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If you are an Advisor you undoubtedly have a group of best clients. Clients who are friendly, appreciative and cooperative. And they generate great revenue.

Wouldn’t business be easier, more profitable and more fun if these clients regularly and personally introduced you to their qualified friends and colleagues?

Advisors come to us wondering why these best clients will sometimes give a referral name but are not making quality personal introductions. When we ask how many first appointments they’ve had with quality friends of their best clients over the last year or two, the answer generally is “very few”.

The very first thing we look at is their story. Because for starters, if their story isn’t “remarkable”, it really isn’t worth talking about.

A remarkable story is about who you are, not what you do. It’s not about your facts and figures. That’s just the same old talk and it doesn’t stick.

We’ve spoken with countless Financial Advisors whose stories are basically all the same; how their firm is different, where they went to school, the degrees they’ve earned, how great their numbers are, their charitable work, their families. There is nothing about their story that clients feel in their gut.

When you have the right Remarkable Marketing Story, your clients will respond to you far differently. We have found that as soon as an Advisor moves away from their old (read: tedious) marketing story to an effective client centric story – one that has meaning to the listener – everything begins to shift. Their qualified activity goes way up, their confidence goes up, and their revenue upticks.

Developing an effective Remarkable Marketing Story is a deliberate process that shows you understand your market and how to address their predominant worldview… a well documented general distrust of the entire industry, including advisors. (See Darth Vader Post) That’s why puffery works against you.

If your story is not authentic (and you don’t live it every day), your clients and prospects will not be fooled. But when it’s done well, it’s what will make your clients dedicated advocates who want to tell everyone about you. Because they see you as remarkable.

So, ask yourself this question. Do you have a lot of quality warm prospect meetings and first appointments warmly introduced to you by your best clients? If not, take a good, hard look at your story.

Client Centric Business Consulting
Great Marketing Stories

Seriously, this probably sounds absurd, but just think it through. Like most businesses that focus on sales, Financial Advisors require a robust sales pipeline in order to grow. However, if you look around, the numbers show very few Advisors have this pipeline in place.

Why? (and here’s the insane part) Because for years the traditional industry wide sales/marketing/referral model – which has been practiced by a great majority of advisors – in all its incarnations and “new” approaches, has produced mostly modest growth and a limited number of new quality clients.

Advisors are at the mercy of the markets, some referrals, or a variety of marketing strategies for growth. The business controls them rather than the Advisor controlling their business.

It’s time to stop the insanity!

There are, indeed, more productive approaches business growth… some may be outside the Industry.

Of course, it’s true that many Advisors have good reasons to feel skeptical about the new or the different, having been burned by expensive sales and marketing programs that promised the moon and the stars.

But look at other successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs. They practice  “healthy skepticism” while exploring new ideas, no matter how different they seem.

It’s not risky. The only investment is a little time.