Free webinar — Using low-cost client lunches to build prospecting momentum

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Many advi­sors are strug­gling with a strat­egy to com­mu­ni­cate with prospec­tive clients.Last week, I con­ducted a webi­nar with U.S. advi­sor site Hors­es­mouth, out­lin­ing a sim­ple approach to prospect­ing using a series of low cost client lunches that advi­sors can host in their boardroom.

You can lis­ten to the webi­nar at the link below — there’s no cost, you sim­ply have to enter your email address.

http://​reg​is​ter​.web​cast​group​.com/​l​3​/​?​w​i​d​=​0​7​2​0​6​1​0​0​9​4​7​2​3​&​a​m​p​;​p​r​e=1

For much more infor­ma­tion, please visit http://​www​.cli​entin​sights​.ca.

Sorry, it turns out the webi­nar referred to above is no longer avail­able, how­ever, here is the tran­script of the pre­sen­ta­tion by Dan Richards:

Sur­pris­ing infor­mal sur­vey con­ducted by Dan Richards…says that the most com­mon answer is “None” when advi­sors are asked, “How much time did you spend in your office last week talk­ing with clients?”

Dan sug­gests advi­sors can host a reg­u­lar round­table lun­cheon series with their clients. It’s impor­tant that they do this regularly.

Only requires about three hours a week–two 90-minute time blocks. Book room for lunch, call peo­ple to invite.

Can hold them in your board­room, or a coun­try club or a pri­vate room at a restau­rant. No need to do it elaborately.

Dan rec­om­mends hold­ing it in your office and cater­ing with sandwiches.

Tim­ing: Do it from 12:30–1:30.

Says do two or three of these lun­cheons in your first campaign.

Goal for guests: eight or nine. Sug­gests that is opti­mum for dynam­ics. It’s a work­shop, not a pre­sen­ta­tion. Invite six or seven client and two or three prospects.

Looks and feels like a client event. That’s what you want. So you only want 33% prospects.

Rule of thumb for invites: Invite 10–15 prospects to get two or three.

Stay away from folks who are anx­ious or dom­i­nate dis­cus­sions. Avoid them for this approach.

What advi­sor should say on invites: “I’m host­ing a series lun­cheons this sum­mer. Hope you can come.” Say, “Next lunch is July 8. Does that work for you?” If no, go on to next two days.

Call them “infor­mal sand­wich lun­cheons to talk about the market.”

Says one advi­sor he knows does one lunch at his down­town office and then does other lun­cheons at firm’s branch offices in sub­urbs. Can also do other lunches at a hotel or restau­rant in sub­urbs.

Week One

Stress it’s very infor­mal, 10– to 15-minute talk in the begin­ning and then open­ing it up for ques­tions and conversations.

Prospects not typ­i­cally cold. You know them, but not that well. May play golf with them. Share mem­ber­ship in an orga­ni­za­tion. They’re not cold.

Break this car­di­nal rule of prospect­ing: Actu­ally leave mes­sage on voice mail if you’ve got a good rela­tion­ship with the per­son. They will call you back if it’s a good relationship.

Empha­size you’re lim­it­ing the lun­cheon to 10 peo­ple. Ask them on phone if they’re on some ques­tions or top­ics they’d like addressed. Ramps up com­mit­ment level. Also ask what type of sand­wich they want.

This is a low-stress invite. You give them three dates. If they say no to all three dates, then you can eval­u­ate whether they’re really inter­ested. Per­haps invite them by e-mail next time you do the campaign.

Write down now two to three names of peo­ple you can see poten­tially inviting.

Week Two

Con­nect with clients by phone who’ve agreed to come. Call to ask them about ques­tions they may have and get sand­wich order. If you have an open­ing, go ahead and ask them if they know any­one who might want to attend…

Struc­ture talk around ques­tions asked by attendees…Makes it per­sonal. Makes it more participatory.

If new to busi­ness, you can ask branch man­ager or whole­saler to be present to help with ques­tions. You deliver the talk.

Week Three

Final­ize open remarks. Prac­tice your remarks; you want to sound con­fi­dent. Send con­fir­ma­tion e-mails. Con­sider send­ing an arti­cle along or link to some­thing you’ve read that per­tains to talk.

Final details: It’s crit­i­cal to fol­low up with peo­ple who attend.

Tips: Think about seat­ing. Have pen and pad, and copy of slides if you use slides. Might ask some­one to ask first ques­tion. Be sure to have folks com­plete eval­u­a­tion. Keep it short and sweet. Use scale 1–4 on lun­cheon, talk, com­ments and a line for their name. Short and sweet.

Follow-up call with clients. Review eval­u­a­tion form. Any spe­cific ques­tions. Ask how they might sug­gest you change or improve the lunches. Respond to any ques­tions they have. Ask them if they want to attend one later in the future.

