This blog has moved!

You should be automatically redirected in 5 seconds. If not, visit
http://www.javelinmarketing.com/blog/ and update your bookmarks.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Overworked? Your Problem is Not Time Management


The most widespread yet ignored problem shared by most financial advisors is the lack of focus. Interestingly, most advisors fail to see that this problem is at the root of all of their other problems.

For example, most advisors will tell you there are not enough hours in the day. They believe this time shortage is due to a deficiency in their time management skills or the nature of a business where there’s simply too much to do. In fact, the shortage of time has to do with lack of focus in their business, attempting to deal with too many products and services and attempting to deal with too many different types of clients.

Let’s take an example. Joe Advisor meets with Mrs. Jones, age 68. He constructs a portfolio of blue chip stocks and bonds. This is the same portfolio he has constructed for another 25 clients, so it was highly efficient for him to do the same thing for one more client. The other 25 clients are also in the same age range as Mrs. Jones—between ages 65 and 78. By having the homogeneous subgroup of clients, Joe is able to take the same approach, use the same products, provide the same service and is able to maintain the portfolios as if they were one portfolio.
At the end of the meeting, Mrs. Jones asked Joe if he can help her son Harry, age 49, who started a new construction business, set up a retirement plan. Hungry for a new client and eager to do more business, Joe agrees to call the son.

In a 30 minute phone conversation with the son, Joe answered a lot of minute questions regarding retirement plans and accommodated the son’s need to be educated about the difference between an IRA, profit sharing, a money purchase plan and a defined benefit plan. The son also mentioned that he was interested in the most aggressive growth funds available because he had a long investing time horizon.

Joe quickly went to work to find information on a profit sharing plan as he had not set one of these up for two years, given that many of his clients were retired. He also spent 55 minutes doing research using Morningstar in order to find two or three good aggressive growth funds since he was unfamiliar with those types of funds which he typically doesn’t use. Joe invested almost 90 minutes for what will be a $10,000 investment for the son to start his profit sharing plan.

Joe will earn gross commission of $400 from this transaction with a minimum investment of three hours. Compare this to the meeting had with Mrs. Jones. The first and second meetings were total of two hours and Mrs. Jones invested $250,000.00 from which Joe will earn $2,500 per year. Dealing with the son has caused Joe to take on business which is highly time inefficient, a digression from his normal business and has forced him to spend more time than he should with the new client.

Joe will also need to keep his eye on the performance of this aggressive growth fund for this one client, his only client that owns this fund. If this sounds familiar, here’s the immediate action you must take:

1. Decide on one niche of clients that you choose to prospect
2. Determine what products and services are most desired and most beneficial for this group of clients
3. Build all marketing and sales functions around this one niche of clients
4. Gain mastery in the few products and services that will serve these clients

Assume momentarily that the three products for this market are fixed annuities, bonds, and blue chip stocks. Pick, at most, your two favorite annuity companies to deal with, one blue chip stocks strategy such as the Dow dividend strategy, and find a newsletter that recommends fixed income instruments so that you know which bonds to select monthly without having to do research. Use the same building blocks with every client so you can finally have the life you dreamed.

Your job is not to cater to the desires of every prospect but rather find prospects that fit the model you use.

If you focus, you can leave the office at 4:00 P.M., you can train assistants to do much of your work for you, you can treat the portfolios of all your clients as though they were one portfolio to be watched. You have far less work to do when you have greater focus and you gain greater expertise in your client niche and in the products and services they desire.

This is the key to having a sane life as a financial advisor. The longer you continue to deal with everybody, give them whatever they like and spend more hours than you should at the office, the longer you delay having the life you want and investing time building a practice that will have no terminal value.

If you hesitate to turn business away so that you can focus on a target niche, consider this recommendation that the marriage counselor gave to an unhappy husband: your marriage will improve when you stop dating.

