Reading Time: 6 minutesAre you looking to make 2024 a blockbuster year for your practice? Here’s a story that can help.
We once spoke with a financial advisory shop that does a few million a year in production. The advisor wanted a firm foundation for generating more appointments and winning more clients in the new year.
During our conversation, it sounded like everything was being done right. The advisor had made pretty heavy investments in marketing the prior year. He was closing business, but he was counting on a little more ROI before more spending in this new year. Certainly made sense to us.
So, he had seeds planted. Great! First-appointment show rates were high. Excellent! Exactly where you want to be with your discovery and sales process.
But there were quite a few no-shows at follow-up meetings, and the advisor wanted more referrals. Then we started deep-diving into the advisory’s sales process and what they were doing to stay in touch with contacts in their database. That is where some gaps arose… but they were simple fixes.
Fine-tuning the advisor’s process for referrals. Exploring some creative, high-touch ways to keep prospects’ attention each year. Refining the marketing so that clear calls to action for meeting with the advisor were set. A lot of it was just building on the essential principles of a thriving practice.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? Whether you move tens of millions in assets per year or are new to the business, the fundamentals matter.
If you’re ready to grow your production, keep these five high-level marketing strategies in mind as you plan and execute for the new year.
1. Drill down to a niche. Yes, agents and advisors selling annuities and other products serve a retirement-age audience. But your ideal client should be more than just “seniors and retirees.”
We shouldn’t kid ourselves about marketing to “everybody” in the senior market. If you do that, you’re competing with everyone else, and you will fall short. As they say, “the riches are in the niches,” so if you drill down enough in your specialty, your ideal client will be easier to find. The narrower that you can get in your client market, the better.
What about some ideas? Well, do you understand the unique tax and income planning issues for oil and gas employees who are 1099 contractors? How about federal government employees with their endless maze of pension and other benefits options? Executives at Sony or another Fortune 500 company that have non-deferred compensation plans and other executive benefits that are complex?
You might consider major companies in your area that can furnish high-potential, prospective clients for years to come. For example, Dallas-Fort Worth of Texas has Lockheed Martin as a big employer, which has nearly 20,000 employees in the area. You could learn the ins-and-outs of their benefits, common pitfalls, and what you can do to avoid mistakes and maximize their financial well-being.
Once you have your niche market drilled down, start looking at ways to bring in prospects. Do you have anyone in your social or business networks who has relationships in that market? Are you connected with someone who can introduce you to key contacts in your target market to get things snowballing?
You might look at LinkedIn as a starting point for ideas. If you are already serving your market, look for ways to increase your referral counts and make your expertise better known in your niche client focus. Which brings us to next discussion points…
2. Zero in on your prospecting. You are in the service business in financial services. Asking the right questions can help you maximize opportunity to help your clients and generate more referrals.
Don’t just ask your client if they “know someone that you can help.” Your clients may not know the kinds of people who are best served by you. It may be hard for them to come up with some names for you, as a result.
Instead, you might ask if they know anyone by framing the question better. Say that during your discovery process, you uncovered a major problem for your client, such as what their options as a divorced person are for Social Security benefits. You brought peace of mind by bringing the issue to their attention and gave them solutions for it.
You might ask if any of their friends has had that issue, if it has come up in conversations with any people they know in the past six months, or if work colleagues have the same questions as them. Your client will have a better idea of whom they can refer to you.
Another way to give better ideas is around life changes.
Does your client know anyone who has just gotten married, become divorced, lost a spouse, or had a baby? How about somebody who started a business, took a new job, or retired?
Framing your request around these life changes will help your client think of specific people in those situations.
3. Ask for referrals by sparking the right connection. Speaking of referrals, how you ask for them is important. In many career agency programs, new agents are trained to ask for the names and contact information of 10 people from the client. You might have been taught this or some other variant.
But you don’t have to opt for the same-old approach and expect different results. Instead, ask your client for a personal connection by introducing you directly to a friend in a text thread or an email. If you want to up the ante, you can also invite your client and their friend to breakfast or coffee. The setting will be an enjoyable, intimate way for you to get to know their friend personally, discuss their situation, pinpoint one or two financial problems they have, and maybe give them a financial plan for life.
This approach is far more effective than calling or emailing a referral out of the blue, then hoping they pick up or respond. Your credibility and chances of connection are much stronger with your client introducing you to their friends with this personal touch.
Your client conversion from referrals will likely go up as well. Financial advisors and agents are in the relationship business, and this referral strategy can be a big business multiplier for your practice over time.
4. Dial in your sales discovery process. Make sure your discovery process is consistent each time and repeatable. Ex: We own and run a number of consumer brands, including a national financial brand for federal employees.
Almost weekly, we get requests for all sorts of questions: pension options, TSP help, locality pay, income planning, beneficiary and death claims, separation from service options, retirement planning, and much more. Our representatives receive the relevant requests as a supplement to our core federal market program.
Our reps could handle these questions on a case-by-case basis, answering the question as it’s asked each time. However, that isn’t necessarily the right thing for the client or even the most productive path.
In the federal market, we have found that encouraging every prospect to go through a benefits analysis walkthrough is more effective. Not only will their questions be answered, but they will also see a more complete picture of what their benefits will be in years ahead and much more. It’s everything in one place.
The process for a prospective client is consistent. In our example, creating a personalized federal benefits analysis is part of the discovery process. For that case, it makes sense to bring the prospects back, year after year, and update their benefits analysis. Your prospects have a track to run on, and it keeps you in front of them.
You can ask your prospects for referrals using tactics as covered before. Keep your marketing effort going consistently. After all, you want people to keep coming in. In time, your appointment flow will be more constant, your referral counts will snowball, and your pipeline will be filled.
5. Have an organized call to action in all of your marketing. All of your marketing needs to have calls to action pushing prospects toward a certain next step. For prospects in your database or who are topically familiar with you, your marketing should push for a consistent call to action of meeting with you.
The value of what the prospect will get out of the meeting should be clearly and quickly communicated. How long will the appointment be? What will you cover? What should their expectations be? What outcomes will they get out of it? Who is the right fit for meeting with you?
Hopefully you will have spent some time in carving out a niche client for your practice by this point. In that case, the “right fit” for your ideal client should be easily describable to people visiting your website or coming across you in other ways.
Fine-Tuning Your Financial Advisor Marketing for New Year Success
There are many other strategies, tactics, and tidbits that build on our foundation here. But get started with these five steps first. If you are already following this roadmap, see if there are any other areas in these five steps upon which you can improve.
If you are seeing success in one area, see how you can multiply those efforts so that you can go to the next level. We have seen and helped advisors as much as 3-10x their production by following this plan.
Ready for personalized marketing and business guidance for your practice? Want to increase your annuity and life production? Safe Money has helped countless advisors just like you score big wins.
Call us today at (800) 790-7791 to discuss what your business needs and how it can go with personalized, custom-fit help. No cookie-cutter solutions. No one-size-fits-all programs. Just tailored marketing programs and guidance for next success!
Side Note: Do you know if you have the right IMO as a partner? How do you find the best fit for your unique business needs? By asking the right questions and cutting through the noise. If you want to start 2024 on a strong note, check out this guide from our sister marketing agency of 71 questions to ask your IMO and see if it’s the right fit for you.