Follow-up call with prospects. Sim­i­lar as above but…

Over­all: Make prospect­ing a pri­or­ity. Be sure to time block…Integrate prospect­ing into ongo­ing client com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Pick one strat­egy as a focal point. Refine and repeat and get really good at it. Don’t be scattershot.

Dan says some clients like to come to such events a cou­ple of times a year. So it’s OK to invite clients to come again later in the year.

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Tags: Advertisement, Amp, Boardroom, Campaign Goal, Email Address, Free Webinar, Informal Survey, L3, Lunch, Luncheon Series, Luncheons, Minute Time Blocks, Momentum, Private Room, Prospective Clients, Prospects, Register, Roundtable, Rule Of Thumb, Sandwiches, Wid, Www Ca
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The Power of Just “One Thing”

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Since Jan­u­ary, I’ve been con­duct­ing full day work­shops to help advi­sors adjust their busi­nesses to today’s new real­ity. I’ve had a ter­rific response to these — typ­i­cally, advi­sors emerge excited with a long list of pos­si­ble ini­tia­tives and new ideas. That’s good news at one level — but also risks hav­ing advi­sors feel over­whelmed and fail to act as a result. The dif­fi­culty after a work­shop is almost never not enough new ideas — it’s almost always too many.

Here’s the one strat­egy that I’ve seen work best to help advi­sors trans­late the ideas they take from any work­shop into action. This strat­egy comes down to four sim­ple words: One idea per quar­ter. I encour­age advi­sors to iden­tify the one idea that will have the most impact on your busi­ness — and resolve to focus on that and only that for the next 90 days. Make a sign up and put it above your phone. Put this idea as the num­ber one item for your weekly team meet­ings. Start your plan­ning for every week by iden­ti­fy­ing what you’ve going to do in the next seven days to make that idea hap­pen. Do this for 90 days and chances are that at the end of that, you’ve got momen­tum behind it and this idea is locked into your rou­tine. At which point you go to the next high impact idea on your list and repeat the process.

With this sim­ple strat­egy, you can act on four high impact ideas a year — and have a high like­li­hood of see­ing a lift in your busi­ness as a result. Remem­ber, we change the way we learned to walk — one step at a time. By focus­ing on one high impact idea a quar­ter, you increase the odds greatly of mak­ing that idea happen.

If you agree with this, two final questions:

First, what’s your high impact ini­tia­tive, the one thing that if you did that and that alone would have the biggest impact on your busi­ness? And sec­ond, what are you going to do between now and the end of the year to make that happen?

Answer those two ques­tions and chances are that you too will see your busi­ness move for­ward, one idea at a time.

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Tags: Act, Advertisement, Array, Business Idea, Business Move, High Impact, Impact Initiative, Initiatives, Likelihood, Momentum, New Reality, Odds, Phone Number, Seven Days, Step At A Time, Team Meetings, Terrific Response, Translate
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4 Ways To Make Recommendations Stick

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

A client meet­ing isn’t suc­cess­ful with­out client buy-in on next steps — even if it’s just to do noth­ing and main­tain the sta­tus quo.

Here’s four proven ways to engage clients in your rec­om­men­da­tions and get their buy-in.
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Six Steps to High Impact Client Meetings

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Given last year’s mar­kets, today’s num­ber one pri­or­ity for most advi­sors is to have as many face to face and phone meet­ings with clients as pos­si­ble. Just talk­ing to clients isn’t good enough, how­ever. To get max­i­mum return on your time, every con­ver­sa­tion with clients has to achieve two goals.

First, con­ver­sa­tions have to be seen by clients as advanc­ing their needs and being a good use of their time.

And sec­ond, con­ver­sa­tions have to advance your agenda with investors, tak­ing advan­tage of the best busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties with each client.

Here are six steps to make meet­ings a good use of times for both you and your clients.

Use a writ­ten agenda

In con­ver­sa­tions with investors and advi­sors, there’s one activ­ity that has a high cor­re­la­tion with achiev­ing both of these goals — and that’s the use of a writ­ten agenda.

Advi­sors who con­sis­tently make use of writ­ten agen­das report that they make meet­ings more pro­duc­tive and help them stay on track.

Just slap­ping an agenda down in front of the meet­ing isn’t enough, though — to get full value, there are a few key steps that need to be put in place around that agenda.

Start with the end in mind

In “The Seven Habits of Highly Effec­tive Peo­ple”, Stephen Covey talked about “start­ing with the end in mind” — look­ing at every activ­ity in the con­text of the out­come that’s ulti­mately desired.

When it comes to craft­ing agen­das, advi­sors need to start with the end in mind as well. Before call­ing a key client to set up a meet­ing, you need to iden­tify the one or two most sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties that are avail­able to you with that client — and then iden­tify a pri­mary and sec­ondary goal for that meet­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on them.

Once you’ve iden­ti­fied your pri­mary and sec­ondary busi­ness goal and in advance of  pick­ing up the phone to talk to the client about the meet­ing you’re propos­ing, write down the spe­cific issues you’re going to sug­gest cov­er­ing in the meet­ing that will help you achieve your pri­mary and sec­ondary goal.

