[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: What's going on, financial advisors? I hope you're doing well. Welcome to another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. If you're a longtime listener, welcome back. I'm glad to have you. If you're new around these parts, then let me tell you something that applies specifically to you. I got this message from someone that said, “Hey, James, I see you everywhere. How do you help financial advisors? What is it that you can do for me?” [00:55.0]
To answer that question, I recommend going to TheAdvisorCoach.com and falling down the rabbit hole there. You can check out the more than 20 products I've created to help financial advisors with specific marketing problems—like if you want to get clients with LinkedIn, I have a product called How To Get Clients With LinkedIn. If you want to have better discovery meetings, I have a product called How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings. If you want to get more referrals, I've got 51 Referral Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors. You get the idea.
If you have a marketing problem, I probably have a product that can help you solve it, unless it's about something that doesn't work, so if you don't see the problem that you're having reflected in the products and whatnot that I offer, it's probably not a good thing that you're trying to solve or a good problem that you're trying to solve.
At TheAdvisorCoach.com, you can also join the email list. You can look at my media appearances. You can see if you jive with me there. You can kind of get a feel for who I am and what I'm all about. But if I could only give you one way to work with me, and the one thing that I know can make the biggest impact in a financial advisor's career, it would obviously be the Inner Circle. [02:00.0]
Here’s a quick summary of this. I started publishing this print newsletter back in 2018, which means I was writing without artificial intelligence. Imagine that, lots of people can't even say that. Every month I mail its 20 or so pages to financial advisors all across the United States and in multiple countries around the world. I have subscribers from all walks of life. There are men and women, young and old, all sorts of companies ranging from solo RIAs to Edward Jones to everything in between.
Each issue is chock full of marketing strategies, real-world campaigns, ideas, and all of these things that financial advisors can use to get clients and build more efficient businesses. The required investment to receive the monthly print newsletter in your mailbox every single month—I guess that's redundant, because it's monthly—is $199 per month. It's cheap enough that any serious financial advisor can afford it, but it's expensive enough to keep the tire kickers at bay, and keeping the tire kickers out is important to me for two reasons, and actually this is really strongly related to what we're going to talk about in the podcast episode today. This is qualification and repulsion marketing. [03:09.4]
Reason No.1 is Inner Circle members also get direct email access to me for their questions. They get a secret subject line that they can use. It gets flagged in my email inbox, and I will respond directly to them, almost always within 24 hours. Unless I'm traveling or I'm on vacation somewhere, almost always within 24 hours. I think 99% of my emails are responded to within 24 hours.
Reason No.2 is I host monthly “Office Hours” through Zoom exclusively for Inner Circle members. I don't want freebie seekers on these calls. I don't want tire kickers on these calls. They're very casual. They're informal, but we still get some serious work done. I turn on my microphone and my camera, and I just hang out on Zoom. I'm ready and able to help my Inner Circle members with whatever business problems they're facing. They can get help right there on the spot. My super simple, I guess, pitch goes something like this: [04:03.8]
How much do you make per client? Because a year in the Inner Circle cost $199 times 12, which is $2,388 per year. Many financial advisors find that getting just one extra client per year can pay for the Inner Circle and then some. If you cannot get one, just one extra client with, think of this, 12 newsletter issues, a year's worth of email access to me, and 12 Office Hours sessions, not with just me, but with your peers, then you are the problem. I say that only half-jokingly. I mean, you really are the problem if you can't get results with stuff like that.
Or think about it this way. How much do you make per year? Let's say you're making $200,000 per year right now, and if that's the case, then all the Inner Circle needs to do to pay for itself is to help you increase your income by 1.2% per year, and if it increases your income by a whopping, unimaginable 2.4%, oh my, goodness help us, then it's a 100% return on investment for you. [05:12.8]
If you want shortcuts without thinking, or if you want someone to, quote-unquote, “do marketing” for you, which cannot work for neurological reasons that are too long to share here, then this is not for you. If you want better thinking, if you want better strategies, if you want access to someone who has just literally tested this stuff for years, then you will feel right at home.
