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 recently read this article about what services wealthy investors actually value. It talked about this survey that revealed people, all with net worths of at least $2 million, valued their personal trainers more than their financial advisors. But wait, that's not all, because they also valued—give me some time because this is long—their sports coaches, private schools, therapists, daycare centers, pool services, estate attorneys, nannies, oh, and housekeepers, all more than their wealth advisors, financial advisors, whatever you want to call it. Among those who use an advisor, 26% are considering switching and 18% may stop using an advisor altogether. [01:16.4]
Hmm, that's funny. I remember writing about this stuff in my daily emails and financial advisors would tell me, “No, James, no, that's not happening. That's silly. Why would that happen?” Very interesting. It's almost as if I could see the shift in the market happening.
If you want to read the article for yourself, it's from CNBC. It's titled, Millionaires Value Their Personal Trainers and Therapists More Than Their Wealth Advisors. This is not just me making this stuff up. It's not just me saying it. It's not my theory or opinion. Again, Millionaires Value Their Personal Trainers and Therapists More Than Their Wealth Advisors. [01:51.2]
Several financial advisors told me they felt safe because they serve high-net-worth clients. This survey from a company called Long Angle had respondents where the majority of them were having net worths between $5 million and $25 million. I know this seems hard for a lot of financial advisors to believe, but these people are just as likely, if not more so, to fire their financial advisors.
It's because they have options, and for better or worse, they're likely thinking that they're smart enough to handle their financial affairs themselves, even though they're called blind spots for a reason. I know everybody has blind spots. Everyone can benefit from having a third party check out their financial situation—but it doesn't matter. It all comes back to their perception. I've talked about this a lot in my daily emails. I've talked about it in previous podcast episodes.
With your “millionaire next door” type client, maybe not so much, but people with $20 million are typically more likely to be professional buyers of services. A large amount of money compared to the average person gets spent on services, just like that list I gave you, therapists, personal trainers, coaches, and so on. These are all services, and high-net-worth individuals, like with any other skill, get really good at purchasing services. They hire, evaluate. They assess ROI and they replace. It's not always personal. It's not a personal thing. It's just how they live. [03:19.7]
It can be personal. I mean, you can have great relationships with your housekeeper or your attorney, but at the end of the day, at least when the money changes hands, it is a transaction. You can stop that transaction. You can continue to be friends, that's awesome, but assuming you're in business to make money and earn a profit, this should be kind of alarming.
Here's the message that I want financial advisors to get from this little old podcast. Every other professional I listed is doing a better job at communicating value than the average financial advisor. You don't have to like it, but you better learn to love it, because it doesn't change that these are real results. [03:57.8]
The personal trainer can say stuff like this. “You lost eight pounds. Your bench press is up 30 pounds. Your resting heart rate dropped seven points. Here are the numbers. Here are the actual tangible results.”
The pool company can say, “We'll come every Thursday. We'll keep your chemicals within this range and this range, you'll never have to think about it again. You'll be able to enjoy your pool and have a whole bunch of fun.”
The daycare can say, “Your child is learning this, this and this. Here's the curriculum. Here are the actual results. Here are the report cards.” They literally give you report cards.
The housekeeper can say, “We're going to clean these rooms in this order on this day. We're going to be here. We’re going to vacuum. We’re going to scrub the baseboards.” Whatever, right?
But what does the financial advisor say? In a lot of cases, the financial advisor says, “I'm, uh, managing your money?” Cool. What does that mean? What does that look like in the client's life? What can they point to like they can point to the clean pool and the kitchen and the 10 pounds that they lost with their personal trainer? [04:52.1]
Most financial advisors just don't have that. They hide behind jargon, and they talk about holistic planning and personalized strategies and long-term relationships, and all of this stuff, and the client is just sitting there thinking, Okay, but what am I actually getting? And is it worth $10,000 per year? Because that was the median number from the survey. That's what these clients are paying their wealth managers and wealth advisors and financial advisors, $10,000 per year.
A lot of financial advisors have built businesses on the assumption that as long as the portfolio grows and the client doesn't actively complain, then everything is fine, except now the wealthy are all lining up their services. They're looking at what they're paying and they're asking a very direct question: “Where am I getting the least”—and this is important—“perceived value?”
I did not say, “Where am I getting the least value?” I said, “Where am I getting the least perceived value?” In the podcast episode where I talked about AI in a lot of detail and I talked about how the markets perception matters more than anything else, if you haven't listened to that episode, I highly encourage you listen to it. It's just a complete shift in how you should think about your marketing. It is about perceived value. [06:05.5]
So, when clients ask, “Where am I getting the least perceived value?” guess who is often at the top of that list? Yep, the financial advisor, not because you're not valuable, but because you haven't done a good enough job of making the value visible, perceived, and that's the real threat. It's invisibility. If a client can't see your value, the client can't feel your value. The client can't justify your value. If the client can't justify your value, then the client starts thinking, Maybe I should look somewhere else. Maybe I should shop around, and once the client starts thinking that, it's only a matter of time before they reconsider the relationship.
