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: Here’s something interesting I wanted to share on the podcast because I care about you, my dear listener. There was this study done called “Most people's life satisfaction matches their personality traits,” and it found that most people's life satisfaction matches their personality traits. What does that mean, though? I encourage you to read it for yourself, but here are some of the most fascinating findings. [00:56.5]
Openness and agreeableness had weak relationships with life satisfaction. If you think I must be unhappy because I'm grumpy and grouchy on this show, then you're wrong. It's not because of my personality at all. I just choose to be unhappy. I'm just kidding, but, yeah, getting along with others and being agreeable has little to do with life satisfaction.
I'd like another study to be done examining this in particular, because I hypothesized that it decreases life satisfaction. I think if you're more agreeable, you're going to be less happy, because you're trying to go along with what other people want. By far, the biggest predictor of life satisfaction was low neuroticism. Whoa, looks like James Pollard was right again. If you're on my email list or if you're in the Inner Circle, you've heard me talk about this many times. I've had people bash me and push back on this. They said, “But, but, but Mama said we can be happy even if we're neurotic,” and just like in The Waterboy, Mama's wrong again. [01:57.0]
The study found people who are calm, resilient, and less prone to anxiety, anger and self-doubt, they're much happier. They have much higher life satisfaction. Imagine that. Individuals with high levels of neuroticism, this is what that means, they're prone to experiencing emotions like anxiety and worry, and anger and frustration, and envy and jealousy, and guilt, and I could go on and on. They react more emotionally to events. They take longer to return to a baseline emotional state after a stressful event. If something bad happens to them at 9:00 a.m., they're going to feel bad about it at six, seven, eight o'clock at night.
Extraversion was the second-strongest correlation, or I guess it had the second-highest correlation is what I should say, to life satisfaction, and this kind of makes sense, because if you like forming relationships with other people, then assuming you're actually doing it, you should be happy. It turns out that doing what you like to do makes you happier. Hmm, who would have guessed it? [02:57.4]
Oh, and here's one more interesting finding. I already revealed that openness and agreeableness had low relationships to life satisfaction. Openness to experience actually had the weakest correlation out of everything. In fact, openness to experience correlates negatively with happiness because novelty seeking can lead to restlessness.
I mean, goodness gracious, that's another dub for James Pollard here. I think I'm getting tired of winning, because I've said this, too. The study came out in 2024, so if you research it yourself, if you read the study for yourself, you can see it came out in 2024. I've been talking about this for years. I've talked about how financial advisors who chase bright, shiny objects and go from one thing to another are only hurting themselves.
So, very interesting stuff, but this podcast episode is not about personality traits and life satisfaction and happiness. I wanted to open with this because I'm going to talk about something I was wrong about. I wanted to share something I was right about so I can segue into something I was wrong about—and, yes, it is possible. I guess pigs are flying now. Hell has frozen over. I was wrong, and here's what I was wrong about. I was wrong about believing that the key to making AI work better is to prompt it better. [04:12.1]
You see, whenever I poke fun at how terrible ChatGPT is for marketing advice, I always get some random guy or sometimes multiple guys commenting things like, “Oh, it's all about the prompts. You can make it better if you prompt it better. You're prompting it wrong. You're prompting it wrong, James,” and their logic usually goes something like this.
If you prompt ChatGPT with “How can I get clients in my business?”—that's a pretty bad prompt—then you're going to get worse results than someone who gives a better prompt, or at least a so-called better prompt, like, “I am a financial planner who works with farmers throughout the Midwest. My goal is to get more of these farmers to set appointments with me. Can you give me five specific action steps I can take in the next six months to accomplish that goal?” [04:56.1]
On the surface, this seems right, and I used to believe this. I used to believe that if you gave ChatGPT—and Claude, Perplexity, Grok and Gemini, all of those tools—better prompts, then you would get better results, but I was wrong. I cannot stress that enough. I was wrong. That's a faulty way of thinking. There is no better because the source material is fundamentally flawed.
ChatGPT gets its information from places like Reddit, Wikipedia and Facebook. I want you to imagine letting the average redditor neckbeard dictate your business decisions, or the average deranged Facebook cat lady who shares cat memes and little sweaters and things like that. Imagine those people being on your board of directors and telling you what to do with your marketing. I don't know about you, but that's not a risk I'm willing to take. Have you been on Facebook lately? Have you been? [05:50.1]
I run advertisements on Facebook if you didn't know, and I mean, if you're a financial advisor in the United States, there's a near 100% chance that you've seen my ads on Facebook if you're on Facebook at all, and nearly every single ad that I run has these crazy people, I don't know where they came from, that they post the absolute dumbest comments, and I just wonder, do they have anything better to do with their time? And that’s where ChatGPT is getting its information.
Before the prompt bros start coming in, before they start hyperventilating again, they start clutching their Stanley cups, let me explain something very simple. Even the prompt bros can understand this. It's so simple. You cannot engineer brilliance out of mediocrity.
