Sales and Sales Management Blog

June 27, 2008

Image vs Substance

Filed under: Financial Services, Personal Marketing, branding, business, developing expert reputation, marketing, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 9:05 am
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A couple of days ago I received an email from a financial planner regarding an article I wrote some months ago titled “The Medium, the Message, and the Financial Planner.” The planner brought up a question about the difference between one’s image and the substance of one’s practice and questioned my assertion that a financial planner needs to develop a public image as an expert and that to do that he or she need not be technically the best in their field but rather they only need be competent.

My reader thought that I was way off the mark in encouraging less than the best to become recognized as an expert, and that by becoming so recognized, they would be damaging the profession. His complaint was that:

“(I) have spent years studying tax law, estate planning, investments, insurance, and other areas that are critical to helping a client formulate a financial plan. I’ve invested most of my adult life in becoming a real expert, not an image.

“What you call developing an expert image and reputation I call branding which in my opinion is nothing more than creating a false impression of who the planner is. I see all of this ‘marketing’ to be degrading to me and my profession. I am not a salesperson as you say in your article. I am a skilled, trained professional. I don’t market any more than a specialist physician or attorney markets.

“Certainly, there are financial planners that market their practice and many have very lucrative practices. I equate them more to the ambulance chaser than to a professional. I have no doubt that if I followed your advice I’d make more money, but at the expense of who I am, at the expense of the dignity and respect of my profession, and at the expense of my self-respect. I may not be making a six figure income, but I make a good living and I’ve done it without prostituting myself or my profession. In fact, I believe that if you and the others like you who are advocating financial planners become common salespeople would cease with your self serving attempt to sell your services, I’d be making considerably more because my expertise would come to the surface. As it is with the advice and guidance you and others give on how to market, many of the best financial planners aren’t acquiring the clients we deserve because lesser skilled planners are attracting them through their marketing practices.”

The reader had a few other comments to make, but you get the general drift of his email. Unfortunately, my experience working with thousands of advisors in the financial services industry is that he is not the only one with this view of marketing and sales.

Like most sales trainers, I get a good number of very positive emails and my share of challenging emails, but I’m not sure I get any more honest than this one. This reader is very clear on how he sees himself and his profession—and how he sees salespeople, marketing, and other financial planners who are aggressive in developing their practices.

He is also very clear on his misunderstanding of what sales and marketing is about and how business is acquired. Unfortunately, being one of the best at what you do isn’t going to bring in business. If no one knows about you, then no matter how good you are at what you do, you’re not going to thrive.

There isn’t a dichotomy between selling and marketing and being a professional, one doesn’t exclude the other. Creating an expert image through ethically sound marketing isn’t degrading or deceptive.

However, the arrogance and ignorance to believe that one is above selling and marketing is self-destructive. Being jealous of one’s competition because they are acquiring clientele you don’t think they deserve is self-destructive. Believing you warrant more business simply because you know what you’re doing is self-destructive.

Being technically competent or even being a technical expert is useless if you don’t have clients to practice on. Spending time and energy and using the strategies that create your public image and reputation as an expert is the sign of a true expert; believing you are above marketing is an indication of a lack of understanding of what marketing is and how business works.

Public reputations don’t happen by accident. They have to be nurtured and cultivated. They have to be created.

How many great financial planners are languishing in near poverty because no one knows they exist? If simply being great at what one does was enough, there would be no need for marketing, advertising, and selling. If being good was good enough, there wouldn’t be so many highly proficient technicians in every industry going out of business everyday because they are starving to death.

Success doesn’t happen because one happens to be a highly skilled technician. Success requires the acquisition of a number of skills—from the technical skills of your profession to the skills to get the word out about your existence and how you can serve the potential client. Success happens by intention, not by happenstance. Image doesn’t mean illusion and substance doesn’t mean success. Technical substance must be combined with a public image created through marketing and solidified through selling if you want to create a practice that is both professionally and financially satisfying.

February 7, 2008

The Medium, the Message and the Financial Adviser

Filed under: Communication, Financial Services, Networking, Personal Marketing, Referral Selling, lead generation, marketing, prospecting, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 8:26 am
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The typical financial adviser will spend over 650 hours a year studying their profession through reading professional books and publications, on-line classes, seminars, listening to CD’s, and other study methods.  That’s almost 17, 40-hour weeks of study a year to become good at what they do.  Broken into the equivalent of college courses, it equates to about three full semesters of college work a year. 

Three years into the profession, they will have completed the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree, plus a semester of graduate school.  After only 5 years in the profession, they’ve invested the equivalent of 7 ½ years of class time.  Since most enter the profession with at least a Bachelor’s degree, they have, in essence, earned a Ph.D. 

