Financial Advisor Blog on Marketing, Lead Generation, Prospecting and Sales

Get Lazy and Get Rich? Sounds like a paradox?

Most of the financial advisors I observe work too hard, work too many hours and sweat too much over getting new clients. It’s time you get lazy and get rich. You do this by establishing your marketing so that people contact you and your job is to react. You also do this by delegating and have others do the work.

Most of us resist some simple truths about ourselves that could make us a lot more money:

1. We are lazy. Wouldn’t you rather be laying on a beach right now? There’s big money in admitting laziness as I explain in a minute
2. We are reactive rather than proactive. Would you rather answer the phone and open an account or cold call to open an account? We are great at reacting. We are very good at answering the phone, responding to inquiries and taking orders. We are lousy at proacting as evidenced by the dozens of books teaching brokers how to overcome the fear and drudgery of cold calling. There are many great order takers and few great (proactive) salespeople.
3. We are good at doing the same things over and over. Notice that in companies, 5% of the people have jobs in management—the people who need to create their own day and determine on their own where to focus for results. The other 95% of the employees are people who are told what to do and then do it over and over, day after day—the bank teller, the customer service person, the auto laborer. Most of the population can do these repetitive routine tasks well but few can invent their own daily work activities without direction.

Most likely, you have set up your business to require all of the actions that you do not do well or don’t want to do: work hard, proact, and do different things everyday. In other words, you require yourself to fight the above list of inclinations and that makes each day hard. You have established a significant headwind and each day is a struggle. But it can be different. Let's see how to plan each day to make it easy.

Here’s how to make a lot of money by capitalizing on being lazy, being reactive and doing the same things over and over.

You must set up all of your marketing to react. You get people to call you by:

1. Send a lot of the right mail to the right people. Yes, direct mail works but not for most financial advisors. It’s because their firm and the financial advisors have taken zero time to study what makes direct mail work. Advertising firms are of no help here. Direct mail is a science. Invest 40 hours of study and you can get a 2% response whenever you mail. Send 1000 pieces a week and have 20 targeted, qualified people contacting you. I know financial advisors that use direct mail to get responses and fill up seminar rooms year after year or fill their appointment calendars.
2. Advertising works. You can earn $10,000 toi $20,000 monthly from small ads costing you less than $1000 per month. The ads have people contact you and you just respond (thet trick is writing compelling ads and that means you need to study copy writing).
3. Have your clients send you referrals. You do that by telling the new client that you will work hard for them and fulfill what they demand of you, but in return, they must refer people to you. You then, after proving yourself, have them introduce you to referrals by either them calling the referral, introducing you in person or sending a letter. If you leave out the above two steps, asking for referrals won’t work
4. Getting and giving referrals to your peers. Financial advisors are the most nearsighted group of professionals when it comes to getting business from their peers. Notice that doctors refer to each other like crazy. And the smart ones are money machines from doing so. Yet brokers will meet a client interested in establishing a 401k for their business and then scurry around to learn what they can so they can put together a half-baked proposal. Rather, they should find the person in their firm who is the 401k master and split the business! Let others do the work for you. Refer like crazy and spend your time on the few items at which you are expert. If you refer, you will be referred to (if you are known for an area of expertise).

Time to get lazy, react and do business.