Get client buy in to the agenda

The next step is to dis­cuss the agenda with the client, so that they see this as their agenda rather than yours.

When the client has agreed to meet, you could say some­thing like: “There are a num­ber of issues I’d like to cover in our meet­ing. Before I talk about those, what are the ques­tions and issues you’d like to talk about when we meet?”

At the end of the con­ver­sa­tion, you should have an agenda that reflects the issues that both you and your client want to cover. Email that agenda to your client as a fol­low up to your con­ver­sa­tion — and con­sider email­ing it again as a reminder in the days imme­di­ately before you meet.

Deal with soft issues before hard issue

As a gen­eral rule, your agenda will focus on hard issues related to a client’s invest­ment, tax or insur­ance sit­u­a­tion or their finan­cial plan.

It’s obvi­ously impor­tant to deal with these. Very often, how­ever, in order to get clients to focus on the hard issues on the agenda, you have to deal with their soft issues first — these days, those soft issues often focus around their fears, anx­i­eties and apprehensions.

Here’s one way to con­sider start­ing a meet­ing to get at a client’s soft issues:

“Here’s the agenda that we’re going to be cov­er­ing today.

Before we get into this, how­ever, some peo­ple report that last year’s mar­kets caused them to lose some sleep. Tell me, how did you find your­self affected by last year’s markets?”

If the client responds that they lost some sleep and expe­ri­enced some anx­i­ety as well, resist the temp­ta­tion to leap in with an imme­di­ate response. Instead, sit back and say the five words that, more than any oth­ers, will help clients talk fur­ther: “Tell me more about that.”

Ask­ing the ques­tion in this fash­ion gives clients per­mis­sion to talk about their own anx­i­ety and opens the door to a dis­cus­sion about how they really feel.

Prac­tice the 50 — 50 rule

One of the most impor­tant steps to pro­duc­tive client meet­ings is con­sis­tent use of the 50 — 50 rule.

Quite sim­ply, for every 50 words you say in a client meet­ing, your client should say 50. Research on this sub­ject is absolutely defin­i­tive — the one fac­tor, more than any other, that gets clients say­ing that a meet­ing was a good use of time, was the amount of time they spend talking.

If you don’t believe this, con­sider this sim­ple fact. Over the years, I’ve talked to many investors who say that one of the things they like best about their advi­sor is that he or she is a “great lis­tener.” I have yet to run into an investor who says that the rea­son they like their advi­sor is because he or she is a “great talker.”

The best way to get clients engaged and par­tic­i­pat­ing in a meet­ing is to be sure to ask lots of good questions.

And the best way to ensure you ask good questions?

Take five min­utes before a meet­ing to go through the agenda and beside each point write down ques­tions you’re going to ask. Do that and that alone and your chances of hav­ing the 50 — 50 rule work for you goes up dramatically.

Trans­late the agenda into client outcomes

At the end of the con­ver­sa­tion, the agenda has helped guide you through the meeting.

At this point, take the time to ver­bally sum­ma­rize what you’ve talked about and next steps from the meeting.

For larger clients with whom you’re meet­ing two or three times a year, you could also say some­thing along the lines of “I found today’s meet­ing very pro­duc­tive and hope you did also. I’d like to sug­gest that we plan to meet again in about six months. Tell me, what spe­cific issues would you like to devote more time to at that meeting?”

You have one final oppor­tu­nity to remind clients that the meet­ing was a good use of time. Most advi­sors sys­tem­at­i­cally cre­ate meet­ing notes, sum­ma­riz­ing what was talked about and out­lin­ing next steps aris­ing from each meet­ing. Con­sider cre­at­ing a “client friendly” ver­sion of this sum­mary — and send­ing it along to clients as a reminder of the things you talked about and the value they obtained from tak­ing the time to meet.

Con­sider build­ing a sys­tem­atic process around writ­ten agen­das into your meet­ing plan­ning rou­tine. If you’re like most advi­sors I’ve talked to, once you’ve tried this for a while, chances are you’ll be pleas­antly sur­prised about the pos­i­tive impact this has on the value and pro­duc­tiv­ity of client meetings.

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Tags: Agenda, Agendas, Business Goal, Business Opportunities, Client Meetings, Conversations, Correlation, Face To Face, Goals, High Impact, Investors, Maximum Return, Phone Meetings, Priority, Secondary Business, Secondary Goal, Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, Six Steps, Stephen Covey
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One Advisor’s Perfect Calendar

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

The fol­low­ing is based on one of Norm Trainor’s clients, Wes Barrett.

Top advi­sors have one sim­ple mes­sage that describes what makes them unique. When some­one asks Wes Bar­rett the ques­tion, “What do you do?” he responds by say­ing, “We help our clients live their per­fect cal­en­dar.” Typ­i­cally, the response Wes gets to this state­ment is, “Wow, what do you mean?” This gives Wes an oppor­tu­nity to describe his services.