Friday, September 19, 2008

How Financial Advisors use Mob Psychology to Get Clients


We’ve all heard of “mob” lynchings and “mob” psychology. These terms describe the behavior of crowds because crowd behavior is distinctly different than the additive behavior of the individuals. You can use this difference to get clients. Specifically, the fact that people are followers and a few leaders can influence them, allows you to build your business faster.
Psychologists more informally term mob psychology, “crowd theory.” Here’s how one writer describes it:

Crowds do not respond to information in the same way as individuals. Communication with respect to crowds is primitive compared to that between individuals. One can even postulate an inverse correlation between the intellectual level of communication taking place within a group and the size of the group—the bigger the group the lower the intellectual level of communication…..Crowds have very small attention spans and memories, therefore, constant repetition is necessary in order to pound the message into the collective psyche. Yet another powerful technique used in order to persuade the masses is the coupling of an image to the message. Coupling an image to the message allows further simplification of the message, while simultaneously reinforcing the sentiment underlying the message itself.

There is actually a science, using the above principals, of how to make presentations that insight mob behavior and you can apply this science to get clients. It’s called “platform sales” and you may recognize some of the most able names at this practice—Ron LeGrand, Dan Kennedy, Chet Holmes. These people get a crowd together at a conference and get the attendees so foamed up, they rush to the back of the room, credit cards in hand, to buy tapes and books and manuals by the hundreds. In your case, you don’t want to sell tapes and books, you want to get clients, you want the attendees to set an appointment to meet with you individually and eventually give you their money.

Now before I continue, there is at least one reader that must be addressed that feels getting a crowd “foamed up” is a bad thing and has no place in proper business procedures. Let's address that. Franklin Roosevelt needed to get Americans foamed up at the start of World War II which is why you now have the freedom to read this or whatever you choose to read. So the knowledge of crowd theory can be used, like anything, for positive or negative purposes. In this context, this education is offered to financial advisors who have the intention of getting clients AND serving as many people as possible and want every available tool to do so.

In our writer’s description above, he mentions four issues which have direct impact for financial advisors who want to get clients:

1. The larger the group, the less individual thinking occurs. In other words, you get more people acting as followers in a seminar of 50 people than in a seminar with 8 attendees. I have personally noticed that like many natural phenomena, there are diminishing returns. Once the crowd gets beyond 70 people, you begin to lose influence as additional attendees are physically further and further away from you and less influenced and the ability to get clients diminishes.

2. Constant repetition. Take a lesson from infomercial producers. In a thirty-minute show, they say the same things four times. In fact, it’s actually 7 minutes of tape that gets replayed four times in various orders. The lesson for you? If you want to get clients, don’t give so much information when you give a talk as people get overloaded. Pick three “themes” and repeat them.

3. Use images. That does not mean PowerPoint necessarily, but it means that you should have something that will burn a picture in the crowd’s mind. This could be a magic trick, you playing a humorous song on your guitar that you composed about insurance companies, a cartoon, etc.

4. Use sentiment. People buy emotionally and justify rationally. So why are your presentations so darn rational and logical? Logic does not move people to action, emotions do. If you want to get clients, fill your presentations with emotional reasons to act (love of family, fear of being destitute, physical discomfort in the Medicaid ward, the joy of taking the grandkids on the Disney Cruise, etc).

Seminars of course, allow you to influence people as a group rather than one to one. Not only do seminars allow you to make a presentation to many people simultaneously and thereby gain time efficiency, when most attendees laugh at a joke, so do the others (even if they don’t get it). And when followers see others nod in agreement with your point, they also agree. And most importantly, when they see others set an appointment at the seminar, they do also. Therefore, you gain an advantage working with groups that you cannot gain when communicating with individuals.

Group presentations can take several forms

The public seminar is the most common for financial advisors and the most lucrative way to get clients. People receive an invitation and attend because they have interest. With a full room, crowd theory takes hold to your advantage. By having an appointment-setting process where every attendee can observe the others making an appointment, your appointment ratio can often double because of the herd psychology of crowds.

Similar to the public seminar, is the private seminar—where the group is already gathered and affiliated—e.g. Rotary meeting, church group meeting, etc. While crowd psychology will operate in this venue, remember that the attendees did not choose to hear you speak. They simply attend their group meeting on the 3rd Tuesday each month and today, you happen to be the presenter. So don’t expect the same results in gaining clients like you obtain at a public seminar where attendees come specifically for your talk.

