The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice

David J. Mullen, Jr.

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814431740
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Services financiers

If you're an advisor, whether you need a push or not, and regardless if you're new or old to the business, this guide will help add instant value to your practice.

Using the proven method author David J. Mullen Jr. has taught at Merrill Lynch and is famous for in the industry, The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice guides aspiring brokers on their journey toward building a lucrative financial services practice. Templates, scripts, letters, and tried-and-true market action plans work together to give you the skills you need to get the appointment, convert prospects to clients, build relationships, retain clients, use niche marketing successfully, and increase the products and services each client uses.

In The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice, you will gain insight into practical areas often overlooked by other industry guides, including:

• how to work in teams,
• how to train sales associates,
• and how to handle and overcome rejection.

Updated with new strategies for acquiring affluent clients, the second edition of The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice includes tips on offering wealth management services, using social media, leveraging alumni marketing, and targeting successful relators as clients to help today's financial service professionals become top producers.

PART 1

THE FOUNDATION

Introduction

YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ A BOOK THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR CAREER.

Building a million-dollar financial services practice is not complicated, but I’m not going to pretend that it is easy. If it were, there would be a lot more financial advisors making millions. In the thirty-two years I have been in the business, I have seen hundreds of people fail to make it past the first two years and few who have reached the million-dollar level. Yet those who reach or exceed $1 million in business have one of the best jobs imaginable. The autonomy and income of, and the excitement experienced by, million-dollar and multimillion-dollar producers are unparalleled.

There are many books and training programs that claim to help you build your financial services practice. This book is different, however, because it gives you step-by-step instructions for carrying out a proven, comprehensive, tactical process that will make your practice more successful.

The Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice covers every aspect of a financial advisor’s job, from prospecting to client service. No matter where you are in your career, it will give you all the tools you need to build your financial services practice to a million dollars and beyond—including templates, scripts, contact plans, lists, tasks, marketing plans, letters, and resources, each of which is integrated into the overall process, and it will show you when to use them, how to use them, and how often to use them. The process I present here has for thirty–two years guided financial advisors, whether working at large firms or on their own, and it will do the same for you.

The book also addresses each of the three distinct stages of an advisor’s career. Stage one is building the foundation. This is done during the first two years. During this stage, the advisor should spend 70 percent of his time on marketing, with the objective of getting a minimum of eight appointments with new prospects a week and building a “practice” of fifty client relationships and a prospect pipeline of one hundred.

Stage two runs from the advisor’s third year through the fifth year of service. Now she must balance client service with marketing. The number of client relationships should be increased to one hundred, and the client relationships and the one hundred prospects should be upgraded at a higher level of affluence compared to your existing average client. The advisor needs to spend at least 50 percent of her time on marketing—on client-leveraging activities, on niche marketing techniques, and on attempting to identify and acquire all her existing clients’ assets. At this stage, the advisor should have at least four appointments per week with new prospects.

Stage three is beyond five years. The advisor should continue to cull through his client list, retaining only the top one hundred client relationships and focusing on attracting increasingly affluent clients. A minimum of fifty prospects should be in the active pipeline. At this stage, the advisor should spend a minimum of 25 percent of his time marketing, and he needs to see at least one new prospect per week.

The road to a million-dollar practice is a series of steps that build on one another. The new advisor needs to understand that building the right foundation greatly increases the chances of creating a million-dollar practice and greatly reduces the time required to get there. An advisor can commit to the million-dollar road at any stage of her career, but the fastest and easiest way is to take the proper steps at the beginning. As the practice grows, the fundamentals remain the same, but the allocation of time changes.

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED

This book is divided into three parts and an Appendix.

Part 1, “The Foundation,” comprises Chapters 1 through 8. Of particular interest to new advisors, it outlines the first things you need to do on the pathway to building a million-dollar practice; it shows you how to build the foundation you need for a million-dollar business. But I encourage any advisor, no matter how much experience she has, to review the information in this section. The importance of motivation (Chapter 3) and the marketing process (Chapters 3 through 7) outlined in this part of the book applies to experienced advisors as well as to new ones.

Part 2, “Taking It to the Next Level,” includes Chapters 9 through 19. If you are a more experienced advisor, it will be particularly useful. You will find everything you need to do once you have built the proper foundation. If you are a new advisor, these chapters will be helpful because they provide a vision for how to reach a million-dollar practice once you have built the foundation of your business.

Part 3, “Market Action Plans,” contains Chapters 20 through 34. It includes more than fifty approaches to fifteen different markets. Each market action plan gives you all the tools you need to succeed in that market: when the action plan is appropriate, how to implement the plan, sample phone scripts and letters, and case studies.

At the end of the book, the Appendix provides you with resources for finding names and directories for each market.

WHAT IS NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION

Lots of things have changed since I wrote this book in 2007. Back then, most of us in the industry had no idea of the financial turmoil that would occur a year later. Since the book was published in 2008, the job of a financial services professional has been challenging as the financial markets have struggled. This doesn’t mean that you can’t create a million-dollar practice, it just means that you need to be on top of the changes in our industry and learn how to adjust your business to keep up with them.

In this new edition, I’ve thoroughly updated the business model to meet these changing times. I’ve interviewed dozens of million-dollar practitioners and learned from both their successes and failures, especially in terms of how they have weathered the storm. In general, I’ve found that the million-dollar practices established before the recession have continued to thrive, which gives me great optimism for the future of this industry.

I’ve also taken a close look at every chapter and adjusted the content accordingly, including snippets of my interviews and their firsthand responses to my questions. In addition, I’ve culled my list of distinct markets and updated my targets for potential clients to include different types of professionals and referral networks, Realtors, and alumni marketing.

New ideas on how to set and reach new targets are included as well in this edition. The most important of these is the implementation of an effective social media marketing plan. I’ve found that social media—especially LinkedIn—are important for every financial advisor to master. While the Internet has become an indispensable tool for all of us, the ability to navigate and increase the reach of your marketing efforts will have a positive impact on the growth of your practice.

Finally, I’ve taken a much deeper look into the wealth-management process, which I believe must be the cornerstone to any million-dollar financial services practice. Chapter 10 has become a must-read for every practitioner, whether you have been in business for five months or fifteen years. What’s more, the earlier you can adopt it, the more successful you can become.

I hope you find this industry as compelling as I do. The most successful financial advisors have made a 100 percent commitment to this business. To them, it’s more than a job, it’s their career. With that attitude and the lessons in this book, you’re off to the best start imaginable. Together, we can set the stage for you to create a long-term, million-dollar practice that will be both challenging and enjoyable for years to come. Let’s get started.

CHAPTER 1

The Concept Behind the Process

THE FIRST STEP TO BUILDING A MILLION-DOLLAR PRACTI...