If that sounds like something you're interested in, you can check it out for yourself over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. If you end up joining, I look forward to welcoming you with open arms. I take my Inner Circle members’ success very seriously, but there's also a universal law at play, where you only get out what you put in, so if you're not willing to do the work, then you will not get results. You can only get out what you put in. It's the law of sowing and reaping. [05:57.0]
But enough about that, even though it's kind of related to the episode today. It's about why your website should repel 95% of prospects. The reason why is because most people won't be good fits for you anyway. All right, we're done here. I'll catch you next week. No, I'll give you a little bit more. But that truly is the biggest reason. I mean, I'm not going to dress it up too much. That is legitimately the number one biggest reason is simply that most people are not going to be good fits for you anyway.
You see, many advisors build their website with one goal. They want to look professional so everyone who visits will want to work with them, but that's just silly. All marketers know—I guess I shouldn't say all, because some people out here just don't know what they're talking about, but all the good marketers know—that that's complete baloney, and the top-performing financial advisors do the opposite. They build websites that clearly signal, if you're not their ideal client, then this isn't the place for you, and what's cool is the financial advisors who repel the most people end up attracting the best people also. [07:05.2]
I've discovered that selective positioning, what we're talking about here, beats broad appeal every day of the week, and it's not even really appeal. It's just that you're trying to put yourself out there for everyone. Lots of financial advisor websites say some variation of “We help individuals, families, and business owners achieve their financial goals,” like, whoopee, and the translation of that is “I work with everyone,” and that instantly creates three problems.
Problem No.1 is low trust because of that broad positioning. Broad positioning signals shallow expertise, because people inherently know that a jack of all trades can be a master of none or cannot be a master of any of them, so that is where the low trust comes from. They just simply do not trust the jack of all trades. [07:54.2]
Imagine if I came to you and I said, “Oh yeah, I help attorneys and dentists, and corporate executives and small business owners with their marketing, but I can help you, too,” you would not trust me as much as if I came to you as I am today, and say, “Look, I've literally been helping financial advisors for the past 10-plus years. I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes of a podcast that is literally titled financial advisor marketing. I've sent thousands and thousands of emails about financial advisor marketing. I've written a print newsletter for heaven's sake with 20-plus pages every single month about this topic since 2018. My body of written work contains more pages than Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia combined. That is 100% true. We can verify that. Come at me, bro. But, I mean, seriously, the credibility part is humongous.
Problem No.2 is a low close rate, because prospects won't feel like you're specifically for them. This impacts the overall economics of your business, which means you end up paying more for your marketing. You make less money per hour, and you have a lower enterprise value, if that applies to you, all because you decided to let five prospects walk out of the door for every client you get instead of only one or two or three. [09:08.7]
Problem No.3 is low pricing power. This is because generalists cannot charge specialist fees. It just does not happen. It doesn't happen in the capitalistic society in which we live.
So, the problems are low trust, low close rate, and low pricing power. Top financial advisors, on the other hand, are very, very, very specific about who they serve. They say they help dentists or airline pilots, or women going through divorce. See the difference? One group tries to get everyone where they say, “We help individuals and families, and business owners,” and that just doesn't work. They don't get as many prospects. But the other group, the women going through divorce, the airline pilots, that group ends up becoming irresistible to that specific niche. [09:53.8]
Your website should not be a billboard. It should be a sorting machine. Think of it kind of like TSA at the airport. I remember back in the olden days when TSA PreCheck was a rare thing. Very few people had TSA PreCheck, so that line meant something and you could actually get through the airport a little bit faster. Today, something like a third of flyers have it. I should probably check on that. I think it's 32% or 33%, or 34%, so what's the point? I mean, almost everyone has TSA PreCheck now. Even today, CLEAR is the new thing, but not all airports have CLEAR. It's just a mess. [10:30.5]
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.
I guess this analogy isn't as strong as I thought it was going to be, but imagine this. Imagine if only 5% of people had TSA PreCheck. You want your marketing to be like that—95% of people will go one way off in another direction, but 5% of people get pulled into the VIP line with express service. So, instead of getting fondled by TSA with your shoes off, you, my dear friend, get the absolute pleasure of getting fondled by TSA with your shoes on. Oh my gosh, how cool is that? You don't have to take your laptop out of the bag when you're getting fondled. [12:04.7]
Most marketers obsess over the wrong things, like more leads and more clicks, and more people and more traffic, and more appointments. They want more and more and more of everything—and don't get me wrong, don't get this twisted, those things matter when applied at the right time in the right place—but I care much more about the P word, profit, because profit gives financial advisors freedom and margin, and the ability to reinvest in just all of the things that you want in your business to just compound over time. Profit should be the North Star.
