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 are two of the main reasons why financial advisors struggle with marketing. They either don't know what to do, or they know what to do, but don't do it. If you don't know what to do, then the solution is obvious. It's just to figure out what to do. It's knowledge. You need to learn what works and what doesn't. I have all sorts of products designed to solve this problem. [00:53.0]
I have a marketing plan showing financial advisors how to create a simple three-step marketing plan specifically for their businesses. I have the “How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings” video that gives financial advisors the knowledge they need to have better discovery meetings. So, if they don't know how to do it, I show them how to do it. Unfortunately, that's not all there is. There's a saying that if knowledge was all we needed, we would all be millionaires with six-pack abs, because knowledge is not enough. You also have to implement the knowledge.
Most advisors already know what to do at a surface level. For example, they know they should follow up. They know they should publish content. They know they should have a niche, and yet knowing alone doesn't translate into sustained action. So, today's episode will not be about, quote-unquote, “knowing” the tactics. It will be about why marketing feels tough for some advisors and effortless for others, even when they have the same knowledge. [01:50.8]
This episode is going to challenge some assumptions and it'll probably be uncomfortable for a lot of you listening, but my goal is that it will at least provide that spark that changes how you approach building your business. If you've ever felt like you're capable of more growth than you're experiencing, but you can't quite get the traction despite trying a whole bunch of stuff, then this episode is for you. I have a lot of written notes here because I don't want to miss anything, so if it sounds like I'm reading from something at some points during this episode, I am, because it's such an important topic that I want to ensure I express my ideas as clearly as possible. Let's begin.
I frequently see the pattern where financial advisors will reach a point of frustration and then decide to change something. For example, an advisor might wake up one day and just get sick of prospecting feeling awkward. He's just fed up with having to be rejected all the time and having to do the dog and pony show for people who don't really care, so he changes something. He might buy a course or hire a consultant, or start posting to LinkedIn or commit to content marketing elsewhere. [02:52.0]
Whenever advisors do this, there's usually a short burst of activity and optimism, but then things just kind of taper off. If he decides to post to LinkedIn, then his posts start becoming more sporadic, so instead of every single day, he's every other day, and then every third day, it's just like, I don't feel like posting today. That thing happens. If he launched a YouTube channel, he goes weeks without uploading anything, and eventually, the advisor concludes one of the following three things.
Number one, “marketing doesn't work,” which is just silly. I don't know why you would ever think that. Number two is that he picked the wrong strategy, or, number three, he's not a good marketer, he's not wired for marketing, he's not naturally talented, etc., etc., and none of those explanations are accurate, except maybe the wrong strategy one, but still, a lot of things can work if you work. What actually happened is the advisor tried to change his behavior without changing his identity, and identity always wins. All behavior is downstream from identity. [03:52.3]
Marketing is difficult when it conflicts with who you are. There are advisors out there who don't struggle with the same activities, and other advisors cannot bring themselves to see that, and they can't bring themselves to do those activities. I see it all the time with the Inner Circle members versus everyone else. There are advisors out there who dominate content marketing. They crush it, and there are other advisors who struggle with anything content-related. The advisors who do well have aligned their actions with how they see themselves, so to them, marketing is part of who they are. It's just what they do. To other advisors, marketing feels like friction, because it threatens a self-image they're protecting.
You might think that's a little out there or a little strange, but think about it this way. How many times have you heard financial advisors say these things? “I'm referral-only. I don't need to sell,” or “I'm not a salesperson,” or “I don't want to be too promotional,” or “I'm not a marketer,” or “I don't want to be pushy.” Those identities are interpretations. You could have the softest sales pitch in the world, and someone could still get offended. They would still say, “Oh, that's too much. That’s too aggressive. That’s too pushy,” because it's an interpretation. [05:01.6]
You are going through your life with your interpretation of all of these things, and that forms your identity. Once an identity is formed, your nervous system will defend it. That's why advisors can intellectually agree with marketing advice while resisting execution every step of the way. They will not implement the advice, because they're desperately trying to protect this image that they formed of themselves.
Here's something else to consider. Your current behavior, what you're doing right now, reflects what you actually want, not what you say you want. That might sound strange, so let me break it down. You see, every behavior is goal-oriented. Every time you procrastinate or avoid something, that's also a behavior. That counts as well.