My col­league and asso­ciate, Bill Whit­ley, calls this the ‘Wow’ state­ment. The next step is to illus­trate the ‘How’. The two most impor­tant indi­ca­tors of what peo­ple value are how they spend their time and their money. Finan­cial inde­pen­dence gives us the free­dom to spend our time doing what is mean­ing­ful to us. Wes Barrett’s mis­sion is to enable his clients to live their lives doing what they value. In that way, they cre­ate their own per­fect calendar.

Wes uses sto­ries to illus­trate how his finan­cial advi­sory firm helps clients live their dreams. One of the rea­sons his mes­sage is so pow­er­ful, is that Wes is liv­ing his per­fect cal­en­dar. He and his wife, Hy, take a min­i­mum of 150 days a year to pur­sue their dreams. They have trav­elled all over the world. Hy and Wes are fully engaged in liv­ing their lives. When they go away and enjoy their expe­ri­ences, they come back to the busi­ness renewed. Wes truly believes that peo­ple are either grow­ing or dying. There is no sta­tus quo. Horowitz, the great pianist, prac­ticed con­tin­u­ously because he believed that you can always improve.

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Tags: Asia, Barrett, Bill Whitley, Calendar Free, Colleague, Create Calendar, Dreams, Experiences, Financial Advisory Firm, Financial Independence, Free Time, Freedom, Holidays, Horowitz, Norm Trainor, Pianist, Simple Message, Time Conferences, Wes, Work Calendar, Working With Clients
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Communicating Your Difference to Prospects (Dave Paradi)

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

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Com­mu­ni­ca­tions expert, Dave Paradi, dis­cusses how advi­sors can stream­line their mes­sage to prospects to make it more rel­e­vant, mem­o­rable and compelling.

Paradi out­lines the four steps to a stand­out presentation.

Also: Michael White — Three Tip Offs to Mar­ket Direction

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Tags: Autoload, Flv Player, Four Steps, Hana, Market Direction, Michael White, Paradi, Presentation, Prospects, Standout, Tip Offs
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Business building advice from Olympians

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

For the next two weeks, the world’s eyes will be on the Win­ter Olympics in Van­cou­ver. Inevitably, we’ll focus on those  who excel and pull away from the pack with mul­ti­ple medals, the bright­est stars in a con­stel­la­tion of ath­letic talent.

These days, sim­ply appear­ing on the Olympic stage is a huge accom­plish­ment. But watch­ing the Olympics isn’t just about ath­letes achiev­ing their goals.  There are also nine impor­tant lessons for finan­cial advi­sors look­ing for guid­ance and inspi­ra­tion on hit­ting goals of our own.

Les­son one: A plan for success

The first nec­es­sary ele­ment  and foun­da­tion for Olympic ath­letes is a plan of action that clearly spells out the path to the podium. Thirty or forty years ago, you could show up with tal­ent alone and aspire to medal – today it takes ded­i­cated effort and a clear plan of action to even have a chance of winning.

Hav­ing a plan of action is just as impor­tant for indi­vid­ual investors.  In times past, when life spans were shorter and the aver­age male retired at 65 and died at 70, a retire­ment plan wasn’t all that impor­tant. Plan­ning for today’s thirty year retire­ment has changed the rules of the game — just like Olympians, indi­vid­ual investors need a well thought through strat­egy to hit their goals.

This is just as crit­i­cal for advi­sors. At one time, advi­sors could real­is­ti­cally expect to do well just by show­ing up.  That world is gone for­ever.  And yet an appalling num­ber of advi­sors don’t have a writ­ten plan that lays out their mid and long term goals and how they’re going to reach them.

Just like ath­letes with Olympic aspi­ra­tions need a writ­ten plan to have the prospect of gold, if you’re seri­ous about the busi­ness, a writ­ten plan is the price of admis­sion for even the hope of excelling.

Les­son two: A long term view

Last Wednesday’s New York Times con­tained a story on Canada’s ambi­tious plan to “own the podium” in Van­cou­ver and emerge with the most medals.

For many Cana­di­ans, skier Nancy Greene Raine, 1968 gold and sil­ver medal­ist in St. Moritz, still epit­o­mizes Olympic success .

In a recent inter­view, Nancy Greene said that at one time Canada’s Olympic team could hope to com­pete by plan­ning one Olympic game ahead and invest­ing heav­ily in ath­letes. For Van­cou­ver, the plan­ning began eight years ago – that’s the only way a smaller coun­try could hope to have a chance to “own the podium”.

Advi­sors need to adopt a sim­i­lar time­frame in think­ing about their busi­nesses. Yes, one-year plans are impor­tant, but if you really want to excel, you need to look out three to five years and to make invest­ments today that will only pay div­i­dends in the long term.