I have met so many financial advisors over the years who have been sold all of these goofy promises from these marketing coaches and consultants and gurus about getting more leads. Leads, for example, is always a big sticking point, but leads aren't even the real problem in most cases, because anyone with a pulse and a credit card can generate leads. It is not that difficult. You can open a Meta account and start running ads today. You can start posting on LinkedIn right now. You can go to a list broker. You can rent a mailing list and get 1,000 pieces in the mail by tomorrow. [13:11.2]
Very rarely do financial advisors have a lead problem. They have a leverage problem. They're putting energy in activities that increase volume without improving quality, conversion, pricing power, and all the things that you need to increase profit. When you do that, all you get is busier. I don't want the financial advisors I serve to be busier. I want them to be more productive.
Productivity is about input versus output. I want them to put the same input in and get far more output, or I want them to put far less in and get the same output. If you want to make your $500,000 per year and work half the time, that's cool. If you want to work the same amount of time and make double the money, double it to a million dollars per year, that's cool, too. We can take both paths. [13:57.2]
How much better could your business be if you cut out even just half of the people who never turn into clients for you? What if you just snapped your fingers and got rid of them, never had to deal with them ever again? This is where websites, primarily, and all marketing materials, honestly, do a lot of damage, because—let's forget the niche thing for a second. Let's talk about good, common business sense—if your website is written to appeal to everyone, then it also, by definition, attracts people who are fee-sensitive, who are comparison-shopping, and who are unsure of what they want. It's not that they're bad people or they're evil or malicious or anything. They're just not for you, and they're mighty expensive when you start spending time with them. This is real money that you could put back into your business. [14:47.4]
Let's say you're an advisor making $400,000 per year. For easy math, that works out to be roughly $200 per hour. If you spend five hours a month either talking to or doing all of the other things with the poor-quality prospects, that's $1,000 a month in real money leaving your business. Actually, it's more than that, because if that time was reinvested properly, it could give you even more money, and obviously, you can adjust this up and down. If you're making $100,000 per year, then it's $50 per hour. What did I say? Five hours? So, 250 bucks a month go on out the window.
Back to the Inner Circle thing. If the Inner Circle is $199 per month, and all the Inner Circle did was literally just help you shore up that productivity problem in that one area, that one slice of your business, it pays for itself. Kind of cool. What the best websites do is they pre-frame the relationship before that first conversation ever happens, so by the time prospects book a call with you, they already know who you work with. They know who you do not work wit and they know what kinds of problems you can solve for them. They know this. [15:55.0]
Think about this from another business' point of view, or you're a consumer. Why in the world would you schedule an appointment with an air conditioning company if you have a plumbing problem, right? But that happens in the financial advice industry. It happens all the time. But if you clearly say, “Hey, we're not just a home improvement company. We specialize in plumbing only, or we specialize in air conditioning only,” then never the twain shall meet, and this alone changes the entire dynamic of your first meeting, because you're no longer persuading or selling as hard as you otherwise would be. All you're doing is just confirming that you're a good fit.
Now, this doesn't mean that you need to plaster your website with “If you make less than this dollar amount or something like that, then go away.” That's not what I'm talking about. You don't have to be hostile like I sometimes am. It's saying things like “We work primarily with people in this phase of life,” or “We tend to be a good fit for clients who value this and are less concerned with this, or if you're looking for this, then we're probably not the right fit for you," and those sentences do more filtering than any fancy funnel ever will. [17:05.4]
Here's the part that trips advisors up. They worry that being specific will shrink their opportunity. In reality, it concentrates it. Yes, fewer people will raise their hands. That's the point. But the people who do will be easier to work with. They'll be more decisive, and they will be more profitable. That's the P word. That's what you want. You want more of the P word in your business. That's how you end up with fewer meetings, better clients, and higher confidence in your pricing. I didn't even mention that, right? I mean, that could be an entire podcast episode all by itself.