What about a more informal setting—like an afternoon tea for eight at a client’s home? You not only gain the momentum of the mob (albeit a small mob), you also gain the tacit (or explicit) endorsement of your host. And we know that referrals, recommendations and testimonials are important because people like to follow others and get comfort in doing so. Referrals are also the easiest way to get clients. So make sure to give your host an introduction to read or speech that is in fact a testimonial or endorsement for you. (The same technique can be used at a public seminar. Have a client introduce you and tell how you changed his life and let him know its okay to get emotional).

Your next step? If you don’t speak to groups, learn to so. Join toastmasters and get a speech coach (call your local National Speakers Association chapter for a recommendation). Pull out your normal presentation and determine how you can incorporate the elements of crowd theory to improve your results and get clients.

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Get Referrals From Professionals—Not Just CPAs and Attorneys

Odds are that from the day you started out in this business, you heard the adage “this business is built on referrals.” Referrals may be your best source for new clients but how do you get more high quality referrals than your existing clients can provide?

The best way to gain additional high quality referrals is to form “host-beneficiary” relationships. The “host” is an entity or professional that has clients that you desire. You will show the host why it is in his interest to refer their clients to you. You become “the beneficiary.”

The benefits of these types of relationships include:
• Prospects will be “warm” since someone whom they trust will have recommended you. They already know about you, your service, and how you are paid.
• Once you establish these relationships, it doesn’t take much time to maintain them. Therefore you can focus your efforts on meeting with prospects and clients, instead of on the phone begging for appointments.

Strategic Alliances
The most common type of host-beneficiary relationship would be strategic alliances that you develop with other professionals, such as accountants or lawyers who serve the type clients you want to target. Your goal should be to develop a network that will refer business to you, and you will reciprocate by sending your clients to other members of your strategic alliance. But you need to start thinking outside the box.

For example, life agents long ago started calling on P&C agents as P&C agents make the perfect hosts. In return, the life agent can provide referrals or compensation (depending on State law).
Perhaps your specialty is money management. In this case, you need to work with professionals who see money in transition ands can send you clients. This is money that has just been acquired and needs to be invested. It could come from a business sale, lawsuit, divorce, property sale, lottery wining, or death benefit. Sources who would know about this money in transition include not only attorneys and accountants but also real estate brokers, business brokers and funeral directors. How many relationships do you have with these types of professionals?

In each case, you can refer business to them or compensate them if legal in your state.

Give First to Receive
Call the professionals whom you want to meet. Tell them that you have clients who you think may be able to use their services. Offer to take them to lunch. What professional would turn you down? At lunch, find out about them, their practices, and what types of clients they want. Position yourself as a resource for those types of clients. You must establish your value to this professional as a means of building his practice. Offer them referrals first, as a show of good faith.

You can also discuss mutual marketing techniques that can help you both build your practices. Attempt to leave the lunch with a joint marketing commitment, such as, mailing to each other’s client lists, a jointly presented seminar, or a mention in each other’s newsletters.

Another good way to find professionals to align yourself with is to ask your family and existing clients. Your top clients likely work with accountants or lawyers you may be able to partner with. An introduction from a mutual client serves to give you instant credibility with these possible partners.

Creative Possibilities
A little creativity can go a long way in your search for good “hosts” you can partner with. I knew one long term care insurance producer who contacted the local hospital’s senior services coordinator. As you may know, hospitals have very active departments for courting the seniors in the local area. They provide free blood tests, cholesterol screening, exercise classes, etc.
This agent offered to teach a monthly class on long-term care insurance. The hospital viewed his classes as an added service they could offer the seniors.

Each class he taught introduced him to the attendees and established him as a trusted expert. He spends the days after each class meeting with seniors, in an office that the hospital provides, writing applications for LTC insurance. He found the perfect host and now he’s a rich beneficiary.This approach was so successful that this is now his sole marketing method. He travels his state giving classes on long-term care insurance, and writing policies after them. He is a top LTC producer in the US.

Other creative possibilities could include:

o Local professional associations. You can join the local realtor’s
association as an associate member. Develop relationships and let them
know you are seeking for example, senior clients who are trading down and will
have a wad of cash to invest. Or young families with income over $100,000
and three children for a significant life sale.
o What about people who
sell office furniture? Do you think they can introduce you to business
owners with expanding businesses who might need insurance, estate planning and
investment advice?
o If college funding is your thing, do you think
teachers might be a good source of referrals to parents? Virtually every
county has one or two teachers associations you can probably join.