Les­son three: Hard work and commitment

The all-time leader in win­ter medals is Nor­we­gian cross-country leg­end Bjorn Daehlie, who won eight gold and three sil­ver medals over three Olympics in the 1990s. The first time he tried, Daehlie failed to make Norway’s junior team, but through relent­less ded­i­ca­tion to his train­ing and sheer hard work, he improved year after year after year.  Daehlie still holds the record in one com­mon fit­ness test and is con­sid­ered the great­est cross coun­try skier of all time.

With sim­i­lar perserver­ance, Canada’s speed­skater Cindy Klassen won five medals in Torino, the most of any com­peti­tor.  She’s said  “To suc­ceed, every prac­tice has to count, every step, every push on the ice.”

When it comes to build­ing your busi­ness, a con­stant quest for improve­ment and a strong work ethic are just as impor­tant. Some peo­ple are attracted to the busi­ness by the finan­cial rewards and the prospect of inde­pen­dence – what they don’t always see is the hard work it takes to achieve these rewards.

Les­son four: Tak­ing risks

To win at the Olympics, you can’t afford to play it safe. That’s true of the speed sports like ski­ing and speed skat­ing – and equally true of sports like fig­ure skat­ing, where ath­letes such as Germany’s Kate­rina Witt and Great Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christo­pher Dean won gold by push­ing the artis­tic lim­its and tak­ing chances on their program.

The same applies to advi­sors.  To excel, you need to get out of your com­fort zone and take mea­sured risks   – whether it comes to hir­ing addi­tional staff ear­lier rather than later, invest­ing the time to posi­tion your­self against a key tar­get group for the future, spend­ing the money on a com­puter solu­tion that will stream­line oper­a­tions in your busi­ness or repo­si­tion­ing your busi­ness to meet emerg­ing needs.  Avoid­ing risk of any form is a pre­scrip­tion for mid­dle of the pack per­for­mance for Olympic ath­letes – and equally so for advisors.

Les­son five: Resilience

With its focus on sports such as ski­ing, skat­ing and slid­ing, the Olympics are replete with sto­ries of remark­able come­backs from hor­rific injuries. Per­haps none was more extra­or­di­nary than Aus­trian skier Her­man Maier. He was dubbed “the Her­mi­na­tor”  when he recov­ered from a spec­tac­u­lour crash in the down­hill at the 98 Win­ter Games to come back and win two golds. Sub­se­quently, a motor­cy­cle acci­dent almost claimed his life – and once again he came back to dom­i­nate inter­na­tional competition.

There are lots of times when it would be easy for advi­sors to get dis­cour­aged. It can relate to peri­ods of tough mar­kets such as we’ve just been through. It can be los­ing a great prospect that you thought you had in the bag or hav­ing a good client leave for a  rea­son beyond your con­trol, per­haps mov­ing to another city or being lured away by sto­ries from a golf­ing buddy about great returns from his bro­ker. Just as Olympic ath­letes need to work through set­backs to reach their goals, some­times advi­sors need to reach deep to bounce back from disappointments.

Les­son six: Seiz­ing opportunity

For ath­letes to win gold takes tal­ent and hard work but there’s often also an ele­ment of luck involved – the trick for ath­letes is to max­i­mize the impact of skill and min­i­mize the ele­ment of chance. Hav­ing said that, win­ning ath­letes know they can’t ever elim­i­nate the role of luck entirely – all they can do is posi­tion them­selves to cap­i­tal­ize when the chance presents itself. As the old expres­sion goes, luck occurs when prepa­ra­tion meets opportunity.

For instance, in the finals of the 1000-meter speed skat­ing com­pe­ti­tion at the Salt Lake Olympics, Aus­tralian Steven Brad­bury was trail­ing when a col­li­sion wiped out US favourite Apolo Anton Ohno (sub­se­quently of Danc­ing with Stars fame) and the other lead­ers.  By being oppor­tunis­tic, Brad­bury claimed the first win­ter Olympic gold of any ath­lete from the South­ern Hemisphere.

The same prin­ci­ple applies to finan­cial advi­sors. You can have a great plan – but you still need to be adapt­able and flex­i­ble and open to oppor­tu­ni­ties that present themselves.

In an arti­cle last sum­mer, I wrote about an advi­sor in a mid sized com­mu­nity in which the biggest employer announced lay­offs on a Fri­day. This advi­sor spent the week­end going through the company’s ter­mi­na­tion offer and pen­sion plan and also talk­ing to an accoun­tant and lawyer she knew.

The fol­low­ing Wednes­day, just five days after the lay­offs were announced, the three of them were offer­ing lunch time and after hours work­shops at a hotel across the street from the company’s office. She filled the first ses­sion by ask­ing a client who worked for the com­pany to email invi­ta­tions to peo­ple she knew.  Word of mouth took over from there and his advi­sor spent much of the next six weeks focused against this, with great results.