When advisors avoid follow-up, for example, that avoidance is serving a purpose. When advisors delay publishing content, that delay is serving a purpose. The purpose is usually protection. “Protection from what?” you might ask. It could be a myriad of things, but it's usually protection from judgment, rejection, exposure, evaluation, just stuff like that, and I'll be the first person to admit that a lot of financial advisors truly do have a discipline problem. [06:15.3]
They are just not disciplined enough to get the things that they want out of life, but that's not always the case, because sometimes advisors say they want to get more clients, they say they want to build a better business, but their behavior suggests they're protecting their identities, which means it has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with safety.
Marketing struggles when there is a mismatch between the stated goal and the reality, the behavior, the lived goal, and you cannot outwork an unconscious goal. If your unconscious mind wants something, and you're intellectually saying, “No, I want this other thing. I want this other thing,” your unconscious mind is going to win, and you might have a real breakthrough here. [06:57.8]
Most financial advisors are really rational, intelligent people. They’re great. So, when their actions don't match their stated goals, what do they do? They start creating explanations, and those explanations preserve their identity. It is a perpetuating cycle. They preserve their self-respect. Here are some of the explanations that I've heard from financial advisors over the years.
“Oh, I just need to refine my message more,” or “I need the right niche. I'm waiting until my website is finished. I don't want to put out low-quality content.” Sometimes those explanations are valid, but often they are cover stories to protect identity while allowing an action to continue without guilt. That's why advisors can stay stuck for years while still feeling productive. They think they're productive because they're busy and thinking and planning and preparing, but they're not actually doing anything that matters, because when you do the stuff that matters, you open yourself up to receiving feedback from the marketplace, and that feedback threatens your identity, so you create a world that avoids the feedback. [07:59.3]
Let's talk about how identity actually forms. First, you pursue a goal. Then, based on your reticular activating system, that goal shapes what you notice. If I tell you to focus on red Toyota Corollas, you're going to start seeing them more and more and more. But if I ask you at the end of the day, “How many red Toyota Corollas did you see today?” you would have no idea.
So, your reticular activating system tells you what to notice based on your goal, and you act based on what you notice. You receive feedback from all the stuff that you notice. You adapt your behavior, and as you progress towards your goal, it becomes automatic. You start telling a story about who you are. Once that story solidifies, you defend it. [08:44.2]
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And why wouldn't you defend it? It's just a natural, rational thing to do. Of course, you would defend it, because it's the behavior that got you what you wanted. This is also why advisors react so strongly when certain beliefs are challenged, because the belief is integrated into who they think they are, and I need to get better at recognizing this when I give marketing advice, because when I challenge an advisor's beliefs about marketing, I'm threatening the very psychological structure that has kept him or her safe. [10:10.8]
The nervous system responds to identity threats the same way it responds to physical threats, with defensiveness and avoidance, and rationalization and withdrawal. They run away, even if they don't physically run away, although sometimes they do. Sometimes they run away from me. They mentally run away.
So, even though I get frustrated when I try to help financial advisors and they get defensive, I need to get better at this. I need to step back and realize it's just biology. But it still doesn't change the fact that different business models require different internal operating systems, because you cannot build a better business, a modern, visible, scalable business, while operating primarily from a conformist or self-protective mindset. What got you here will not get you there. [10:53.4]
If your internal priority is staying in your comfort zone, your marketing will be constrained. For instance, content marketing isn't always about writing or publishing or recording. It's about putting your opinions out into the world, which requires a level of internal development where disagreement is tolerable.
You need to be okay with people viewing what you've created and not liking it, or listening to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast and absolutely hating it. There are people out there who hate this podcast, and that's okay. People unsubscribe from my email list every single day, and that's okay. I'm in the mental space where I acknowledge that feedback is data and visibility is not equated to danger. I do not need to run away from this feedback.
Oh, and while I think about it, this is why copying tactics rarely works. I see financial advisors copying each other all the time. They see that so-and-so has a YouTube channel, and they think they need one, too, or they see so-and-so going to this event, so they need to go to the same event because they might miss something. It's just goofy, because you cannot borrow the internal lens that makes those actions sustainable. You cannot adopt the same context and the belief system that makes the other financial advisors' success possible. [12:07.0]
Here's another lesson I want you to understand. Intelligence in marketing is the ability to steer. It's the ability to act, observe, feedback, adjust and continue without emotional collapse. Low marketing intelligence looks like this: you try something once. It doesn't work immediately, so you conclude it doesn't work, and then you stop that. Financial advisors say, “Oh, I tried direct mail that one time and it didn't work” “Oh, I tried email marketing that one time and it didn't work. I'm not going to try it again.” That's low marketing intelligence.