When advisors tell me, “James, my clients love me. I'm safe,” I just sit there. I bite my tongue. It sometimes it's not even worth trying to tell these advisors otherwise, and the data says otherwise, too. The survey here is basically your clients saying, “Hey, we're reevaluating everything. We're comparing every dollar we spend to the value we think we're getting, and you're on the list. You're on the list with everybody else.” So, the question now becomes, what are you going to do about it? [07:12.8]
You can pretend this isn't happening. You can tell yourself that your clients are different, and oh my goodness, I've heard that so many times from financial advisors. “Oh, my clients are different. My clients wouldn’t do that.” Yeah, okay, whatever. You can assume that just because they haven't fired you yet, that they never will, or, here's what I recommend, you can get serious about making your values so obvious, so concrete and so emotionally compelling, that your clients feel about you the way they feel about all the other services listed way above you.
No. 1 was personal trainer, by the way, so if a personal trainer helps them drop 20 pounds or get stronger, or whatever they have as fitness goals, you can be in the same league as the personal trainer, because here's the beautiful part, especially with financial advice—the bar is really low. I mean, almost to the floor. Most advisors aren't doing this at all, and if you're the advisor who does, then you become the one that people don't cut when they go through their, quote-unquote, “expense list.” [08:11.5]
I don't really think that financial advice is an expense. I think it's an investment, but, hey, I'm in the minority. Again, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. It matters what your market thinks, and if your market believes and perceives that financial advice is an expense, then this is what's going to happen. You become the professional who is mentioned in the same breath as “Oh, these are all the other people that we have to cut because these are expenses.”
But what you want is, when they say, “I don't know what I would do without my personal trainer,” or “I don't know what I would do without my nanny. She does such a great job with the children,” or, “I don't know what we would do without this person,” you want to be mentioned like that. That's the position you want. [08:48.1]
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.
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I have been helping financial advisors grow their businesses for more than 10 years, and the more I do it, the more I realize that financial advisors believe they're in some sort of special bubble where the laws of economics don't apply, market forces don't apply. They think their clients don't shop around. They think that being a good person, or simply being a human now in the age of AI, is good enough to protect them from their competition. [10:12.7]
Speaking of just simply being human being enough to protect you in the age of AI, I talked about this in a recent office hours session exclusively with my Inner Circle members. We talked about a few potential paths that these AI tools could take with financial advisors, and I'm not going to go into too much detail here because the Inner Circle members are paying for this information, but I will share that real estate agents are going through something similar right now, because when people ask questions about homes in ChatGPT, Zillow pops up.
Zillow did this, by the way, because they get most of their web traffic from search. They realize that their search traffic is tanking, so they need to adapt. Seems like something I have been telling financial advisors to do. But long story short, people are now using AI to search for real estate. They type in addresses and look for homes, and all sorts of things that Zillow would have steered people to in the Google search results. [11:09.4]
What are real estate agents saying about this? They're saying the exact same things financial advisors are saying. Here, this is a real comment from a real estate agent, a real real estate agent, I guess I should say, talking about the advantages that real estate agents have over AI. This is an exact quote. Here we go. “Here's what it can't do. It can't hold your client's hand and guide them through a challenging deal when a family member just died. It can't rationally talk to the client and guide them step by step using the right tone in person. It can't walk through a condo and spot the water damage they painted over or know that the building's HOA is about to hit everyone with a $50,000 special assessment.” [11:51.7]
Does that sound familiar to you? That's exactly what financial advisors say. That's how they're coping right now. They say things like it can't sit across the table from a widow and help her make her decisions. It can't calm a nervous retiree when the market drops. It can't understand nuance and hold your hand and pat your back and swaddle you, or whatever it is that you're saying—and they're kind of right. The AI can't do that. That's a good thing for financial advisors. But here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. Most of you aren't doing that either.