That’s an exam­ple of seiz­ing an unex­pected oppor­tu­nity. Click here to read the full arti­cle on cap­i­tal­iz­ing on cor­po­rate down­siz­ing: http://​cli​entin​sights​.ca/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​t​u​r​n​i​n​g​-​c​o​r​p​o​r​a​t​e​-​d​o​w​n​s​i​z​i​n​g​-​i​n​t​o​-​p​r​o​s​p​e​c​t​i​n​g​-​s​u​c​c​ess

Les­son seven: Teamwork

Today’s Olympic ath­letes are sup­ported by a pha­lanx of train­ers, nutri­tion­ists and psy­chol­o­gists. For instance, U.S. skier Lind­say Vonn trav­els with her “von­n­tourage” of two train­ers, a ski tech­ni­cian and her coach (who con­ve­niently is also her husband.)

While there will always be indi­vid­u­al­ists — New Hamp­shire gold medal­ist Bode Miller raced inde­pen­dently for two sea­sons before rejoin­ing the U.S. ski team last Octo­ber – even ath­letes who race in indi­vid­ual dis­ci­plines almost always oper­ate as a team.

In the same way, it’s essen­tial for advi­sors to have the right team behind them. That team can be your assis­tant and asso­ciate, it can be your branch man­ager, it can be resources within your firm or exter­nally, it can be other advi­sors in your branch who you meet with on a reg­u­lar basis. What­ever the com­po­si­tion of your team, in future few advi­sors will be able to suc­ceed on their own.

Les­son eight: Confidence

There have been many upsets at the Olympics, but per­haps none greater than the 1980 U.S. hockey team’s “Mir­a­cle on Ice” defeat of Rus­sia for the gold medal.

Cru­cial to their suc­cess was coach Bob John­son. John­son drove the team hard in prac­tice but he also instilled con­fi­dence.  “Bob made us believe we could win” one player said “and that con­vic­tion car­ried us through the moments of doubt along the way.”

Advi­sors need the same con­vic­tion to achieve their long term goals. In any long path, there will inevitably be dis­ap­point­ments – a sense of real­is­tic opti­mism and con­fi­dence are crit­i­cal to carry us through those periods.

There’s a grow­ing body of research on strate­gies to main­tain con­fi­dence and opti­mism. Click here for an arti­cle on research by Mar­tin Selig­man of Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, who out­lined some spe­cific strate­gies to stay pos­i­tive in his book called Learned Opti­mism. http://​cli​entin​sights​.ca/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​d​e​v​e​l​o​p​i​n​g​-​a​n​-​o​p​t​i​m​i​s​t​i​c​-​o​u​t​l​ook

Les­son nine: Perspective

After win­ning gold and sil­ver dur­ing his Olympic career, Nor­we­gian speed skater Johann Koss founded Right to Play, with the goal of using sports to fos­ter devel­op­ment and improve the lives of chil­dren in some of the most dis­ad­van­taged parts of the world. Many Olympic ath­letes have embraced this char­ity — at the Torino games, Amer­i­can speed skater Joey Cheek donated his gold medal bonus to Right to Play.

After his win in the 500 metres, Cheek said: “I do a pretty ridicu­lous thing, skat­ing around in tights. But because I skate well, I have a chance to bring expo­sure to big­ger things I’d like to pursue.”

This inspired Canada’s Clara Hughes to make a sim­i­lar dona­tion , even though  Canada’s Olympic pro­gram didn’t give ath­letes medal bonuses and the money came out of her own bank account. Hughes invited Cana­di­ans to match her con­tri­bu­tion – and Right to Play saw an influx of dona­tions as a result. Win­ner of a gold medal in speed skat­ing and one of only four ath­letes ever to medal in both the win­ter and sum­mer Olympics, last Fri­day Hughes car­ried Canada’s flag into the Olympic stadium.

Advi­sors can bor­row some of that per­spec­tive from Johann Koss, Joey Cheek and Clara Hughes.  Like Olympic ath­letes, it’s easy to become fix­ated on doing what it takes to suc­ceed – but it’s impor­tant not to get so caught up in our own goals that we ignore the broader world around us and the other things in life that bring us satisfaction.

For the next cou­ple of weeks, we’ll all be glued to the screen and cheer­ing our ath­letes on.  While doing that, though, we may want to reflect on the impor­tant lessons we can take from the Olympic exam­ple to achieve impor­tant goals of our own.

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Tags: Ambitious Plan, Appalling Number, Brightest Stars, Business Building, Constellation, Financial Advisors, Individual Investors, Life Spans, Necessary Element, New York Times, Olympians, Olympic Aspirations, Olympic Athletes, Olympic Stage, Price Of Admission, Retirement Plan, Rules Of The Game, Skier, Term Goals, Winter Olympics
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Leaders Can’t Be Trained

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Despite the hun­dreds of books, pro­grams and web­sites devoted to lead­er­ship, the truth is that lead­ers can’t be trained. Lead­ers need to be devel­oped. Hope­fully this doesn’t seem like a sim­ple mat­ter of seman­tics, because it isn’t.

