In this webinar we will cover the essential role centers of influence (COI): attorneys, estate planners, accountants, and other professionals play in the planning process and how advisors can best interact with them. We will focus on overcoming the critical hurdle with many COIs: a reluctance to partner with an advisor and how these relationships benefit your mutual clients to support your business.
Sara will answer attendees’ questions during the webinar and will be available to continue the discussion on APViewpoint.
Conference booths are by far the #1 most archaic form of marketing. Throw that booth application form in the trash bin. Here are better ways to spend your conference-marketing dollars.
Seniority works in the advisor’s favor, but not when looking “too old” brings on age discrimination and deters clients from working with you. Here are some ways to address that without using Botox or plastic surgery.
While I am grateful to see many advisors (both female and male) focused on serving women, here are a few ideas to connect more deeply and powerfully.
September is life insurance awareness month so I thought I’d celebrate by cautioning against the worst clichés frequently used when selling insurance.
No fee model is 100% free of conflict, but retainer or flat fees are close to achieving that goal – and are very popular. Yet it is hard to make both the advisor and client equally happy. How do advisors set this up in a way that sustains their practice in alignment with the value they provide, yet charges the client fairly?
Here’s a powerful strategy that advisors who hold the CFA® designation can use to build their brands and monetize their credential.
I interviewed two very successful businesspeople. Here is how to get meetings with these kinds of super-rich individuals – and what advisors should never do.
Here is my list of the five tackiest depictions of retirement. Are any of these pictures on your website?
There’s nothing worse than the feeling of throwing money down the drain. Unfortunately this is the experience that most advisors have with marketing. If you haven’t gotten the results you wanted in 2018, here is where you went wrong and how you should change your marketing budget in September to fix the problem.
I’m not currently a dog owner or an advisor anymore; but if I were, my dog would absolutely be a prominent component of my marketing strategy.
Bearing and raising children can set you back or it can be the catalyst for better performance and higher earnings. Ever since having kids I’ve become more successful in my career and it has a great deal to do with my willingness to challenge the myths about being a working mother.
The car you drive isn’t just a status symbol. In the age of digital communication, Bluetooth and wired vehicles, advisors can use their cars to drive leads by converting boring downtime during a commute into active prospecting.
Having a beard is a great way to set yourself apart and grow your business.
It’s one of those things you’re told never to do. But here’s an example when crying in front of a client led to a breakthrough I never would have made dry-eyed.
For advisors who work with people in transition, there is no more transitory place than an elevator. Here’s how I nabbed a prospect while scaling 20 floors – and some steps you can follow to meet prospects in an elevator.
The fact that millennials are the next generation of wealth is well-documented. What remains to be explored, however, is how advisors can best design their practices to communicate with Millennials as clients. Using the right words is an important part of reaching this population. Advisor language has typically been dry, impersonal, and full of cliché and jargon. This has to change if advisors want to retain assets and succeed with intergenerational wealth transfer within their books of business. If not, fee compression and roboadvisors pose a very large competitive threat.
This seminar will teach advisors what they need to know about how to communicate effectively with Generation Y. It will cover:
Just as investors have beliefs that limit their ability to grow their portfolio, advisors have beliefs that limit their ability to grow their practices. Those who overcome resistance get the most business. Here’s how the cycle of resistance works and what you can do about it.
Roboadvisors don’t cause fee compression; when used correctly by advisors, they are the solution.
With stints at firms such as Hightower and United Capital, Todd Eklund has worked with some of the largest RIA firms. Having seen and observed some of what works and what doesn’t in the advisor space, I thought his perspective would be valuable to RIA firms considering outsourcing to a TAMP.
Looking spiffy for work as an advisor doesn’t mean taking out a second mortgage on your home. Here are some high-end brand picks that I saw at my local Goodwill store.
Advisors need a shot clock to keep their sales and marketing efforts on point. What if every 24 hours, you have to get a new prospect in the pipeline or your competitor gets a shot at them?
If your brand is failing to connect with affluent prospects, here’s a glimpse inside their minds.
