TactiBrand and Pareto Systems on Client Acquisitions
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•797 views
Kirk Lowe, Branding Tactician at TactiBrand and Duncan MacPherson, practice management leader at Pareto Systems share their thoughts on Attracting and Engaging clients in Financial Services.,
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Viewers also liked
Similar to TactiBrand and Pareto Systems on Client Acquisitions
Similar to TactiBrand and Pareto Systems on Client Acquisitions (20)
TactiBrand and Pareto Systems on Client Acquisitions
- 1. Client Acquisition How to Attract & Engage
- 2. Wisdom from… Kirk Lowe Duncan MacPherson Branding Tactician Speaker, Practice Mgmt Leader
- 3. Defining Question Which situation seems more risky for your practice?
- 4. What is Success? Success is growth in business development, practice management and professional competence.
- 5. Formula for Success Balanced competence is needed. Professional Competence: Practice Management: Business Development: •Client Engagement •Business & Operations •Branding •Expertise Management •Marketing Assets •Focus •Team Development •Communication Plan •Client Retention •Referral Process •Call-to-Action Tactics •Referral Approach
- 6. Client Acquisition Embrace attracting and engaging. Develop a simple and compelling story. Build professional content and material to showcase your story. Get your story in front of people, offer value and wisdom without obligation – it’s called building rapport and it means everything. Give them options to engage your ideas, your tribe and your services.
- 7. Your Brand Needs to be unique, relevant and simple to share and understand. Rate your brand in 5 categories: Uniqueness | Relevance | Exposure | Behavior | Advocacy
- 8. Marketing Assets Develop marketing assets to support credibility and professionalism. Then package assets and use as call-to-actions. Build Library of Value & Wisdom: Website | Blog | Papers | Articles | Posts | Checklists | Tools
- 9. Communication Plan Think ‘boomerang’ – you need to put it out there so it will come back to you. Offer value and wisdom. Attract then engage. Social Media | Blog | Nurture Campaigns | Public Relations | Community
- 10. Outcomes When you share a compelling story in a professional, value-added manner, people will talk with you and about you. The Return: More Inquiries, Endorsements , Referrals & Ideal Clients
- 11. Defining Moment Which situation seems more risky for your practice? Next Steps: Take Brand Challenge at TactiBrand.com/challenge Subscribe to KirkLowe.com Subscribe to ‘Actionable Tip of the Week’ at ParetoSystems.com Zero-Cost Coaching at ParetoSystems.com or call Anita Vaughn at 877- 359-8020 for more information
Editor's Notes
- I want to start by asking everyone an important question - a question I hope you will take very seriously. If you notice the image on the screen, the fish-bowl of the left may be you now, an advisor among advisors, offering similar services, selling similar products using similar tools – some of you might even feel like you’re a commodity. Or you could be the advisor leaping into a new world, where there are fewer competitors, more opportunities, better clients and a better work/life balance.Here’s the question I want you to take away from this webinar: which do you see as MORE risky? Staying in the same fish bowl or leaping into a new one?I think the answer to this question will define your mindset as you consider advancing your practice. It’s very difficult to stay the same and change at the same time.
- As a financial advisor, you can be successful at every stage of your career. But as your practice matures, so to do your expectations. Eventually, you’ll want more because you know what’s possible. Eventually, you’ll want to be free to run your business exactly as you dreamed, with the freedom and rewards that come with being an independent professional. If you’re sitting there considering where you fit on this life cycle – know this, whatever stage you are at, there’s always work to be done to enhance your position.
- I think you’ll agree that no one can be an expert is all areas of their business but if often takes expertise in all areas to grow and sustain a vibrant practice. You need to excel in all of these three areas: professional competence, practice mgmt and business development. Today, we’re going to focus on business development. But just to be clear, I want to make sure you understand we highly recommend you have competence in all of these areas.
- When we talk about business development, what we’re really talking about is Client Acquisition…how to attract and engage prospects – preferably ideal candidates – your most profitable and/or your favorite clients. The kind of clients you want to duplicate over and over again. There’s a lot of client acquisition experts out there, yourself included. No one knows your business better than you, but at the same time, it’s always helpful, sometimes even necessary to get an outside perspective – to assess what your business truly looks like and what improvements are needed to move forward. Let me share three business building pillars: before you do any marketing, make sure you have a clear and compelling story to share, your marketing should scream credibility and professionalism and that starts with content, not just marketing copy, but real content, and you need to be diligent about getting your message out there to the right people, the right way. Here’s the good, the bad and the inspiring:The good news is that if you focus on building your marketing foundation keeping these pillars in mind, you’re well on your way. The bad news is that this requires an investment of time and money to do it the right way. For a little perspective here, it took 18 months to develop TactiBrand’s current content offering. This includes advisor tools and resources, a new website, a new blog and more. We only recently launched our new website and marketing but now we’re positioned to leverage every opportunity in front of us. And now for the inspiring news – it’s two fold: First off, the process outlined here is too much work for most professionals to take on. Many will pursue the path of least resistance which means for those of you who pursue the path of greatest success, there will be less competition. I’m sure Duncan can share many stories about the outcomes of the path of least resistance through the thousands of advisors his company has coached over the years. Secondly, going through each of these pillars won’t just improve your marketing, it’ll improve your confidence and your ability to close business. I’ve had many clients over the years who have called me with success stories before we’ve even got their website completed – just because they started telling a more compelling story to those already in their pipeline.