You can already see it happening. People are using AI to research homes, neighborhoods, local crime rates, school ratings, property taxes, contractors, inspectors, zoning issues, negotiation tactics, and a lot more in the real estate space. They're doing it because it's faster. It's private. I mean, I say private, but we know all our data is being leaked anyway. It doesn't make them feel obligated to a salesperson. That's what I mean by private. They're not going to a person and talking to a person. They're doing it in the comfort of their home. That's the privacy I'm talking about. But truthfully, I mean, these big tech companies, they don't give a darn about your data. They just ship it out. [13:04.0]
But my point with sharing this is, this should sound familiar to you. Real estate agents are discovering this right now. Many of them are clinging to emotional arguments about empathy and intuition, all while ignoring the fact that buyers simply want reliable updates. They want clear explanations. They want consistent communication, very similar to financial advisors, and financial advisors who respond in the same way, where they just dig in their heels and say, “I'm human, I'm human, I'm human,” they're heading towards the same cliff.
Clients don't leave because the robot is smarter. They leave because the robot made the human look lazy, and this is the part that most financial advisors refuse to confront. They want AI to be the villain. They want the narrative to be “I'm human, therefore I win,” but humanity isn't the differentiator unless you actually demonstrate something meaningful with it. That's how you change the perception. You can't just say, “Clients need me” and do nothing. You have to give them reasons to feel that way. [14:00.5]
If an AI tool gives them immediate access to information and predictable responses, and clear explanations and structure, and their advisor gives them check-ins maybe once a quarter, slow responses to emails, who do you think creates the stronger impression? It should be obvious.
That doesn't mean advisors should become machines. Far from it. That's not what I'm saying. It means advisors must be intentional, visible and proactive, because these clients out there, especially the high-net-worth clients, they're no longer passive. They're comparing every service provider in their lives and technology is influencing the way they judge value, and when they line everyone up, the trainer, the nanny, the attorney, the accountant, the estate planner, the advisor needs to stand out—not because of being human alone, not because of personality alone, but because the advisor makes the client's life easier in ways that AI can't replicate. [14:58.6]
That's the advisor who stays in the client's life. That's the advisor who never ends up on the chopping block when the again, quote-unquote, “expenses” get reviewed, and no industry, at least within reason, is immune to this shift. Look at accountants. I mean, this has been happening with accountants, too. Many of them believed they were protected, because “Taxes are complicated. You need an expert to look at your taxes,” but they don't realize you can literally just upload the tax code to an AI tool and get answers right there. It is the tax code. It is in writing, okay?
So, when clients started showing up with these summaries that took half the time to review, accountants started complaining that the clients who started becoming too demanding, and they would say, “Perplexity, told me this,” or “ChatGPT told me this,” and the accountants were like, “I'm a human and I know more than that,” not really, because it's literally the tax code. Do you not understand this? It is an actual document that I can reference. [15:57.8]
Look at physicians. ChatGPT actually going in the direction of not giving medical advice anymore, not that it really ever did. But I really like being able to type in “Hey, I'm having this pain in the middle of my back and it hurts when I stretch this way. What do you think it is?” Then ask me a bunch of questions to help diagnose. I love that kind of stuff.
But doctors kind of got upset with it and physicians started making patients feel stupid because of it, and they’d say, “Why would you do that when I went to medical school?” It's like, This tool has access to a lot of studies and meta-analyses and anatomy charts, and it knows everything and it can ask direct questions, and it can do it at like 1 a.m. When you're not available, Doctor, I have this.
Every industry is being shaped by a new kind of client, a client who comes to the table already more informed, already more prepared, and that is a good thing. That is not a bad thing. Financial advisors are not exempt from this either. If anything, they're more exposed, because the work is often invisible until the advisor chooses to make it visible. [17:06.6]
That's why value packaging matters so much. It's not just a marketing gimmick thing. It's the only way to turn invisible work into something tangible. Advisors tell me all the time that they do a lot of stuff behind the scenes. Behind the scenes doesn't count unless the client can name it.
Let me be blunt for a second. Your clients do not wake up wondering how hard you worked yesterday. They're not sitting around hoping that someone rebalanced their accounts or checked their beneficiaries. They're too busy focusing on their own lives. They assume things are happening unless something goes wrong—and this should be exciting rather than scary, because a lot of advisors will never adapt.
They'll read the same surveys you and I have been discussing, and they'll just shrug. They'll think it doesn't apply to them. They'll assume that their clients are different, like I said earlier. I hear that all the time. They'll just reassure themselves that their relationships are stronger than market forces. That's good for you. That means the bar to stand out is incredibly low. [18:05.2]
You don't have to become this super human or amazing financial advisor or marketing machine. You don't need all of that. Clients just need signals now. They need reminders that someone is present. They need to see that their advisor is on top of things and thinking ahead. They need reassurance more than they need brilliance. If you can do that, then you will be the advisor who last.
I know this was a bit different than the usual podcast content, but I think it is so important for financial advisors to understand. If you know someone who could benefit from information like this, please share this podcast with a friend. I’d greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much for all of your support, and I will catch you next week. [18:47.7]
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