Simply by doing this and getting involved in this process, you will be far more likely to have a successful price increase, which, again, increases your profitability, and once you experience those things, it's very hard to go back to the old way. You won't want to be a generalist again. You won't want to do the attraction marketing. You’ll be all in on repulsion marketing. [17:58.4]
Again, I cannot stress this enough, I care about the total profit in your business. I think that you should be in business to build personal wealth for yourself. Of course, that wealth comes from serving others, but let's keep the main thing the main thing—your goal is personal wealth creation through a valuable service to people in your target market.
When you start viewing the world through that lens, you realize a lot of these advisors out there thumping their chest about how awesome they are and how they built these businesses that are super-duper cool and amazing, and then “Look at me! Look at me!” they build their businesses on sand, because they might have great revenue numbers and all of these vanity metrics, but they have virtually no personal wealth, because a surprising amount of financial advisor marketing advice is built around activity, not outcomes.
I don't care as much about the activity. Again, I don't want more activity, necessarily. I will pursue more activity if that leads to more profit, which it does when applied correctly. However, I refuse to chase activity for activity's sake. Selective positioning is usually much better because it forces you to answer some difficult questions. [19:07.8]
Who do you genuinely do your best work for? What problems energize you instead of exhausting you? What conversations almost always lead somewhere useful and profitable in your business? When your website reflects those answers, it stops functioning like a little brochure from the 1990s and it starts functioning like a filter, and filters are incredibly profitable when you let them do their job.
It also simplifies your overall decision-making and what you think about, because when someone reaches out who isn't a fit, then you don't agonize over whether you should make it work or you have to pull out all the stops for this person. The answer is already there. You can just tell them politely and clearly who you're for and who you're not, so deciding, your internal decision-making, becomes easier. It becomes faster. It becomes cleaner. You don't have all of these long explanations. You don't have any guilt about the process. It just is what it is, and that alone can free up an incredible amount of bandwidth for you, an incredible amount of mental space. [20:09.2]
When you stack that over months and years, compounding starts to show up everywhere. Your calendar starts to become more efficient. It opens up. Your energy improves. All of these things start to compound. That's why I'm far less interested in these clever copy tricks and tactics and design trends that most people rely on when they're, quote-unquote, “marketing,” if you can even call it that. It’s not marketing, but that's what they say it is. A website doesn't need to impress or do those things. It just needs to align with the people you want as your clients.
I'll give you a specific example of how I do this, how I implement repulsion marketing in my business, how I eat my own cooking. I am constantly filtering financial advisors with the Inner Circle, which I mentioned earlier. I am purposefully pushing away financial advisors who are wishy-washy and/or advisors who are uncomfortable with doing the hard work necessary to build successful businesses. [21:08.2]
These people self-select out before they ever hit my inbox, which protects my time, it protects my energy and the quality of the decisions I'm able to make. I have a lot more mental bandwidth because of that. That's repulsion marketing doing its job. For the right financial advisors, they see those qualification mechanisms and love them. They absolutely love them. They create relief. They think to themselves, Good. That's incredible news. I don't want to be spoon fed anyway. I don't want to be talked down to. They love that.
The irony is that the more clearly your website signals who should move on, the more trust it builds with the people who stay. They don't feel sold. They feel relieved. They recognize themselves in what you've written, and arrive already aligned with how you think and how you work, and how you make decisions. That alignment is worth far more than an extra lead or two or three that that never would have turned into a healthy client relationship anyway. [22:02.6]
Most advisors underestimate how much of this filtering they're doing manually every single week and in meetings that go nowhere and they don't do anything. It's just a lot of time and a lot of effort. Repulsion marketing simply moves that work upstream, so instead of doing it in your meetings, instead of doing it one on one, you do it in your marketing materials. It lets words do what you have personally been doing for years.
When you allow your website and your marketing materials to carry some of that load, the rest of your marketing gets simpler and calmer, and more profitable, almost by default. Don't be afraid to do this. I know it might sound intimidating if you've never done it before, but I promise you, it is the superior way. With that said, I will catch you next week. [22:48.3]
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