A Good Brand Will Repel More Than It Attracts

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

by Stephen Wer­sh­ing, The Client Dri­ven Practice

Finan­cial advi­sors work hard to develop a value propo­si­tion that will get the atten­tion of prospec­tive clients. Focus­ing on how well your slo­gan or ele­va­tor speech attracts atten­tion, though, can backfire.

How you describe your­self, whether it be ver­bally or through a brochure or your web­site, is one of the key ele­ments in pro­mot­ing your brand. It needs to be effec­tive in prompt­ing ques­tions or con­ver­sa­tion about what your prac­tice has to offer. Ide­ally, it will cap­ture the inter­ests of prospec­tive clients in your niche. And it will do noth­ing for peo­ple out­side that tar­get mar­ket. If that value propo­si­tion is well-crafted it will actu­ally turn peo­ple away from your prac­tice if they are not in your niche.

I was reminded of this by Eric Schwartz, CEO of Cam­bridge Invest­ment Research, in a talk he gave a cou­ple months ago. We sus­pect it may have been said by leg­endary mar­ket­ing guru Al Ries. The only direct ref­er­ence I can find is by William Arruda, but if you have not read any­thing by Ries on brand­ing it is worth your time.

Many finan­cial advi­sors I work with are chal­lenged when nar­row­ing their mes­sage. The whole point, they believe, is to attract new clients. Why say some­thing that may turn away most of the peo­ple you talk to? But the desire to say some­thing that every­one finds attrac­tive hurts your brand because it takes the empha­sis off of what is spe­cial about what you have to offer a par­tic­u­lar group of people.

Brands that attract the right clients and gen­er­ate refer­rals build a rep­u­ta­tion. Fuzzy, gen­eral, unfo­cused brand­ing mes­sages are not mem­o­rable. An effec­tive brand will help you build a rep­u­ta­tion that will assist peo­ple in remem­ber­ing you when the right sit­u­a­tion comes along.

Let’s say you tar­get vet­eri­nar­i­ans. You have devel­oped an exper­tise in the finan­cial chal­lenge of run­ning an ani­mal hos­pi­tal. You under­stand how to value a vet­eri­nary prac­tice and are famil­iar with the terms and lim­i­ta­tions of suc­ces­sion agree­ments when those prac­tices get sold. Your brand – what peo­ple say about you – would empha­size that unique knowl­edge. So when you describe the value of what you do, you would talk about that exper­tise. If the per­son you were talk­ing to was not a vet­eri­nar­ian, they would prob­a­bly have no inter­est at all in dis­cussing it further.

And that’s okay. Because if a vet­eri­nar­ian 10 years from sell­ing his prac­tice talks to you and the advi­sor who talks about his “spe­cial rela­tion­ship with his clients” and another who talks about her “sophis­ti­cated invest­ment man­age­ment strat­egy”, who do you think will win the client?

Brand­ing is not about attract­ing the most clients, it is about attract­ing the right clients. Get com­fort­able with describ­ing your prac­tice in a way that most of the pop­u­la­tion will have no inter­est in. Then you can focus on build­ing a rep­u­ta­tion that your ideal prospects will have a lot of inter­est in.

The Client Dri­ven Practice

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Tags: Al Ries, Animal Hospital, Brochure, Driven Practice, Elevator Speech, Financial Advisors, Financial Challenge, Guru Al Ries, Investment Research, Niche, Promoting Your Brand, Prospective Clients, Referrals, Reputation, Slogan, Succession, Target Market, Value Proposition, Veterinarians, Veterinary Practice, William Arruda
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Practice Essentials: Investment Management Focus Days

Monday, July 30th, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chroncity Per­for­mance Consulting

One of the goals that you should pur­sue is to opti­mize the time you spend in client-facing activ­i­ties.  We define client-facing activ­i­ties as time spent man­ag­ing exist­ing (ideal) client rela­tion­ships or in busi­ness devel­op­ment activ­i­ties to attract new (ideal) clients to your business.

Some indus­try stud­ies report that advi­sors who spend in excess of 60% of their time in client-facing activ­i­ties earn three to five times the income of those who do not.  This study also reported that only about 9% of advi­sors spend in excess of 60% of their time in client-facing activity.

If you study the industry’s most suc­cess­ful advi­sors, you will find they have good processes and teams to allow them to focus on man­ag­ing their client rela­tion­ships and build­ing their per­sonal, busi­ness and client networks.

One of my fond mem­o­ries of being an advi­sor was when I was out of my office and was stopped by three advi­sors in the branch who wanted to talk.  My assis­tant Sheri got up from her desk, approached the group, grabbed me by my sleeve and pulled me back to my office.  I asked her what that was about and she told me “I get a per­cent­age of your rev­enue.  When you are talk­ing with other advi­sors, you are not talk­ing with clients and you are not mak­ing any money.  Get back to work!”