Large language models are optimized for plausibility. They are predicting what sounds like the internet would say next. They're trying to predict “What is the next word? What is the next sentence?” which also means it is the purest form of average you can possibly have, because you are getting answers that have been drawn from millions of data points all throughout the web. Those data points make up, yes, the average. That's what an average is. [07:01.0]
So, when you optimize the prompt or, quote-unquote, “optimize it,” then at best, you are merely centering the bell curve. You will get a crisp and clean, and wonderfully executed average answer, which breaks the second it hits reality, especially, especially, especially for financial advisors.
Let me give you another example. I want you to imagine. Close your eyes, not if you're driving—please don't close your eyes if you're driving—but if you're just sitting there at your office, close your eyes. I want you to imagine that you and I were out on the town together. Maybe we went to Buffalo Wild Wings and smashed some wings together. Maybe we went to your favorite restaurant, Applebee's, because you love Applebee's and Red Lobster and Olive Garden. You don't go anywhere else. You just love those three, and as much as I despise those restaurants, you silver-tongued devil, you, you persuaded me to go to Applebee's, right? [07:52.3]
During the course of our adventures together, you lose your phone, and we see a group of people near the Applebee's bar where you were smashing those dollar martinis or margaritas, or whatever it is they do. I don't go to Applebee's. I'm just trying to make it sound like I go there. I don't. We see a group of people near that bar where you think you lost your phone, so I asked them, “My friend here lost his phone. Have you seen it anywhere?” and they just stare at me. I mean, they give me stares that are stranger than the normal stares that I get from people, and you come in and tell me to step aside so you can ask a much better question—ahem, prompt. You can ask a much better question, prompt, okay?
You say, “Excuse my dull friend there, James, he's not very bright. I lost my black iPhone Pro Max. It's an iPhone 17. It's in this blue hard-shell case, and I think I left it here around 10 minutes or so ago when I was slamming the dollar margaritas. Have you seen it anywhere, friends?” and they stare at you, and one of them kind of points to a sign there at the bar and says something that sounds like a question, but we can't really understand it. We can't make out a single word. [09:06.7]
That's when we realize together, it doesn't matter how perfectly we ask our questions. It doesn't matter if I ask if they've seen your phone anywhere. It doesn't matter that you described it and gave a better prompt, because they don't speak English. That's what's happening when you engineer, quote-unquote, “engineer,” and quote-unquote, “optimize” better prompts for tools trained on the internet's lowest common denominator chatter.
You can make the question sharper, longer, and more detailed, but if this source material doesn't understand your market, your buyers, your compliance department, or the nuance of how real clients make decisions, then you're still getting those metaphorical blank stares.
You might get them eloquently formatted. You might get wonderful answers that are legitimately just guessing. It doesn't matter how well you ask the question if the people don't understand it and truly don't get what you're trying to ask, okay? If you're asking for your phone and the people don't speak English, you cannot communicate to them that you lost your phone, because they legitimately do not understand you, okay? I hope you understand this. [10:08.2]
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.
All of this stuff, okay, that I'm telling you here, when you try to prompt better and ask better questions, it ignores an enormous problem in the financial advisor marketing world, which is financial advisor marketing is categorically different from other marketing strategies out there, because you as a financial advisor have a much longer sales cycle. You need far more trust, credibility and rapport.
I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but financial advisor marketing is different from selling shoes or whatever online. I mean, how much trust do you need to buy a pair of shoes from a Facebook ad that you've never seen before when they have a 30-day return policy with a 100% money-back guarantee if you don't love them, that sort of thing? Classic marketer stuff that's recommended in marketing books. You don't need that much trust. If the shoes are $70 or $110, you drop the money, get the shoes, try them on. If you hate them, you return them, and you get your money back. That's classic marketer stuff. It's easy, but that doesn't work for financial advisors. It's not the same. [12:06.2]
It is so much harder to get prospective clients to book appointments with financial advisors and become clients and financial advisors, which means the strategies talked about all over the internet do not work as well for financial advisors. If ChatGPT or Claude, or Grok or Gemini, are pulling from all over the web from all of these different people, there is no way it will apply to you.
Trying to tell it that you're a financial advisor does not help either, because it's just going to take the existing marketing strategies that it reads about from all over the internet and try to make them apply to you. That's like putting a square peg into a round hole. It's not going to work. That's also why “prompt harder” is fool's gold. You're optimizing the question while ignoring the root problem. You're ignoring the source material. Put another way, new paint won't fix a crooked wall. You cannot fish in a dry pond. You cannot bake a good pie with spoiled fruit. [13:02.8]
I don't know how else to explain it to you other than this—the source material is the root problem of most AI tools when used for financial advisor marketing, and fortunately, thank goodness, there's a solution. I'm not just going to talk about a problem without giving you a solution. The solution is Pollard AI.