Summary
It takes some creative thinking to establish good host-beneficiary relationships, but once in place, most take little maintenance. By offering a winning solution to a complementary professional seeking to grow their business (or seeking extra income), you can effectively create a stream of additional business for yourself.

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

How to be a MIllion Dollar Producer part 2

Sales professionals perform only professional activities and no clerical or administrative activities. In the financial advising business, there are three professional activities:

a) Communicate with prospects about having them become clients;

i) You should not be doing the work of prospecting.You are to get involved with
a prospect only when a prospect has indicated interest and the financial
resources to work with you. Big producers do not waste time like most advisors
do-- identifying prospects from the sea of suspects. They have an
assistant or a system to do that. More on this later in the chapter on
marketing.

b) Communicate with clients to retain them, or about doing additional business; studies show that the larger producers have more contacts a year with clients while smaller producers have fewer contacts

c) Design procedures for others to follow. You’re the business owner, so it will always be your job to tell others what to do and lay out their work for them.

Think through these above3 three activities carefully and you will see that everything else you do during the day is unimportant and can be delegated. If you see that, you're on your way to being a million dollar producer.

If you have been in McDonald's recently, you may have noticed that they are the employer of last resort. They seem to hire the people that no other employer wants—people who cannot think and cannot listen. I order a Big Mac with no cheese and two seconds later the cashier asks, “do you want cheese with that?” Brain Dead. Yet, no matter where you go in the world, the McDonald’s product is amazingly consistent. That’s because McDonald's has systematized and documented everything. There is an entire manual on how to make fries. The genius behind McDonald's is that the company has taken something as simple as making fries and removed every ambiguity.

Here is what you and I see to making fries:
Open the bag
Dump the fries into the bin
Put it in oil for 2 minutes
Dump it out
Sprinkle with salt

But these instructions are totally inadequate. Look how many questions are unanswered:

Where do I get the bag of fries?
Do I tear it open or use a scissors?
Do I dump the entire bag into the bin at one time or just part?
How do I know when it’s been 2 minutes—I don’t own a watch
Does the oil ever need to be changed?
How will I know?Etc, etc.

If you want to be a million dollar producer and have a business that runs on auto-pilot you will need to document every little process in your office so that someone other than you can do it. You need to think about every little question or exception that can arise and document the handling of that issue just like in the McDonald's example above.

This has tremendous benefits:
1. It is the first step to becoming a million dollar producer without needing to work more than six hours a day
2. When an assistant quits, you’re business does not come to a halt as everything for the new person is documented
3. You have a way to make continual incremental improvements to your business by knowing the current procedure to compare to a potential new procedure

Before we proceed, let’s take a look at your local doctor’s office so you can see these three activities in action. When you call your doctor’s office, does the doctor answer the phone? No, he has a receptionist (in the financial services business, we call this person a service assistant).
When you arrive for the appointment, does your doctor take your temperature and blood pressure? No, he has a nurse do that (in the financial services, we call this person as ales assistant).

The doctor sees you ONLY when it’s time to generate revenue. He gets involved in none of the non-revenue-generating activities of his practice (as you do in yours). As a result, he earns a lot more than you do. He is a professional, he is a million dollar producer because he pays someone else to do the non-professional activities.

And do you see the doctor’s staff constantly asking him questions or do they seem to know exactly what to do? They each have their procedures and they do their business efficiently thereby allowing the doctor to generate income

Why would any rational person (you?) not hire some one for $20 per hour when your time is worth $200 an hour?The next time you are about to make some crack about the financial knowledge of physicians, think twice, since it seems they know a lot more than you do about making money, hiring help, systematizing their business and being a million dollar producer.

This post contributed by Javelin Marketing

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Achieve sales success through zigzagging and stumbling

Few people in the financial services industry ever become seven-digit earners but there are thousands that attain this sales success, which means it is possible for all. In fact, the financial services industry offers more opportunity for large earnings than possibly any other industry. So why do so few get there?

It’s the same reason that there are very few Albert Einsteins or Thomas Edisons. The folklore is that Edison made 10,000 attempts to invent the light bulb. Most advisors will not attempt something even a second time if they don’t get instant sales success. And therein lays the difference between those that earn more than the rest can imagine and the rest.