Invest­ment man­age­ment is one of the core sta­bi­liz­ers of your busi­ness, you need to man­age the process so you make good deci­sions and rec­om­men­da­tions.  At the same time you need to be effi­cient so that you do not take away time from client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment and busi­ness development.

Here is a process that I think you should con­sider:  Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days.

I have writ­ten in pre­vi­ous arti­cles about the inabil­ity of humans to multi-task.  The brain is sim­ply not wired to do more than one thing at a time.  So, by allo­cat­ing time specif­i­cally for invest­ment research and report­ing, you will get more done in less time.

Even more impor­tantly, the process of devel­op­ing port­fo­lios and client reports will help you orga­nize your thoughts and help you pro­duce bet­ter client results.

If you are a reg­u­lar reader, you may have seen my arti­cle enti­tled “A Sim­ple Method to Improve Your Clients’ Invest­ment Per­for­mance”.  In this arti­cle, I dis­cussed a process called Purpose-Based Asset Man­age­ment.  You can read the arti­cle for a full expla­na­tion, but the con­cept is help­ing clients to iden­tify a series of “buck­ets” rep­re­sent­ing future uses of money, iden­ti­fy­ing how much money will be required in each “bucket” and esti­mat­ing a time­frame for each “bucket”.  Then port­fo­lios, invest­ment pol­icy and report­ing processes will be devel­oped for short, medium and long-term port­fo­lios, cor­re­spond­ing to the “buckets”.

On your first Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Day, you should develop a series of port­fo­lios for a vari­ety of time­frames and risk tol­er­ances.  You may want to develop port­fo­lios for tax­able and non-taxable accounts.  Your goal should be to develop port­fo­lios that are appro­pri­ate for 80% of the cases that you encounter.

You will be pre­sented from time-to-time with cases for which there is not a fit within your port­fo­lios.  In these cases, you should review each new port­fo­lio to assess whether it should become one of your model portfolios.

Once your port­fo­lios have been devel­oped, you should back test them to judge volatil­ity and per­for­mance against bench­marks.  Then, you should pack­age the port­fo­lios so they are in a client-ready for­mat.  I would sug­gest that you cre­ate elec­tronic (pdf) ver­sions so you can e-mail them.

The next step is to write a quar­terly invest­ment report in which you dis­cuss such things as:

• Per­for­mance for the past quarter
• Out­look for the next year

Keep it sim­ple.  I have been involved in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try for over thirty years and still don’t under­stand some of the reports that are sent out to clients.  Write your own.  It helps you to orga­nize your thoughts.  You may strug­gle with the first cou­ple but once you get in a groove, it gets a lot easier.

To com­plete all this work ini­tially, you will prob­a­bly need more than one day, but it will take much less time to update your port­fo­lios that to build them the first time.

On the other hand, this process will save you hours of time.  Rather than devel­op­ing port­fo­lios from scratch, you can sim­ply pull your port­fo­lio reports from a shelf (or print them from your com­puter).  You may even cre­ate a pre­sen­ta­tion binder (hard copy or elec­tronic) to dis­cuss with clients.  Clients love being given choices, espe­cially when they are easy to understand.

Make sure to stay focused – your ulti­mate goal is to spend a sin­gle day per quar­ter on invest­ment port­fo­lio and report­ing so you can spend more than 60% of your time in client-facing activ­i­ties.  Pre-book these days a year in advance.  Arrange with whole­salers or other indi­vid­u­als with whom you would like to col­lab­o­rate to meet on your Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days.

I real­ize that if you man­age your own port­fo­lios that it is vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to do all the nec­es­sary work in one day per quar­ter.  It is dif­fi­cult to man­age invest­ments rather than work­ing with invest­ment man­agers and break through the 60% client-facing thresh­old.  Model port­fo­lios will def­i­nitely help your cause.

We are prepar­ing to launch a new ser­vice to help you man­age your invest­ment processes.  Should you decide to imple­ment a pro­gram, like the one above, we will help you nav­i­gate through set-up and your invest­ment processes and port­fo­lios.  Then, we can, at your option, meet with you on your quar­terly Invest­ment Man­age­ment Focus Days to dis­cuss your port­fo­lios and reporting.

You can par­tic­i­pate in our new pro­gram, Invest­ment Processes and Port­fo­lios, based on your needs, pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties.  A vari­ety of options are avail­able from pay-by-the-minute to pre-booked ses­sions of as lit­tle as 15-minutes.