During the same time, they have invested little, if anything in their profession’s other side—learning to sell and market their services.  By the end of their 5th year in the profession, most advisers have invested little more than a college semester in learning how to generate the clients necessary in order to practice their profession. 

Unfortunately, being technically good is useless if you don’t have a client to work with.  Being half a financial adviser will get you nowhere except into another profession. 

Many advisers struggle when it comes to generating new business.  Some cold call.  Others network the local chamber of commerce.  Some stick their business cards to bulletin boards at restaurants or under windshields in parking lots, send unsolicited emails, fax fliers all over town, invest in direct mail, buy leads, or purchase expensive advertising.  Yet, few invest their time and money in learning more sophisticated prospecting and client acquisition methods.

When acquiring complex and sophisticated services such as financial products and guidance, prospects want to work with an adviser they believe to be expert.  Indeed, whether their assumptions are correct or not, prospects make a number of assumptions about what an expert is and how experts acquire their business.  They assume that experts are not cold calling, sending unsolicited emails, sticking business cards on windshields or bulletin boards, putting up cheap yard signs on street corners, or faxing fliers.  Rather, prospects assume that experts don’t have to do these things because their practice is populated through referrals from the adviser’s current client base. 

Consequently, the very act of cold calling, faxing fliers, blasting emails, or engaging in any other form of prospecting that prospects identify as crude, sends the message that the adviser is not what the adviser proclaims himself or herself to be—an expert.  These prospecting methods confirm Marshall McLuhan’s proclamation that “the medium is the message.”  The medium used to communicate to the prospect shapes the prospect’s perception of the adviser more than the content of the message.  Unfortunately for the adviser using these media, the message the medium communicates is the exact opposite of what the adviser seeks to communicate. 

Nevertheless, there are client acquisition methods available whose medium message can reinforce the adviser’s content message.  Learning and perfecting these formats requires as much dedication and commitment as learning the technical aspects of the profession.  Alternatively, hiring someone who understands the financial adviser’s business and can perform a number of these activities for the adviser will both expedite the process and free the adviser from the time commitment to learn and hone the required skills.

Communicating an expert message requires you use the media of an expert.  Mixing an expert message with a non-expert medium doesn’t send a mixed message, it sends the dominate message of the medium–a message that the adviser is just another one of the crowd. 

What are the media of an expert?  There are many:

Networking:  Networking through various organizations and associations is an expert format.  However, as all things associated with the expert, how and where you network is crucial.  An expert is more likely to be networking through specialized business, industry, and charitable associations than through more general organizations.  Working within a physician, engineering, architectural, CEO, or charitable organization is more “expert” than surfing the local chamber of commerce or breakfast networking group.  In addition, becoming an active member and developing relationships without overt “prospecting” is more “expert” than trying to evangelize someone you just met.  The relationship converts the prospect, not the overt “selling.”

Referrals:  Prospects assume true experts acquire clients through referrals.  Generating a large volume of high quality referrals requires learning and practicing a well-developed process that leads clients to a comfort level to give strong, quality referrals.  Simply asking doesn’t produce the quantity or quality desired.  However, there are processes used by the top sales professionals that work extremely well.

Press Releases:  Learning how to write and distribute well-written press releases about yourself and your practice will have far more impact than advertising.  Most prospects are resistant to advertising and direct mail.  Press releases, on the other hand, have the authority and subtlety of being reported as hard news.

Published Articles:  Becoming a published author on technical subjects important to the prospect demonstrates expert knowledge—and is in a medium most prospects recognize as educational and informative, not one that is “selling.”  With the thousands of article databases on the internet, becoming a published author is quick and easy if the article is well-written, educational, and void of overt self-promotion.

Speeches:  Giving educational speeches to local business and civic groups and organizations will also establish your credentials as an expert.  Moreover, like writing articles, the medium used has automatic expert credibility.  By appearing before the group as an expert, you become an expert.  And like writing articles, the emphasis is on education, not self-promotion.  Experts are far more effective at promoting themselves when they don’t overtly promote themselves.

Becoming an Expert Source:  Recognized experts are interviewed and quoted in various media—print, audio, and visual.  The “experts” quoted and interviewed in your local media have worked hard to become expert sources for the reporters, columnists, and freelance writers interviewing or quoting them.  You can become an expert source also by learning the ins and outs of working with the media and establishing yourself as a source for information, quotes, and interviews when they are dealing with a subject that you can address as an expert.

By carefully matching the medium you use with the content of your message, you can establish a public image and reputation as an expert in a matter of months that will continue to grow over the years.  These media are not easy to use, nor are they a quick solution to client acquisition.  They are, however, highly effective and they come to the prospect in a format that doesn’t confuse the message or, worse, defeat the content of your message.

