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'm going to tell you a story about a financial advisor. I'm not going to use his real name, and I've changed his personal details because I don't want to put him on the spot. What's important for you is that you understand that there are thousands of advisors just like him, and they all have the same feelings and situations in their businesses.
His name is David Parker. He's 42 years old. He's been a financial advisor for 14 years. Until recently, he felt like he was doing everything right and still getting nowhere. He had a lot of experience and credentials. He had a great website and an okay LinkedIn network, and all the things that you have as a financial advisor, and yet he was stuck. [01:12.7]
He wasn't starving or anything. He was doing fine on paper, but fine is a dangerous place to be. Fine means you're busy, but you're not building. Fine means you wake up one day and realize the last five years look exactly the same. David tried everything you're supposed to try if you're a financial advisor.
He posted educational content on social media. He sent newsletters, and by newsletters, I mean emails maybe twice a month. He paid for leads that went nowhere. He even hired a marketing coach who told him silly things like, “Be more authentic,” and he just thought to himself, Wow, be more authentic. What a breakthrough. Long story short, nothing worked the way it was promised. [01:55.7]
Then, something strange happened. David stumbled across a simple shift in how he approached marketing. It wasn't some magic funnel or automation, or AI tool, either. It was a different way of thinking about how prospects actually decide to trust a financial advisor, and within the next 30 days, he booked more appointments than he had in the previous six months combined, and at the start of 2026 he raised his fees and didn't miss a step, or at least that's what he told me. I'm recording this in December 2025. He's telling me that he's going to raise his fees. I just hope he follows through. Right now, he's not chasing any prospects anymore. They're actually chasing him.
Here's the part David figured out. He realized he didn't have to teach more. He didn't have to become a content marketer shaking his booty for social validation. In fact, doing those things the wrong way is often the reason financial advisors stay stuck, and the marketing approach he figured out is embarrassingly simple. [02:57.0]
It works because it aligns with how the human nervous system decides whether another person feels safe, competent and trustworthy. It’s the reason some prospects will come up with a ton of objections, like saying they need to think about it and they need to, I don't know, talk to their dog first, instead of just nodding along and saying, “Yep, this makes sense,” or “I feel like you understand me,” and moving forward.
Most financial advisor marketing incorrectly focuses on information, but prospects are not lacking information. They're lacking certainty. Think about that. If people had certainty that you were the best fit for them, don't you think they would move forward? Absolutely. The reason growing a financial advice business is so freaking difficult is because too many financial advisors believe that marketing equals providing information. They believe if they can somehow get more information out to the marketplace, they will get more clients, and that is dead wrong. [03:54.2]
The focus needs to be on resolving uncertainty, because when your marketing helps your prospects resolve uncertainty instead of overwhelming them with information and education, decisions happen faster and with less resistance, and that's the real lever. When I talk about leverage and scale, and all the other cool things that help grow businesses, this is leverage.
Removing uncertainty in your marketing is leverage, because if 5,000 people a month are seeing your marketing materials and you're getting a certain number of people to become clients, cool. Now imagine, if you remove the uncertainty, how many would you get? Once you see how to do this, you really can't unsee it, which is cool because it means it's stuck with you forever.
Uncertainty is emotional first, and then cognitive second. If you address that in the wrong order, then the brain never relaxes enough to accept your logic. You start with emotion. Then you go to logic. The first step. I mean, this does not have to be “the” first step. It's not like this is written in stone or anything, but this is what I have figured out after more than 10 years of helping financial advisors with their marketing and far more than 10 years in the marketing world. You want to name the uncertainty out loud. You want to confront it. You could do this in your meetings. You could do this in your marketing. I recommend both, of course. [05:08.4]
Most advisors avoid doing this because it feels uncomfortable, but avoiding it doesn't make it go away. It's still going to be there, and prospects are silently thinking things like, “Am I going to look stupid? Is this person trying to sell me something? Probably, yeah. I mean, it seems like everybody's trying to sell me something. Everybody's got their hands in my wallet. What if I make the wrong decision? What are the consequences? I'm so scared I don't know what to do?” When you name those fears before they do, you short circuit them.