- So let’s delve into these three pillars more. I’ll start with branding – so should you. I could spend a day talking about branding but let me summarize by saying you need to achieve 5 things: You need to be seen as unique, not necessarily the only one in the world, but certainly one of few in a certain marketplace. Obviously, the one and only is the best status to have. Your uniqueness needs to be highly relevant to your ideal client. If you’re great at “x” and they really only care about “y”, you SOL my friends. So be relevant. Share a simple message. You need to make sure your message is simple enough to put out there - naturally you need to get it out to the right people, the right way – and we’ll talk about this more in your Communication Plan later. You need to “be” your brand. You can fake it for a little while but if you’re not who you say you are - it’ll catch up with you. I’ve seen this – it’s a deep hole to dig out of. Lastly, your message needs to be so compelling that clients and peers want to talk about you – advocate for you. This can really only be achieved if everything above has been achieved and all of your team and marketing consistently preach your brand. To help you gain a better understanding of where you sit as far as building your brand, I invite you to take our Branding Challenge. It’s a 10 minute assessment of your brand and you’ll get a useful report along with a brand score. Again, you’re welcome to take the assessment and use the results to move your business forward. The URL to take the assessment is www.tactibrand.com/challenge. I’ll provide this URL again at the end of the webinar today.
- This is an area I have been talking about a lot lately - and it’s not being talked about by anyone else – developing marketing assets. In order to effectively put your name and services out there you need to rely on marketing assets – it might seem like a new way of doing business but it’s really not. Doing new business with new people has always been about building rapport, showing the prospect that you know a lot - and that you can be trusted to adhere to professional standards. So let me ask you this, when financial advisors engage social media experts, what exactly are they saying and what are they sending out? For the most part they’re re-purposing other people’s content. They’re curators. They’re small-curators competing with mega-curators and for the most part I don’t think prospects are terribly excited about this. To be compelling online you need a unique story, sharing a unique point of view, and in a giving way – sharing ideas, resources and tools while asking for nothing in return – not right away anyhow. I just spent 18 months developing a new website, a personal blog, 8 marketing papers, a research paper, a branding assessment, a client conversation tool and more – just so I had something to talk about. And only recently was I able to put it out there. The image you’re looking at on this slide is of my new blog, Kirklowe.com. It was one of the final pieces to this strategy and I hope it will be one you visit every few months.
- Communications has changed a lot over the past few years. Three of the five tactics above are new media. In fact you could even say that how one does public releases and community outreach has changed also. But before you put your message out there you need to have a compelling story, compelling ideas and compelling resources to share. It’s not easy but it’s what you should focus on going forward. I’m not saying you can’t market seminar or client appreciation events or products, but you need to start with building rapport versus asking someone to sit in front of you for 2 hours while you sell to them. Times aren’t a changing, they’ve already changed and will again soon. A few notable communication tactics for you to pursue are:Social Media (I recommend LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook in some cases, Slideshare, Twitter and even Pinterest) I don’t have time to get into these but they basically all revolve around you sharing your compelling story ideas and resources. Your Blog is a great way to communicate your ideas and resources. For years I would tell advisors not to use the word “blog” with compliance because compliance would freak out. The truth is, a blog isn’t much different than articles, it’s the fact that it can be easily controlled and updated by advisors through simple content mgmt systems that really spooked compliance departments. Thankfully, most compliance departments are slowly warming up to the prospect of advisors communicating online everyday. Nurture Campaigns or Nurture Marketing is all about turning cold prospects into warm prospects. In this business, you don’t win clients online, you win their attention and interest – perhaps even enough to meet with you. That’s the goal, to use technology to move them along the path to trusting you, to engaging you in conversation on their terms, at their pace. We use a tool called HubSpot for nurture marketing. We’re about to launch a very large campaign for an Insurance Marketing Organization and everyone is excited about seeing the results and engaging prospects in new ways. Public Relations is old school but still a very powerful tool. It’s a great compliment to social media. You can share articles and resources with the press and if someone picks it up, there’s your next tweet. Community is a grass roots approach – one that has worked for many financial professionals. It too has changed. For one, being in the community is more about being socially active online than anything. I think a good mix of personal and online community engagement is in order. You’ll have to find the right balance for you and your ideal audience. Facebook may be your best tool to communicate with your community although I highly recommend having a business versus a personal account. You can share personal experiences and interests with your business prospects but you might not want Ant Henrietta sharing pictures of your first bowel-movement. I thought about taking that word out but at this point in the presentation I figured it might just wake everyone up.
- What are the outcomes you’d like to see for your practice?more inquiries?more endorsements from centers of influence?more referrals?or better yet, more referrals to ideal clients?
- Before we start taking questions, let me remind you of the question I asked you at the start of the presentation. Which situation above seems MORE RISKY to you? If you’d like to answer, feel free to raise your hand. We’ll now start taking questions. Scott, do you have any questions for Duncan and I?