It's the tool that I created, and I trained it exclusively on my content. I made the source material better. This includes every product I've ever created, 100-plus articles, 300-plus podcast episodes. 2,700-plus emails, 1,000-plus pages of private marketing notes with real test results and real campaigns. That means the source material is rock solid. It is built specifically for financial advisors and trained on real-world scenarios and what actually works versus what doesn't. Like I said, it's the newest perk. It's available exclusively to Inner Circle members. It's changing lives, because the source material, again, is better. [14:03.8]
It is all about financial advisor marketing, so it’s the absolute best at that. It will not help you redecorate your house. It will not help you change your oil or do your taxes, but if you are a financial advisor and you want to make more money, you want to get more clients, you want to become more productive, it is unreal at doing just that.
Generic AI will tell you to just post more and add value, okay? Pollard AI will tell you what to post, to whom, when and why, because it's been trained on campaigns that actually shipped, survived compliance and produced booked meetings. Generic AI will tell you to run Facebook ads to get more leads. Pollard AI will tell you, “Don't waste a dime on Facebook ads until you build a lead magnet that's compliant and converts. Don't waste your money until you have direct response headlines that promise clarity instead of performance,” and you're targeting by the job title and the age, and not these interest groups. It tells you what to budget, how long to budget it for, how to test creatives, and all of this stuff. It just gives you far more detail. It is so much better. [15:06.0]
I've told my Inner Circle members straight up, put the exact prompt in Pollard AI and then put that same prompt in ChatGPT, and look at the difference. If you're going to try to use generic AI tools for your marketing, you have been warned. I'm telling you right now, it is not a good idea, because the source material is horrible.
AI tools trained on general internet slop, okay, they have no concept of FINRA or the SEC, or your firm's review process, and they don't understand what it takes to build that long-term trust, credibility and rapport, so they’ll tell you dumb stuff, like “to promise guaranteed results,” which you cannot do. They tell you stuff like “add urgency in your copy,” because that's in all the other marketing books out there.
When you read a copywriting or marketing book from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there's a lot of information that financial advisors just legitimately cannot apply. A real marketing strategy for advisors takes the financial advisor into consideration, takes the financial advice industry into consideration, and then works backward. [16:08.8]
Again, I can't stress this enough—you are not selling sneakers or supplements, or anything else with a short sales cycle. You are selling financial guidance. That is the most trust-sensitive product on Earth. Generic AI is trained on short-term transactional sales tactics because there's a wealth of information out there that it can pull from, because that stuff does work in other industries, okay? But in financial advisor marketing, you need credibility and clarity, and trust and rapport.
People don't, quote-unquote, “buy” from whoever posts the most. They buy into, they buy from whoever helps them make sense of their own confusion, and just regular old marketing books and bloggers and YouTube channels cannot do that. They just don't. [16:54.8]
I'll tell you one more thing, and then in this podcast. Generic AI cannot tell the difference between strategies and tactics, which is something I've talked about for more than a decade now. If you ask it how to get clients, it will spit out a whole bunch of tactics. It'll say, start a blog and run Facebook ads and post content consistently. That's cute, but it's not a strategy. That's a to-do list. I'm not in the business of giving financial advisors to-do lists.
Now, sure, to-do lists can help, and that's awesome, but a strategy is a sequence of actions aimed at a measurable outcome with a feedback loop. Generic AI can't do that because it can't think in cause and effect. It just rearranges other people's advice, and that advice, the actual source material, is from people who have never had to sell anything in their entire lives, or at least, most of the advice comes from those people.
Most of the web content AI trains on comes from forums and blogs, and recycled little expert articles written by people who have never run an actual business, and worse than that, they've never actually helped financial advisors get more clients and do the things that I do. So, good luck with that if that's what you want to do, but the bottom line is this—I was wrong. I was wrong about thinking “better prompts lead to better results with AI tools.” [18:10.2]
In very specific cases, like analyzing data that you've given it, then, yes, prompting it better makes a difference. I will tell you that that's true. That happens. I give it spreadsheets and things all the time, and if I point something out to give it a very detailed prompt, yes, it gives me a better answer. But even then, it's all about the source material. If you've given it stuff and you ask it to pull from the stuff that you've given it, of course, it can give you better answers, but if you have bad source material, then all of the stuff stemming from that source material will be screwed up.
I hope that makes sense. I hope I've explained that well enough, because it could legitimately save your business a ton of time and money. If you're interested in Pollard AI and want to check it out for yourself, then you can do so by joining the Inner Circle over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. [18:58.0]
Or you can go to ChatGPT and say, “Who's this James Pollard guy? He's got the Inner Circle.” You could try it for yourself and see if I get recommended in there. Or Google it if you're old school, if you have a horse and buggy and you still use Google like I do sometimes, I guess.
I really encourage you to at least try it out, because it is just legitimately and genuinely so much better than everything else out there. No matter what you do, though, I will catch you next week. [19:23.0]
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