You could start by saying something like, “Most people come into this conversation worried they'll be pushed into something. That's not how I work.” Boom, you're done. It's that easy. You have removed the uncertainty. Or “Almost everyone worries about making a mistake they can't undo.” See how easy this is? This is not complicated stuff, but when you do it, you demonstrate awareness. You are aware that the prospect is uncertain in that area, and that awareness reduces the uncertainty faster than almost anything else. [06:04.2]
I talked about this in the Inner Circle for years, and what people want to know is what will happen next, and that's true in all marketing. People want to know what will happen when they click the link in your social media post. They want to know what happens when they open your email. That's why using all these images and doodads and just weird stuff in your emails doesn't work. They ruin people's patterns. It ruins the sense of familiarity that people have.
People want to be reassured that when they open your email they will get something familiar, like a story with a lesson or something like that. It should be recognizable. When you create that predictability, it calms the nervous system. I wrote about this in depth in the January Inner Circle Newsletter issue. By the time you listen to this, it'll be way too late for you to get it, but that's also one reason why you should join if you haven't yet, so you’re on the list for the next one, the February Inner Circle Newsletter issue, which will be mailed on February 1. [07:02.3]
Another reason why building a financial advice business can be so freaking difficult. It’s because financial advisors put too much importance on what they do. This is going to be a hot take. This is going to be a little controversial here, but I'll say it. I think financial advisors have this weird professional insecurity where they feel like they need to be taken more seriously than they are. They go out there like, “Respect my authoritah!” and I don't know if I'm explaining this well or not, so I apologize if I'm not. But what I mean is that financial advisors want to be taken seriously so badly and treated like respected professionals so badly that they almost exaggerate their importance, and they exaggerate the weight of their decisions.
To be fair, money is a serious topic, but I think financial advisors sometimes make it too serious to the point where it's intimidating. People freeze when that happens. They don't move forward, so if you're looking for people to move from prospects to clients, it ain't going to happen when people are frozen. They don't want to move forward when that happens. They don't want to move forward when choices feel permanent. [08:09.0]
The catch-22 is that financial advisors kind of have to market services that help people avoid making mistakes and maybe I'll talk about this in a future podcast episode, but for now, I'll tell you that, ironically, giving people an exit makes them more likely to move forward, meaning, you should let people know that they don't have to work with you if they don't want to. They don't even have to take your advice if they don't want to, and that removes uncertainty as well.
Also, while I'm on the topic of financial advisors wanting to be treated more seriously, a lot of advisors have this weird thing where they try to prove how smart they are, and that increases uncertainty, too. Stop trying to prop yourself up as this ultra-smart person and everybody else is dumb but you. Don't do that. Instead, what you want to do is narrate how you think. [08:56.5]
That's a cool trick that I learned a long time ago, I don't remember who told me. I think it may have been the copywriter Clayton Makepeace, don't quote me on that. But, basically, just narrate your thought process, and that works wonders in marketing and copywriting, and applied to financial services, whoo, it is a doozy. It works so well.
For example, you might say something like, “When I see a situation like this, I ignore all the fancy stuff and look at three basic constraints—time, flexibility, and risk tolerance.” You are narrating your thought process. You are telling people how you think about a situation. David—remember David Parker, age 42? He really struggled with this. His meetings were packed with explanations and charts, historical returns and all sorts of concepts. He really struggled with this idea, not that he needed to dumb it down, but he didn't need to position himself as this super-smart intellectual and he knows way more than everybody else. [09:51.4]
He mistakenly believed that clarity came from completeness, so when he was just throwing everything in the kitchen sink at his prospects and it didn't work, what he didn't realize is that all of that stuff felt like complete chaos to his prospects, because they were already unsure. They were unsure about the money situation. They're unsure about whether they should even be in the room with David or in a Zoom meeting with David. They were just unsure about everything. They had that uncertainty.