We hold you account­able, chal­lenge you on your port­fo­lios and strate­gies and proof your report­ing.  You iden­tify your needs and we help you.

To dis­cuss how this pro­gram can help you build or man­age your invest­ment man­age­ment pro­gram,  please con­tact Bob Simp­son at 905−502−0100 or bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

Bob Simp­son

Direct Line:  905−502−0100

Toll Free:      866−646−6002

E-mail:  bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca

Text Mes­sage:  905−502−0100

Web­site:  www​.syn​chronic​ity​.ca

Join our Dis­cus­sion Group on LinkedIn:  www​.linkedin​.com/​g​r​o​u​p​s​/​A​d​v​i​s​o​r​-​C​o​l​l​a​b​o​r​a​t​i​o​n​-​4​2​4​8​7​2​5​/​a​b​out

Bio:  www​.syn​chronic​ity​.ca/​a​b​out

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Tags: Bob Simpson, Brain, Business Development Activities, Client Networks, Client Relationship Management, Client Relationships, Decisions, Desk, Focus Days, Fond Memories, Investment Management, Investment Research, Management Development, Management Focus, Money, Personal Business, Practice Essentials, Practice Management, Sheri, Stabilizers
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Financial Services Shouldn’t Fear Social

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

It’s no sur­prise that many inde­pen­dent finan­cial advi­sors have been hes­i­tant to join social media net­works — even many of the 50 most impor­tant pri­vate banks and wealth man­age­ment insti­tu­tions world­wide have lagged behind, accord­ing to a studyby Asset​inum​.com.

Mea­sur­ing the FIs’ use of Twit­ter, LinkedIn, Face­book and YouTube, as well as their website-social media inte­gra­tion, the researchers deter­mined that the banks aver­aged 43 out of a pos­si­ble 100 points. Assentinum​.com also observed that clients across the globe want greater trans­parency and edu­ca­tional con­tent from their banks. The demand is there, yet finan­cial pro­fes­sion­als and insti­tu­tions have con­tin­ued to ignore it.

Finan­cial ser­vices firms that fail to engage with exist­ing and prospec­tive clients on social net­works may be miss­ing out on vital oppor­tu­ni­ties to build client cap­i­tal and estab­lish deeper rela­tion­ships. These web­sites can also prove use­ful in the sales stage of the buy­ing cycle, when you are research­ing prospects’ busi­nesses, val­ues and goals in order to devise a solu­tion that will help them. Social media can make your sales, mar­ket­ing and client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties more effi­cient and bring your firm into the 21st century.

“Espe­cially for renowned banks with a demand­ing clien­tele, it is increas­ingly impor­tant to be present in the vir­tual social net­work,” the com­pany notes. A sur­vey from Cogent Research found that more than 5 mil­lion investors with more than $100,000 investable assets use social media plat­forms when research­ing and mak­ing finan­cial deci­sions.. Finan­cial Plan­ning reports that the study also deter­mined that 75 per­cent of the 5-million investors men­tioned in the research study turn to LinkedIn most fre­quently when con­duct­ing invest­ment research.

There is no rea­son to shy away from social media. Although it may seem com­plex in the­ory, the reg­u­la­tory issues asso­ci­ated with the chan­nel can be avoided if you care­fully plan your social mar­ket­ing strat­egy. Before set­ting up blogs and pro­files, take time to iden­tify the goals you have for mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing your prac­tice and yourself.

Are you join­ing these net­works sim­ply to spread aware­ness of your brand, or do you gen­uinely want to cre­ate more mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions with the pub­lic, prospects and clients? How do you cur­rently use social media for busi­ness pur­poses? What do you hope to gain by expand­ing your online presence?

Side­step­ping social media and keep­ing it out of your mar­ket­ing mix is no longer an option. Increas­ingly, high net worth indi­vid­u­als, as well as the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, are join­ing the net­works and using dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools to stay in touch with their busi­ness associates.

Shauna Trainor is The Covenant Group’s Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. She focuses on The Covenant Group’s own mar­ket­ing strat­egy and also helps entre­pre­neurs through finan­cial advi­sor train­ing to lever­age social media and other tech­nol­ogy to spread the word about their ser­vices and prac­tices and build relationships.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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Tags: Client Relationship Management, Covenant Group, Educational Content, Facebook, Financial Decisions, Financial Professionals, Independent Financial Advisors, Investable Assets, Investment Research, Management Institutions, Management Responsibilities, Marketing Strategy, Media Integration, Media Networks, Media Platforms, Private Banks, Prospective Clients, Regulatory Issues, Social Marketing, Social Networks, Vital Opportunities, Wealth Management
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