Creating a financial profile that includes a budget, risk tolerance test and attitudes on money will shape the strategies, tactics and plan designs of your clients. There’s no cookie cutter, one size fits all. So, you have to go through a discovery process to determine their value system and not impose your beliefs on them. You are not your client. Your beliefs are irrelevant and attempting to imprint your mindset on a prospect or client can derail the relationship. Value selling is based on … [Read more...]

The carpenter’s roof leaks, the shoe salesman’s children run barefoot, the preacher’s kids are hellions and the financial adviser/ agent is broke, in debt and doesn’t take their own medicine. Indeed, most advisors don’t have a budget, a debt reduction plan and an overall plan that include saving strategies for an emergency account, a down payment for a home, a car, college education for their children and their retirement/estate . If you’re unwilling to put your own feet to the fire, you’ll … [Read more...]

The sales environment among financial professionals is extremely competitive. Often the market adjusts compensation models to reflect what consumers are willing to pay for advice. One of the results, the only result worth caring about, is pricing fee income and product commissions. But can your practice survive on your present margins? Can you be profitable? Will sales contract in such a way as to implode on itself in these uncertain times? Good business models are designed to support … [Read more...]

In general terms, most customers can never be right about everything all of the time, especially regarding money. If they could DIY (do it yourself) they wouldn’t need to meet with you. So, an engagement letter can be a good start to a new relationship that lays out what you’ll do and what you won’t do as well as what you expect the prospect or client to do. Establish your areas of expertise and offer the team approach of outsourcing to other financial professional you partner with that have … [Read more...]

The marketing mantra is less is more. Don’t complicate the sale. An elementary entry level best serves the client or prospect. Keeping it simple stupid is the sales moniker of the day. Maybe? Concept selling is craft in and of itself. Can you sell an idea? After all concept thinking is more like vapor on paper until you scribble your thoughts on a yellow pad. Compliance requires proper vetting of the client, so one size can never fit all. It further requires the proper caveats, disclosures … [Read more...]

Back in the 80s, there were so called financial professionals, who were revered as one interview closers. The skill sets or sales pressure to convince a new client to act on the first interview was sales nirvana. But pressing people to sign documents and draft a check also created a lot of NTOs (not taken offers) in life insurance sales and conservation complaints from competing registered reps and broker/dealers. As insurance and security products merged onto planning models, it became clear … [Read more...]

Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracey, Tony Robbins are well known carnival barkers of the art of the sale. Their pithy one liners and high powered adjectives coupled with their command of the English language can create an overwhelming impression that they’re in the know and live a successful lifestyle. Successful selling is an art form and part and parcel of your practice as long as it’s not manipulative. Often the word manipulation is found in the transcripts of arbitration and court documents in disputes … [Read more...]

Typos, deletions and other office mistakes occur in the everyday transactions of your employees in your business. Most of these are little iniquities don’t rise to the level of major transgressions. But if they do you could be on the hook as well for any legal action, even though you yourself are innocent. Well as innocent as the law will allow. Afterall you run the show. You should have been aware of the activities of your employees. Employee Benefits Liability Insurance is an insurance … [Read more...]

You would think that putting the interests of your client first before yourself would be a given, the mark of an honest steward who oversees of their client’s monetary concerns. It should be an unspoken ethos in our society and culture. But it’s not. Financial professionals’ new mantra in the public domain is advertising your official status as a fiduciary. It’s good PR, but the accountability is greater. Substantial legal authority in the public domain is great for advertising your firm. The … [Read more...]