After David made this shift where he started doing the opposite, he got way better results. He started removing things, so he would say stuff like this. He would say, “There are dozens of strategies that we could talk about here, but only one of them actually matters right now,” or “only one of them is worth exploring right now.” Or “Most advisors would make this more complicated than it needs to be. I don't want to do that for you. I'm going to try to keep things simple, and here's how I do it,” and he would explain his process. He would narrate his thought process. [10:44.0]
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This wasn't really, I guess, dumbing anything down. That's really the wrong way to explain it. It was more like prioritizing, and prioritization is one of the fastest ways to resolve uncertainty. Think about it, if you have a list of a million things to do and you somehow figure out that you need to do this thing next, you have clarity. You know what to do now. That removes the uncertainty. [12:06.8]
Uncertainty grows when everything feels equally important. When you help someone understand what does not deserve his or her attention, that person's mind relaxes, so that person will stop scanning for danger—and I talked about that in the January issue as well. I talked about the literal neuroscience and parts of the brain that get activated when financial advisors make these mistakes.
Lots of financial advisors are marketing in such a way where it is neurologically impossible for people to become clients. Not unlikely, not just difficult. I'm talking about neurologically, legitimately impossible for people to become clients, and I proved that in the January issue. [12:48.0]
Another subtle change that David made was his pacing and he slowed everything down, and this sounds really trivial until you experience it in real life. Most advisors, they just rush without realizing it. They rush explanations and recommendations, and they rush to close even when they say they're not selling. Rushing, what does it do? What does it feel like when someone is rushing through a process with you? What is it? It makes things uncertain. It signals pressure and hidden incentives and suspicion when people are rushing.
David began leaving space. He let his questions just hang out for a little bit. He stopped filling silence. He stopped feeling this urge to just talk forever. He stopped, I guess, rescuing prospects from their own thinking. He just shut up, and something interesting happened. Prospects started talking more. They filled the silence. So, silence from David's part or on David's part, did more to resolve uncertainty than any other explanation could. [13:48.3]
Most advisors are uncomfortable with that silence in their sales process or in their meeting process, or whatever you want to call it. The moment a prospect stops talking, they rush to fill that gap and they explain again, and they add context and clarify and justify. What they do not realize is that this behavior tells the prospect something unintended. It tells prospects that something is being pushed.
When you speak continuously, the prospect's brain stays in evaluation mode, because you're giving them more information to evaluate. That's the reason why. That is the scientific reason why. It keeps scanning for risk. You're giving them more stuff to think about. It wonders what you're trying to get them to agree to. It's taking in more information, and silence shuts that down. Silence communicates that nothing bad happens if the prospects take their time.
Then there was pricing. This was one of the hardest shifts for David, because, like most advisors, he had been trained to do what? To justify his fee. I wish there was a word that means “more intense justification,” because, yes, you need to justify your fee. Of course, you do. But, I mean, like I said earlier, throwing everything in the kitchen sink at his justifying his fee, that's what I'm trying to explain here. [15:06.8]
He stopped doing that. Instead of explaining what his clients got for the fee, he framed the fee itself as the reason his advice could be trusted. Ooh, that's such a good strategy. He would say, “My fee exists so you never have to wonder whether my advice is influenced by commissions.” Or he would say, “This structure allows me to tell you not to do things, even when they sound exciting,” so that reframing removed suspicion before it had a chance to form.
So, the fee was no longer a cost to be defended. It became a stabilizer. It was something that made the relationship safer—and silence mattered here, too. If you get nothing else from this podcast episode, learn to shut up a little bit more in your meetings. [15:48.8]
After explaining his pricing in this way, David did not rush to add more context and just talk more, and say all these things and give the prospects more information. He let it stand on its own, and that pause gave prospects time to process what they just heard without feeling nudged toward agreement. They could process it. They could evaluate it, because when you talk more, you give people more to evaluate. In many cases, the prospect would nod, reflect for a moment, and then ask a more thoughtful question, maybe one that indicated that that person was now more oriented towards saying yes rather than being defensive.