Here is the number one lie that advisors tell themselves and the rest of the world about retirement: Nowadays people are living until they’re 90!
Find a good external manager, take the cut on fees and outsource the management of your investments. Then turn around and be obsessively thorough with your marketing efforts. In the long run your practice will be better for it.
It’s not just smaller advisor firms with limited marketing resources that can use podcasting to deliver their messaging to affluent prospects and clients. Big firms can easily leverage the potential of podcasts. I recently started a modestly successful podcast, so here are my suggestions for those who are thinking of doing the same.
After I published my last article on whether you should wear a necktie, I had an overwhelming response from female advisors seeking fashion “inspo.” In response, here are a few summer fashion tips.
Transitioning to a new broker dealer or RIA firm is as appealing as using someone else’s toothbrush.
Don't ditch the necktie without reading this advice.
Every advisor falls into these five social media profiles. Which one are you?
I've yet to meet an advisor who I wished had written a book.
Can you connect to big shot prospects through social media? Most advisors don’t even try. That’s a shame, because I’ve found an extremely effective way to reach just about anyone.
As someone who is in contact with tons of advisors each month, I’m constantly amazed at how so many of them will spend six thousand dollars on a Brioni suit to make them look successful and pay zero attention to their hair.
How to dress is not something they teach you in the CFP curriculum, but they should.
Advisors should use a few elements from Silicon Valley’s office design to improve success when prospects visit.
How should you approach a casual acquaintance and open the dialogue about working together?
Everyone keeps saying that advisor fees are on the decline. Hogwash!
Humor is a lethal weapon. To connect better with your audience, refresh them, relieve tension in stressful situations and be more relatable and real to the people you want to impress, here are ways to infuse humor into your business, and some that you’re better off leaving out.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of the Internet, a crafty little marketing consultant figured out how to make a small advisory firm look bigger than it is. I’ll show how that was done. But first I’ll go over a few commonly used and slightly-less-than-scrupulous tactics that you should avoid.
If you’re not getting leads from social media, it’s because you are investing your time in the wrong way. Here are five tasks to do on a daily basis that will eventually yield clients and assets.
The previous article I wrote on this subject was so popular that I had to continue my tirade. Toss these six marketing buzzwords in the never-to-be-used jargon dumpster, in reverse order from the least to most offensive.
Most advisors are frustrated and ready to throw social media out the window, but the game is about to get even tougher. Social media won’t be free much longer. Here’s how I see it happening and what it will mean for advisors who are counting on it.
Even if your ability to post to social media is restricted, it is still a very powerful prospecting tool. Here are a few ideas that don’t involve posting content.
Mid-sized advisor firms, upon graduating from being a one- or two-person operation, find themselves contending with all sorts of growing pains. All of a sudden they have the marketing issues of a larger firm – with an infrastructure that hasn’t caught up. Here’s my best advice to escape the trap of the mid-sized advisor firm.
For those of you who think that social media is a useless tool for financial advisors, I’m going to tell you a story about my success back when I was an advisor.
Advisors grow their businesses through word of mouth and referrals. But when it comes to active prospecting, most have no clue how to engage a prospect from discovery to closing. Here are the two costliest mistakes advisors make once they have a prospective client.
They call themselves fee-based, dual-registered or hybrid advisors, but I’ll call them “part-time fiduciaries.” Don’t hate me for this, but I recently referred my close friend to one of them. Despite the bombardment of propaganda from fee-only RIAs, these part-time fiduciaries are pretty good.
The great fee debate continues. I’ve heard a new paradigm coming into the market: advisors who charge no commissions or tiered fees, just a flat, annual retainer. It’s a nice idea but in reality they’re trading one bias for another – and I’ll explain why.
Here’s my call for 2018: Most robo-advisors are going to fail. Read on to see why I don’t drink the Robo Kool-Aid that the financial industry and media are serving up.
If you’re giving your website a makeover, an investment in photos of your actual team (as opposed to tacky stock photos) is a great way to give it a personalized feeling. Here are five things to do and (more importantly) what to avoid to have it come out like the perfect Ansel Adams.