Really large producers know a secret about life. If you keep knocking at the door, it eventually opens. It’s a matter of how long one is willing to stand in front of “no success” that determines if you achieve sales success. But in a culture of “instant gratification,” it’s hard to stay with something that doesn’t work. And so, most people in financial services move from one idea to the next, one product to the next, one marketing system to the next, always in search of the Holy Grail but never finding it, never realizing that the big producers create their own grail through sheer commitment to stay the course.

Big producers simply have a commitment to an idea (usually not how much they earn), but of making something work, or of proving a point or of doing something better than anyone else. They continue to experiment, stumbling along in a zigzag fashion toward the target, making changes here and there to their approach, allowing their problem to continuously simmer in their thoughts. And by having the tenacity to hold the problem, the solution often comes coincidentally, like Newton being hit on the head by a falling apple and realizing the structure and formula describing gravity and mass.

How does this apply to you on Monday morning and your sales success? If that seminar you did was not successful, don’t give up and try something else. If you’ve been soliciting CPAs for 3 months with no referrals, don’t give up and try something else. If you’ve been running an ad that was not instantly successful, don’t give up and try something else. Stay with your problem and find the solution. Be willing to stand in the place called “I don’t know what I’m doing” because then you take steps to learn and find out what you don’t know (or find the person that has already solved your dilemma). In the Internet age, all knowledge is at your fingertips so you only need seek out the information or the person who can help you.

I get solicited every month to help people with their ideas (which are usually not in my area of expertise) and I wonder how many of these we will ever see:

• A nationwide financial planning firm for women

•A training to teach financial advisors to manage family business succession from one generation to another and building a network of such advisors

• A training to teach advisors to integrate the investment plan with the estate plan

• A plan for financial advisors to enroll their clients in a medical identification program, so that if injured anywhere in the world, the medical facility can instantly access the client’s medical background

• A training program sold through financial advisors that helps people be better investors


I meet many advisors with the same story of broken dreams, “I started in the business selling product X. But then the market went down so I shifted to Y. And then you know what happened to interest rates, so I shifted to Z. And then….

The sad fact of this recount is that had the advisor stayed with product X and not abandoned the original plan so quickly, that advisor may now be the best known provider of X in their town with wild sales success to their credit. Everyone else would have exited that business leaving the last man standing to win the spoils.

On Monday morning, take list the ideas and approaches you have abandoned in the last year or are ready to abandon and stop.

--Make three phone calls to people who you think can help you or refer you to others that can (you will likely find an expert through a zigzag network of referrals from one person to another).

--Do several Internet searches using various key phrases related to your problem (which will probably take you on a zigzag course to insight). It’s likely by the end of the week, you will have made a leap in solving your current dilemma or abandoned opportunities by zigzagging and stumbling along.

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."Thomas Edison

Post provided by Javelin Marketing

Monday, September 15, 2008

Three Requirements to be a Million-Dollar Producer


Perhaps you’ve been in the business for a few years and you’re doing okay, but you can’t seem to find that magical formula that will make you a million-dollar producer? If you only had more clients, that would do it, right? However, time is a precious commodity; there is a limit to how many clients you can effectively serve. In truth, acquiring more clients isn’t as much the answer as getting the right clients in the door is.

This is the first of a series of three articles that will help you focus your practice so that you can reach the million-dollar sales level.

You Must Have Homogeneous Clients
The homogeneous mass market, which has dictated the offerings of U.S. producers since the dawn of the industrial revolution, is coming to an end. Think about what has happened to the automobile industry. Henry Ford sold his Model Ts in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black. And the same holds true with the fast-food restaurants. Today, you can get it “your way.” Hardly the case a few years ago when all that was available was a one-way-suits-all burger.

The mass market is splintering into market niches and the niches are growing smaller. Therefore, the shotgun approach to reach those niches will not be as effective as they were in the past. You must breakaway from the heard and focus your marketing efforts on a narrower and more specialized group in order to become a million-dollar producer.

Tomorrow’s clients will be more demanding and vocal and will expect you to fulfill their requirements. So rather than trying to increase your number of clients, think about narrowly targeting your market to increase the quality of the products and services your offer to fewer clients.