January 17, 2008

De-Commoditizing The Financial Services Sale

Filed under: Financial Services, Personal Marketing, marketing, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 7:14 am
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If you sell financial services, from property and casualty insurance, to life and health insurance to securities to financial planning, your industry is rapidly changing.  You must either change with it or find a way to combat the change.  Either way, you will have to change the way you do business if you want to survive.

It wasn’t that many years ago when consumers who were in the market for financial services of any kind wanted and expected the advice and guidance of a financial advisor.  Whether dealing with an insurance decision, investing their hard-earned money, or trying to layout a complete financial plan, people understood the need to consult an expert.

Consequently, most people selling financial services, whether working for an insurance company, a wirehouse, or a financial planning firm, spent hundreds, some thousands of hours each year studying the intricacies of their products and services.  Each sought to become a product expert, a trusted source who could not only properly fill out the paperwork and calculate the cost (and the commission), but could also give professional advice—advice designed to help the customer or client reach their ultimate goal and to make well informed decisions about complex issues.

Certainly, there have always been a percentage of financial services providers concerned about making a quick buck, but most who entered the industry were seeking a career where they could not only make a solid income, but also be recognized an expert, a true professional.

There are still hundreds of thousands seeking the same goals.  They still spend hundreds or thousands of hours each year diligently studying their craft.  They still seek to find creative—yet legal—ways to help solve client problems.  They still try to help their clients meet their ultimate goals, whatever those goals are.

Nevertheless, your industry is changing before your eyes.  What was once considered complex transactions needing expert advice and guidance is quickly becoming nothing but a commodity to be bought at the lowest possible price.

Insurance companies are looking for ways to turn agents into order takers, selling based on price or the ability to at least appear to be the lowest price; investment firms are looking to turn registered reps into order takers, transacting trades at the cheapest possible price; and some companies are offering cheap fill-in-the-blank “financial plans” that are nothing but boilerplate documents, with recommendations taken from a pre-determined list of options.

Of course, there are still customers who recognize a need for expertise and guidance.  However, that group is shrinking all the time.  More and more people are prescribing their own financial medicine.  Just as the proliferation of drug ads on TV and in print is subtly encouraging people to determine their own medication, needing only the sign-off of their doctor, the proliferation of financial information, from books to TV shows is encouraging more and more people to financially self-medicate, needing only the signature of a licensed agent or registered rep.

This isn’t to say that the tsunami of financial information available isn’t good.  It is simply to say that the natural culmination of this proliferation of information is a large–and growing–number of people who believe they no longer need to pay more for financial advice than the price of a book. 

And the result of all of this self-medication?  Traditional insurance, securities, and financial planning firms are finding it more difficult to find new sources of business.  Traditional agents, registered reps and financial planners are fighting for an ever-shrinking number of potential clients.  Competition is getting more and more cut throat.  The reaction of the companies is to hire more agents, reps, and financial planners, hoping to bring in more business. 

The washout rate within each industry is increasing—with no end in sight.

Yet, within each segment of the financial services industry, there are agents, reps, and financial planners, both long-time professionals and new up and comers, who are making more money than ever before.  This small group of professionals has found a way to combat the commoditization of their industry.  Not only have they found a way to combat the growing commoditization, they have found a way to make it work in their favor.

How?  Not by giving in to the pressure of selling price.  Not by retreating from offering expert advice and guidance.  Not by throwing in the towel.

Their answer is to decommoditize their products and services by developing a public reputation and image as the local expert in their field.  They have forsaken traditional marketing and opted for a more radical marketing model.  Rather than simply becoming product or service experts and then seeking to market themselves as in the past, these professionals have sought to become publicly recognized experts and mini-celebrities within their local areas. 

They no longer hope for simple name recognition through advertising or direct mail.  They no longer rely on the attraction of their company’s household name.  They certainly don’t spend hundreds of hours cold calling looking for those few individuals willing to talk with them.

Instead, they actively work to generate a public name and image for themselves that sets them apart from their competition, whether that competition comes from traditional marketing or from discounting price.  They have learned how to use strategies historically reserved by corporate PR departments and high visibility “experts” to position themselves within their marketplace as a recognized expert.

They realize people are willing to pay top dollar to work with someone who has the public status of an expert—and visibility and publicity dictates status.  You may be the best agent, registered rep or financial planner from a technical standpoint, but if prospects don’t recognize you as an expert by reputation, image, and publicity, you are just another of the crowd. 

If you want to stand above the crowd in a crowded and shrinking marketplace, you will have to shift your thinking from traditional marketing to using methods that are more sophisticated.  Being a great technician just isn’t good enough any more—unless you’re satisfied selling a commodity.

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