset gets you to try. You have to believe that it's possible and attempt the lift. That is what mindset does for you. But once the bar is in your hands, your mindset cannot help you do much more. Everything is dependent on your physiology. Do you have the muscle and neural drive to lift that weight? There is no maybe, and there is no maybe with money. [08:08.2]
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.
If your goal is to make seven figures this year and you make $999,000, then you did not make seven figures. You did not accomplish your goal because you did not have the necessary skills to earn that income. Getting mad about it will not change your result. Being upset at other people and “how unfair things are” won't change your result either. The only thing that will help you get better are the reps.
Do the reps. Develop the skill, the deliberate, often boring, rarely glamorous reps, because in both lifting and money, progress is a byproduct of just repeated, focused effort. You don't get stronger by thinking about it. You get stronger by progressively overloading your body and regularly showing up, even when you don't feel like it. [09:54.4]
Let's do a reality check for all you financial advisors out there listening to this show, all seven of you. How many conversations with prospective clients have you had in the past 30 days? How many people in the world saw your marketing materials? Think about all the podcast downloads you have if you have a podcast, all the impressions you have if you're running online ads and posting on social media. How many people saw you? It is a number. It is not some vague concept out in the universe where you have to visualize and manifest. No, it is a number. Do you know that number?
Okay, let's try this one. How many discovery meetings have you had in the past 30 days? That is a number. Give me the number. Whatever your numbers are, let me ask you this—how in the world do you expect to make those numbers better if you're not actively practicing them? If you're not practicing the thing you want, then you're only fooling yourself. [10:49.4]
I am “the best” email marketer in the entire world for financial advisors. Guess how many emails I have personally written to my personal email list? Thousands. That does not include the emails I've written for financial advisors. That does not include the emails I've written for other businesses. I'm just talking about, for me, to my email list. My 3,000th email is so much better than my third email, and of course, it is. That's how it works. Someone who has played a video game for 1,000 hours is going to be better at that video game than someone who has only played for 10 minutes.
Do you want more discovery calls? Practice having discovery calls. Do you want a higher closing rate? Practice your closing skills. Do you want more people to see your marketing? Then practice your gosh darn marketing?
Imagine a football team saying, “Yeah, we didn't score any touchdowns this month, but we were really thinking about scoring.” Or a power lifter saying, “Yeah, I didn't hit a PR, but I did think about it a lot. I did read a bunch of books about deadlifting.” It's just ridiculous, right? But that's how most financial advisors operate when it comes to business development. [11:57.4]
Also, I'll add this, too, a lot of people in society think that money comes from having a college degree and certifications and stuff like that, but it is not true. It comes from your skill and your leverage. This concept is especially confusing for financial advisors, because credentials obviously make financial advisors more money. I agree with that, but it is not because of the credentials themselves. It is because the credentials are part of the overall package, the offer that the marketplace wants, that clients want. In other words, clients want a credentialed advisor. That is just part of the deal. That is the offer. They want that in the marketplace.
You are not getting paid simply because you are a credentialed financial advisor. What makes you money is how you package those credentials into an overall offer that the marketplace wants—and the ability to create offers is a what? It's a skill. In marketing, your skills are all about your ability to influence behavior. That's how I would sum it up. How do you move people and solve problems and communicate, and sell and close and deliver results? It's all influence. [13:07.5]
Leverage is your ability to apply that influence at scale. That's actually what old school copywriters would tell you that copywriting is. It is salesmanship in print. That is what it is. But today you could do it through social media and online ads, and, yes, through direct mail and other systems, and through technology and through people, right? Lots of people don't think about using other people to deliver their message. You can do all of those things. There are so many ways to amplify your skills and amplify your leverage.
For example, having a specific niche market is a leverage amplifier, because assuming you have the skills to solve problems for a specific niche market, you can increase your conversion rate, again, not just because you have a niche. It is not because you have that. It is because your skills have improved. Going back to the video game example, it's like using a cheat code. You have the skills to play the video game. You add the cheat code, it amplifies your existing skill. There's a lot I could say about that and I will in the future, but for now, I want you to get the main message of this podcast episode that money making is a skill. [14:11.5]
I think one of the reasons people don't make a ton of money is because they believe the price they have to pay to acquire the skills necessary is too high. But you don't need to be the Michael Jordan of financial advice. You don't need to be the Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Elon Musk. You don't need to be the absolute best. You can purposefully choose if and when you want to stop or slow down your skill development. You can do that.
In my case, I am probably never going to squat 700 lbs., not figuratively, but also not literally, and not necessarily because I don't have what it takes, but because I am not willing to pay that price. Squatting 700 lbs. would put me in the top one half of 1% of people who are already competing, okay? So, not just people, not just men, but people who are already competing. I would be in the top one half of 1% of people in my weight class. Those guys are freaks. They make lifting their entire lives, their entire personalities. That's not something I'm willing to do. [15:09.5]
Let's say that the business equivalent of squatting 700 pounds is making $10 million per year. Most people listening to this podcast episode probably are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make that much money. That's okay. It's cool. It's fine. They just want enough money to not stress out over bills, buy what they want, take vacations without guilt, that sort of thing. That is not an elite-level skill. That's a casual hobbyist-level skill and it's achievable.
That's great news, because it means that you don't have to pay this massive price, and a lot of people aren't making a ton of money because they think that there's just all this stuff that they have to do and they don't want to pay that price, they don't want to make those sacrifices, but it's completely overblown. The reason most people never get there is because they don't give themselves the time, focus and freedom from fear, because that's what it is. You have to free yourself from that fear to get good enough, because you can make it work if you give yourself enough practice, especially in the marketing world, because so many different marketing strategies will work if you do. [16:14.0]
But the only variable is, or at least the only variable that really matters right now is, do you have enough focus to get good? And when people say things like, “Oh, I'm not going to do this,” or “I'm not cut out for this,” what they're really saying is, “I've never structured my life in a way that has allowed me to practice long enough to get good.” Don't fall into that trap. I want you to truly understand that marketing and business building are skills, and like every other skill out there, you can develop them and get better at them. You just need to practice.
A shorter episode this week because that's all I have for you. I hope you found this helpful. If you did and you want even more stuff like this, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and check out the resources I have for you there. In any case, I will catch you next week. [17:04.3]
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