Guerrilla Marketing for Financial Advisors

Innovating Financial Professionals Through Practice Management

Jay Conrad Levinson, Grant W. Hicks

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781630478148
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

This practical marketing guide offers inspiring examples and field-tested advice specifically designed for financial advisors. Guerrilla Marketing is different from traditional marketing. Instead of simply spending money on and hoping for the best, readers will discover how to invest time, energy and imagination into growing their business. Financial professionals will be able to grow their capacity by implementing key practice management processes including:

• Identify and attract better ideal clients to manage your growth effectively
• Gather more revenue and get more referrals by implementing proven processes
• Inspire clients to act quickly through articulating your ideal client experience and case studies
• Build key practice management processes to build ideal capacity such as feedback and your value proposition.

CHAPTER ONE

What is Practice Management All About?

Chapter one – What is practice management all about? The key processes of practice management and top producers– firing on all six cylinders

You don’t need to be a mechanic to know the effects of a car not firing on all six cylinders. If one cylinder is not working to the best of its ability and it is completely blown, then what happens to the car? How does this affect the gas mileage and horsepower and performance? What type of confidence does it give the driver when they need to pass someone? I will discuss the six steps or cylinders as it relates to getting the maximum horsepower out of your practice.

This book is written for the dedicated financial advisor who is developing his or her career and has the desire to go to THE NEXT LEVEL. The next level, however, needs to be defined.

Running a growing practice for twenty years, I wish I had had the time to learn all about these great practice management processes. The challenge for me was always finding time to work on my business, not in the business. It hit me on a quiet Saturday when my wife stormed into my office and said, “Get in the car, we need to change things today.” I was working long hours for too long and I was well past capacity in my practice. I got in the car and asked her, “Where are we going?” She drove silently for a few minutes and drove up to a house that I did not recognize. “What are we doing here,” I asked? She replied, “See that camper for sale in the driveway? We are buying it and taking the kids camping so you can stop working the way you are.” She was right. It took my wife to see what I could not see, and realize that I was well past my ideal capacity. It was a major blind spot in my business and my life.

I have dedicated this book to my wife Kim and my kids with whom I had a great time camping with that summer and many more. I want to help advisors identify their potential blind spots and capacity issues that it took my wife to discover. I call it capacity practice management, and will share all the research and numbers until the cows come home to prove to you that it works for top advisors and can work for you in your practice. I’ll start by illustrating a great study done in the United States by Think advisor, pursuing practice excellence.

In a practice management study conducted in 2012, advisors measure their business success very differently. This is based on advisors in the United States.

How do you measure business success?

Revenues	85.8%
Client satisfaction	79.7%
Assets	73.5%
New clients	65.8%
Investment performance	44.2%
Expenses	36.9%
Employee satisfaction	25.2%
Financial ratio’s	13.9%
(e.g.: revenue per employee, expense per client)
Number of financial plans	13.1%

[Source: thinkadvisor.com pursuing practice excellence study By Spenser Segal and James J. Green Investment advisor group and Actfi 2012 http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2012/05/22/pursuing-practice-excellence-the-advisor-perspecti]

The study results are interesting, as advisors measure client satisfaction very high, yet a majority do not have a formal feedback system to measure client satisfaction. In a later chapter, I will address the client satisfaction issue by helping you implement a formal feedback system into your practice.

Who is training you on practice management?

When we got into the financial services business, there was no school of practice management. How do you learn about the key processes that successful advisors have? Let the pages ahead of you guide you toward finding the key processes, so you can reach your practice goals. The financial industry realized that it is very expensive to train advisors. We want this book to be a solid investment into your practice. This book is a guide to key practice management processes. I highly recommend that you work through this with another advisor, which will help you get the most out of it. Together you can bring the pages to life with dialogue. It is the dialogue that helps advisors implement strategies. Just reading this and putting it on the shelf will not help you get the most out of this material. Our aim here is to build key practice management processes into your business. Challenge the processes and add dialogue and you will find that the ideas become transforming for you, and the person you discuss them with. Consider a manager, mentor, coach wholesaler or associate, someone to give you feedback and healthy discussion. This book will add value to your business, make you think of practice management and marketing, and help you develop great relationships. Relationships with your clients, their friends, and their families that will last decades.

Map it out. It is like going on a long road trip. Would you drive across country without first trying to determine the most efficient route (of course these days you could just use your GPS app)? However, this is no ordinary road trip. This trip is going to last for the next 5 to 10 years or more. You need all six cylinders of your car (or business) to be firing to get the maximum performance on this trip!

Where does your practice need the most help?

If I were to ask you today, what do you need the most help with, would you say finding new ideal clients? Again, referencing the study done by Think Advisor revealed that advisors with good practices and processes need help in marketing and communicating:

Getting More Specific: what are the areas in which you need the most help?

Enhancing prospecting and client acquisition skills	71.4%
Improving client communication	61.5%
Creating differentiation	57.3%
Defining and executing a business strategy	55.6%
Developing marketing and branding materials	54.7%

[Source: thinkadvisor.com pursuing practice excellence study By Spenser Segal and James J. Green Investment advisor group and Actfi 2012 http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2012/05/22/pursuing-practice-excellence-the-advisor-perspecti]

In the study, Sales and marketing was the most important category for advisors, with nearly 57% saying it was either “important” or “very important.”

How do you spend your time?

The difference between an average producer and a top producer is how they manage their time. The chart below gives us some important keys to success, as we all have the same 24 hours in a day.

	Average time spent Best practice time spent	Allocation hours per day Allocation hours per day
Client service	16%	32%
Client acquisition	10%	17%
Employee training	4%	12%
Marketing / practice
mgmt. processes	6%	8%
Portfolio management	12%	7%
Research	12%	5%
Office administration	10%	4%
Back office operations	8%	1%

[Source Advisor benchmarking Inc. an affiliate of Rydex Investments / Practice Made More Perfect Mark Tibergien and Rebecca Pomering – Bloomber...