High marketing intelligence looks like this. You try something. You observe the results. You adjust the variables. You repeat and you persist across time. The most intelligent financial advisors stay oriented toward a direction even when their individual efforts fail. Again, feedback is information, and they keep going. [12:56.4]
If an advisor came to me feeling stuck, here's something I would recommend. Take one day to interrupt your automatic behavior. Get honest about what your behavior is protecting you from. During the day, you repeatedly ask yourself what your actions are actually moving you toward. What are they actually doing? Act as the smallest believable version of the advisor you want to become.
You don't need to have everything figured out right away, because the smallest version would only do one or two things differently. Maybe that's publishing a post. Maybe that's sending a little bit of a riskier email you wouldn't have sent before. But you'll be able to do it because you'll be more aligned with who you want to become.
If you are a financial advisor currently making $300,000 per year, and your goal, or at least, you tell yourself your goal, is to make a million dollars per year, you need to adopt the identity of a financial advisor earning $1 million per year, and the financial advisor who is doing that will have a different set of behaviors and actions and beliefs than you currently have right now, because if you had those beliefs and you had those same actions, you would already be there. [14:04.2]
One of the ultimate ironies in business is that when your identity aligns, tactics suddenly work better. So, even though I say tactics don't really matter that much, the tactics actually work better when your identity changes, but the tactics don't change. Posting on LinkedIn is still the same tactic for you, for me, and for everyone else on the platform, but the execution can change, and that allows marketing to feel more natural. It feels like something you should be doing because you're becoming a different person. You should be doing it.
I put emphasis on that. You are going to do that, like a healthy person should be eating fruits and vegetables and lean meats and dairy instead of junk food all the time. That's just something a healthy person does. A smoker, for the reverse, a smoker is someone who smokes cigarettes and all the other things that you could possibly smoke, right? But if someone has the identity of a non-smoker, that person is not going to smoke. That's how it works in business. That's how it works in life everywhere. [15:02.5]
When you feel like it's something you should do, you start saying things like, “I should have done this years ago,” or “This isn't as hard as I thought,” and when advisors say things like that, it's a signal that they're becoming different people. When an advisor says, “This isn't as hard as I thought it would be,” or “I should have done this years ago,” the advisor is now saying, “I am stepping into a new version of myself. I am moving away from the old actions and identities and behaviors that I used to have.”
In the 300,000 to a million case, if a financial advisor is doing stuff that gets him or her to a million dollars per year, he or she's going to look back at the old version of $300,000 per year and say, “I don't know why I ever stayed stuck that long. I don't know why I did those things.” It happens all the time. [15:46.4]
Let me zoom out and bring this home. If you've been listening to this episode and thinking, Okay, that explains a lot, that is the point. It explains why people stay stuck in marketing, because most financial advisors don't fail at marketing due to a lack of intelligence or a lack of effort, at least not all the time, or even information, because, again, I've established that they know what to do. They fail because their identity and actions are not aligned.
When those things are misaligned, marketing feels way harder than it should be. It feels forced. It feels like something you have to psych yourself up to do instead of, again, something you should be doing, something that a person with your identity naturally does, and no amount of tactics can override that for very long. But when identity shifts, everything downstream gets easier. Identity changes the behavior that you repeat long enough for your nervous system to recalibrate. [16:44.7]
That's why I keep emphasizing, you want to become the smallest believable version of the advisor you're becoming, and then you do the smallest version of that, and then the smallest version of that, and you start shifting slowly over time. Once that happens, tactics finally have something to attach themselves to. They have an identity to attach to, and that's when marketing plans and discovery videos, and content strategies and all the things that I put out there, they actually stick for financial advisors because of the identity. [17:15.1]
Now that's all I have for today. If this episode hit a nerve with you, sit with it. Don't rush to consume more information. Just sit with this for a while and let it change how you see yourself, and how you see the work that you've been avoiding, and how you can step into that new identity.
If you want help operating at this level consistently, not just after a moment of clarity, that's exactly what we do inside the Inner Circle. So, if you want to check that out, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more, to see if it's a good fit for you—and I will catch you next week. [17:44.6]
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