Over time, David noticed that these conversations just became more direct and there was less negotiating going on. There were fewer objections. The fee conversation stopped feeling like a hurdle, and instead, started feeling like what I tell financial advisors it should be—a filter. People who valued clarity and independence would lean in, while people who just wanted reassurance through discounts or something like that just disqualified themselves. So, your fee itself, and your conversation around your fee and your marketing materials around what you charge, should be a qualification mechanism. [16:57.3]
That pattern showed up everywhere once David started paying attention to it. The less he tried to convince, the more certain people felt. The more space he gave prospects to think, the faster they arrived at their own conclusions, and that is the deeper point a lot of advisors miss, because certainty is rarely created by saying the right thing at the right time. It is created by removing the conditions that make people feel guarded in the first place. When you do that, decisions stop feeling so heavy and these meetings don't feel adversarial. Your marketing begins to work together instead of fighting human psychology.
If you want to go through the same program David went through to come to this realization, it's called The Profitable Pricing Blueprint, and you can find it over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/pricing. It's a 57-minute video about how financial advisors can justify their fees the correct way. [17:55.3]
Over the years, I have asked a large number of financial advisors a really simple question: “How do you explain what you charge?” Or other questions, I ask, “How do you help clients understand why your fee is worth it?” The answers tend to fall into a few familiar patterns, and on the surface, they all sound reasonable, but the problem is that they break down when you start to scrutinize them.
For example, one common response is that advisors point to studies like Vanguard Advisor's Alpha or different research about why financial advisors are worth it, and this approach feels intellectually solid and it's the right context. In some cases, it can be very useful if it's used correctly. The issue is not the research itself, though. The issue is that your clients have not read it. They're not emotionally attached to it and they're not making decisions based on white papers. When you lean on third party studies to defend your fee, the message you send, even if unintentionally, is that your value needs outside validation, and that comes across as very needy and very defensive, and it's not a very confident approach. [19:01.8]
Another explanation that financial advisors give is they do the things that technology can't do, like they're humans and they'll be there, and they talk about helping clients navigate life changes and organize paperwork, and all this stuff—and that matters. It reflects responsiveness and the human presence, and things like that, but the problem is that it's largely invisible the minute your fee is evaluated.
Clients do not mentally rewind the last five years and tally up every helpful interaction and say, “Oh, well, he or she was there when I needed this. And, oh, well, he/she is a human so there are points for this.” They don't do that. When the fee appears, they see the number. They feel an immediate emotional reaction and they quietly ask themselves if the fee still makes sense.
If your pricing explanation boils down to “Oh, well, I do a lot of stuff,” then you're positioning yourself as a highly involved administrator rather than a trusted decision guide, and at that point, you're just listing activity. You're just saying all the stuff that you do. You're not reinforcing value. [20:03.0]
I could go on and on and on. I mean, financial advisors say that they keep the clients from making emotional mistakes, and that's important. They say this and that, and none of those explanations are inherently wrong. They're common. They're sincere and they're usually offered with good intentions, but what they share is a critical flaw—they place the burden of justification on the client, so in effect, the advisor is saying, “I do all these things behind the scenes. I care deeply. I stay informed. I help you avoid these problems. You can see why all this is worth it, right?”
But the reality is, the clients do not maintain some internal ledger of your unseen efforts. They're not assigning dollar values to all these mistakes and thoughtful emails and reminders. Their evaluation happens in the blink of an eye, in a single moment—when the fee is presented and their sense of clarity is tested. [20:54.2]
If your explanation, mark my words, if it sounds like a list of tasks, a reference to some study or a vague promise of support in the future, you are not strengthening your perceived value in that moment. You are weakening it, because value is not what you do in the background. It is what feels immediately clear when the price is placed on the table—and if you want to know what to make clear and why, check out the 57-minute video over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/pricing.
That is all I have for you right now. I hope you resonated with this story. Again, David, not his real name. I changed the personal details, but if you can relate, the reason you can relate is because it's very common. I will catch you next week. [21:40.8]
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