Let me illus­trate this dis­tinc­tion. Lead­er­ship is more about WHO you are than about what you do or what you know. Two exec­u­tives can do and say the same things but get very dif­fer­ent results — even when they do and say those things to the very same per­son! Although what you say and what you do are impor­tant, effec­tive lead­er­ship is even more depen­dent on HOW you do or say those things. This explains why the actions of those two exec­u­tives can elicit such dif­fer­ent responses.

You can train peo­ple about what to say. You can train peo­ple about what to do. You can even show some­one how to do and say those things. But get­ting them to change how they go about doing things and get­ting them to change how they go about say­ing things is a whole other story.

Lead­er­ship is about who we are, and it’s this “how” of doing, say­ing, and being that defines who we are. I think a good deal of “who we are” is cap­tured within the com­pe­ten­cies of Emo­tional Intel­li­gence, devel­oped and made pop­u­lar by Daniel Gole­man. There are 12 EI com­pe­ten­cies, with five of them being the one’s that ulti­mately affect our effec­tive­ness as leader. These five com­pe­ten­cies are:

1) Coach­ing and Men­tor­ing — The abil­ity to develop others

2) Inspi­ra­tional Lead­er­ship — The abil­ity to develop a com­pelling vision and to lead with it

3) Influ­ence — The abil­ity to uti­lize persuasion

4) Con­flict Man­age­ment — The abil­ity to resolve disagreements

5) Team­work and Col­lab­o­ra­tion — The abil­ity to build and guide teams

Let’s briefly exam­ine each one of these com­pe­ten­cies with respect to train­ing vs. devel­op­ment as it per­tains to leadership.

Coach­ing and Mentoring

As a pro­fes­sional coach, I know many pro­fes­sion­ally trained coaches. They’ve gone through a cur­ricu­lum of coach train­ing from an accred­ited coach­ing school. And yet, although they have the nec­es­sary skills and knowl­edge to be a good coach, a num­ber of them are really rather poor at coach­ing. Con­versely, I’ve come across asso­ciates who are rea­son­ably good at coach­ing, yet have never had any for­mal coach training.

How is this pos­si­ble? How is it that some­one with great coach­ing skills is mediocre at coach­ing? And how is it that some­one with­out any for­mal train­ing is very effec­tive at coaching?

The answer of course, is in HOW they apply their coach­ing knowl­edge and skills. In order to be effec­tive as a coach, one must, at the very least, be aware of one’s own emo­tions, have con­trol of one’s emo­tions, be empa­thetic, and have good judg­ment. The real­ity is that each of those traits must either be devel­oped or be nat­ural to a per­son. They just aren’t things that can be “trained”.

Inspi­ra­tional Leadership

Lead­ers need to be inspir­ing. They need to instill pride, they need to hold and com­mu­ni­cate a vision, and they need to inspire an orga­ni­za­tion and its peo­ple to aspire to excellence.

Here’s the chal­lenge… Peo­ple aren’t sim­ply inspired by the right words. The right words spo­ken by the “wrong” per­son will have only a min­i­mal effect. In order for a leader to move oth­ers to action, he or she needs to be some­one who oth­ers admire and respect.

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Tags: Books Programs, Coach Training, Coaching And Mentoring, Coaching Mentoring, Collaboration, Competencies, Conflict Management, Curriculum, Daniel Goleman, Disagreements, Distinction, Effective Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Inspirational Leadership, Leadership Coaching, People, Persuasion, Professional Coach, Saying Things, Semantics, Simple Matter, Teamwork
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A Unique Way to Engage Key Clients

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Many advi­sors strug­gle with ways to deepen rela­tion­ships with  top clients .

Nat­u­rally, you pro­vide a more in depth plan and meet with them more fre­quently. And of course their calls are returned promptly and their issues attended to first.

The chal­lenge is that many top clients see this treat­ment  as their due – and you’re not going to impress some­one by merely deliv­er­ing what they expect.

That’s why many advi­sors try to build per­sonal rela­tion­ships with their most impor­tant clients by con­nect­ing at a social level – per­haps by invit­ing them to din­ner, to attend a play or a hockey game  or by host­ing them to a round of golf.

Despite the best inten­tions on the part of advi­sors, often these attempts to deepen rela­tion­ships fall short — despite the expen­di­ture of sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time and money.

First, your top clients are very often pressed for time – and another social invi­ta­tion may be as much of an impo­si­tion as a rela­tion­ship builder.

Beyond this, chances are that mil­lion dol­lar clients enjoy high end din­ners and rounds of golf on their own. As a result, it’s pos­si­ble to spend a sub­stan­tial amount of money with­out mak­ing a mean­ing­ful impact or get­ting an appre­cia­ble return.

