Category: Marketing

Social Capital is the key to developing Client Advocates. It’s an asset Advisors already possess, but when left unused, it represents a significant loss of opportunity.

The best way to understand Social Capital is by thinking about your relationships with your clients.

Your clients trust you with their financial assets. However, do they trust you enough to go far beyond referrals, to warmly and personally introduce you to their circle of friends and colleagues, people who are just like them?

When it’s right,  you are a standout. When it isn’t,  you’re invisible.

To create a great marketing story you must first understand that most people don’t fully trust the Financial Industry or Financial Advisors. (See our “People Don’t Trust You” post)

This is their worldview, their bias that focuses on bad experiences and bad news. This is what makes it extremely difficult for Financial Advisors to get prospects and clients to listen and open up.

Most Advisors fail to effectively address this bias. As a result, they fail to make solid, meaningful connections with their prospects and clients.

Successfully addressing this worldview begins when you craft and tell your marketing story. 

A marketing story is very different from garden variety storytelling. It is told in an “other focused” way, a way that addresses what’s important to your prospects and your clients – not to you. 

It’s not about your numbers, facts and figures. And it’s not telling them what you think they want to hear. That will just shut them down, they won’t listen. 

The most important difference between a marketing story and simple storytelling is that a great marketing story is not designed to win business. 

Instead, it’s intended to convey who you are, not just what you do. Not just some of the time, all the time. It effectively addresses biases and puts you in sync with your clients – and  creates real opportunities for growth.

Creating and sharing a great marketing story is the foundation for meaningful business growth. It’s absolutely imperative that you get it right. 

Matthew G Bellis
Simple, Permission Based Quality Client Acquisition
Matthewbellis1@cloud.com

It’s either because Financial Advisors don’t understand the worldview of the market or they don’t address it effectively. However, some Financial Advisor’s behavior does show that there is at least a subconscious awareness of this issue.

Case in point: I’ve conducted many workshops with Financial Advisors. I always began the workshop by introducing myself and what I do for a living. I ask each of the participants to stand and introduce themselves as if I were a prospect. They proceed to describe themselves with some very “creative” names for what they do for a living. “I’m a Wealth Enhancement Specialist”. “I’m an Innovative Financial Solutions Provider”. If you could have been a fly on the wall you would have seen and heard each Advisor, one by one, introduce themselves to the group, not one calling themselves a Financial Advisor. By the end of the introductions we were all chuckling. When I asked why – and this took some thoughtful searching – they all agreed that it was due to consumer “attitude”, as they called it.

This “attitude” is the worldview commonly shared by most of the public, a broad distrust of the industry at large. It’s not something you can change and we find that most Advisors don’t have a strategy to address and move beyond this barrier.

The key is to develop your marketing story. When you truly understand the way clients and prospects think and feel, you can create a marketing story that subtly and effectively addresses this worldview.

Creating this story will be different from anything you’ve ever done in the past and  you may need to erase some muscle memory.  Presenting facts and figures about your performance history doesn’t work. What does work is a passionate story that is about them, not about you. It’s the reason they will believe in you.

When you do this you’ll find your qualified clients will become your best “client advocates”, the most productive centers of influence a Financial Advisor can have.

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It’s always been said that the best way to grow your financial advisory business is through client referrals. However, we all know that getting client referrals is no easy task.

Our research among Financial Advisors shows that activity – getting referrals on an ongoing basis – is, for the great majority, the number one business challenge. The fact is that most of us – unless we are truly gifted in this area – don’t have the ability to gracefully go from the sale to the referral. We’re afraid, we don’t want to be pushy, we don’t want to put off the client. And we’re just too worried about closing the business. Does this sound familiar?

So what’s the solution to this conundrum? It’s learning how to get warm, qualified introductions – the anthesis of referrals. A warm, qualified introduction is when one of your best clients – the kind of client you would love to duplicate – introduces you to one of their qualified close friends, family members or business associates. Someone like them. What makes the introduction truly warm is that it’s done with permission and inclusion.

Here’s the major difference:

Referrals come from a traditional sales based approach where the primary goal is transactional, to make the sale. You provide financial advice to close a sale, to make money and hopefully, to get a referral. But if you don’t get a referral, that sale won’t help increase your activity or future sales.

Warm, qualified introductions are the result of practicing a service based approach where the primary goal is… warm, qualified introductions. These introductions keep your pipeline consistently filled with qualified potential clients, successfully addressing the number one Financial Advisor challenge… new, qualified activity. When you have more activity more implementation follows. As such, having a full pipeline creates tremendous opportunity to grow your income, revenue and business valuation.