Remem­ber, there are two costs to host­ing top clients to an event that’s ho hum. First of course are the dol­lars you spend.  But per­haps the big­ger cost is the lost oppor­tu­nity build deeper rela­tion­ships with your most impor­tant clients – you only have so much face time with key clients, and you can’t afford to squan­der that time on a rou­tine experience.

Focus­ing on unique experiences

There’s a sim­ple test of whether a client activ­ity is a good use of time and money – will your clients vividly remem­ber this three and six months from now?

If the answer is no or if you’re not sure, chances are that the time and money you spent won’t give you the rela­tion­ship build­ing pay­off you’re look­ing for. To make an impact, you need to cre­ate unique expe­ri­ences that strike a chord with clients and that they’ll recall many months from now.

Here’s a sim­ple four step process to doing things that make an impact with your top clients.

First, make a list of your top ten clients.

Sec­ond, beside each one iden­tify their pas­sions. Are they food­ies or wine lovers? Do they love opera, bal­let or clas­si­cal music?  Are their favourite char­i­ties related to third world coun­tries or to help­ing trou­bled youth in the city you live in?

Next, try to put clients into com­mon groups – find two or three client cou­ples that share a com­mon passion.

Finally, seek out a unique  char­i­ta­ble or fundrais­ing event in your com­mu­nity that caters to that pas­sion, to which you can invite these clients as your guests.

This doesn’t have to be a high priced din­ner – in fact often the big ticket events tend to be too large and imper­sonal to have an impact. Instead seek out smaller, com­mu­nity based events where your dol­lar will go fur­ther and where the expe­ri­ence will be more per­sonal.  What you’re look­ing for are events that are high impact, not nec­es­sar­ily high cost.

Three exam­ples of events that res­onate with clients

As exam­ples to get you think­ing, here are three locally based expe­ri­ences that will strike a chord with the right clients – two in Toronto, one in Van­cou­ver.  The cost of host­ing four client cou­ples to these events varies from $750 to $2500 but for the right clients that invest­ment can deepen rela­tion­ships in a way that con­ven­tional enter­tain­ment just can’t.

If these ideas inspire you , con­sider seek­ing out sim­i­lar events in your own community.

Hands across the nation – for clients who want to sup­port under­de­vel­oped countries

A year ago, Cathy and Chris Fuchs of White Wil­low Ben­e­fits Con­sul­tants intro­duced me to a down­town Toronto fundrais­ing event in aid of Hands Across the Nation, a grass roots char­ity that sup­ports local projects in Mali and Bolivia.

Their annual fundraiser is among the best fundrais­ing val­ues I know of;  at a cost of $85 and includ­ing enter­tain­ment and great  food pro­vided by the Escoffier Soci­ety,  it’s guar­an­teed to res­onate with clients with an affin­ity for projects in under­de­vel­oped coun­tries. As it hap­pens,  tick­ets are still avail­able for this event , which takes place this com­ing Wednes­day March 23 – a link with infor­ma­tion is below.

http://​hatn​.org/​w​i​n​e​_​g​o​u​r​m​e​t​.​htm

The Stop – for seri­ous foodies

The Stop Com­mu­nity Food Cen­ter is a down­town Toronto facil­ity with the man­date to pro­vide the local com­mu­nity with access to healthy food. One Thurs­day each month, their award win­ning chef hosts a din­ner to sup­port their pro­grams. The cost is $75 for food alone or $120 with wine pair­ings – no more than you’d pay for a con­ven­tional din­ner, but with much more impact. And for a really unique expe­ri­ence, for $100 peo­ple get to help pre­pare the meal and expe­ri­ence life in a pro­fes­sional kitchen.

http://​thestop​.org/​e​v​e​n​t​/​1​4​-​a​p​r​-​2​011

UBC Opera Ball – for opera lovers

Last Thurs­day, I attended the annual fundraiser for the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia Opera Pro­gram. Over din­ner, I sat at one of fif­teen tables on the stage of the spec­tac­u­lour Chan Cen­ter, while stu­dents from the pro­gram performed.

No one at my table had attended this pre­vi­ously, so we were all unsure what to expect – but were uni­ver­sally  blown away by the remark­able tal­ent and energy of stu­dents in this pro­gram. Each table of ten costs $1500.  For $750, next year two Van­cou­ver advi­sors can split a table of ten and each invite two client cou­ples. For the right clients, that $375 could be an out­stand­ing invest­ment in rela­tion­ship building.

Chances are that you aren’t located in Toronto or Van­cou­ver – and even if you are, these events might not be a fit for your or your clients.  What’s impor­tant here are not the spe­cific exam­ples, but the prin­ci­ple of deep­en­ing client rela­tion­ships by doing things which break through the clut­ter and stand out.

And note that almost every major uni­ver­sity has a music pro­gram, which often host remark­ably pro­fes­sional  per­for­mances and rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive fundrais­ers – and invit­ing the right clients to these is not just much lower cost than con­ven­tional pro­fes­sional  per­for­mance, but also typ­i­cally more fun and higher impact.

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