Tapping into a specific niche can help you stand out from the crowd—differentiate yourself in ways that are important to your prospects and clients. And the most efficient way to do this is by working with groups who have similar “mind sets” so you can become the expert on solving their problems. Examples of niche markets include small business owners, early retirees from the same company, individuals who recently lost a spouse, and newly divorced women. Take a look at your current client base. Most reps say that 80% of their revenues come from 20% of their clients. What characteristics do your top 20% have? Do you know their preferences, goals, and lifestyles? What do they have in common? Is it their age, net worth, geographic area, or perhaps religious or ethnic background? And equally important, which group do you enjoy working with the most?

Do your homework. Identify common problems; create solutions. Become an expert on the sociology of this group, what motives them, and their inclination to plan for financial security. Find out what this group expects from a financial professional and how they want to receive your message.

One of the best ways to really get to know your clients is to interview them. Ask 20 of your clients who best represent the market you wish to target to meet with you. Take some of your better clients to lunch and ask them what they like and dislike about your products, your services, and the presentations you made to them. The answers will give you some ideas on how to market and sell to this niche. Then you can use the same profile early in a prospect relationship to find out if this is the type of person that you want as a client.

Have a list of 10 open-ended questions you really want answered to gain insight to the mind-set of this group. For a few hundred dollars, you’ll have marketing information that few other planners or even financial services firms have ever obtained.

Reorganize your marketing efforts, such as seminars and direct mail campaigns, around these common needs and carve yourself a homogeneous market. This will allow you to better monitor your results and make changes as needed. Don’t forget to ask for referrals; “do you have other friends who are like you that may be interested in my services?”

Niche marketing requires a thought process in that you cannot be all things to all people; don’t be afraid to turn away business that isn’t in your niche. Once you get into the mind-set of this group, you can better define your practice’s image and product offerings to meet their needs. The payoff will be that you will become better at the services you offer, you will realize more sales per client, and your practice will become more profitable.

This post provided by Javelin Marketing

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Tips for the New Financial Advisor

Good luck. The new financial advisor will need to be MUCH smarter than the advisor from 10 or 20 years ago and will need to be a MUCH better marketer.


The financial advising business will get tougher. Why?Because your prospects are getting smarter. Are you getting smarter, too? Fifteen years ago, stockbrokers had an edge in that people had to call them for midday stock quotes. Financial professionals also had an edge, as they had product information and the prospect did not. That’s all changed. If all you’ve got is product information, your days are numbered. The new financial advisor will soon be the ex-financial advisor.

The broader your knowledge base, the more you stay one step ahead of your prospects. As they get smarter, so must you. If you stay wedded to selling only one product, don’t be surprised if it gets harder to do business. People want advice. Not product advice, but rather, financial advice. Start giving it and start charging for it! (Addressed in a future post - subscribe to this blog.)


This is the millennium of self-learning. Those new financial advisor who continually expands his knowledge base and apply what he has learned will win. Sadly, those who tread in one place will lose. The most important word in this paragraph is "apply" as in a future post, we will address the fallacy that "knowledge is power" and uncover the truth that "applied knowledge is power."


If you think that tax issues are for CPAs and legal issues are for lawyers, you’re mistaken. Some of the top financial advisors I know have far more expertise in their field than the average CPA or attorney. And they use that knowledge to attract business. After all, anything that anyone knows can be found in book or on the Internet. The resources to learn anything are at your fingertips and at your prospect's fingertips. Therefore, they don't need the new financial advisor for information because they can get information for free anytime.

If you have been lazy in seeking out experts, then I guess you have some work to do. No one will call you up to give you the answers. The answers are there, however, for the taking. Million-dollar producers are self-learners. And any new financial advisor that does not continually expand his knowledge of personal finance, his sales skills, communication and psychology, will die in this business. If a big producer wants to be an expert in direct mail, he reads books on direct mail and consults with an expert. In a short time, he too is an expert. And he makes profit with direct mail. Are you willing to "seek" so you shall "find?"

As an example, one new financial advisor wanted to become an expert speaker. He saw that speaking was a way to reach a lot of prospects and quickly build his business with seminars and presentations. He had no speaking experience so he called the National Speakers Association and asked them to recommend their best coach. He called the coach and was told she charged $7,500 for two-and-a-half days of coaching. Most new financial advisors would have been intimidated by the cost. But here’s how big producers think: “I invest $7,500. I can earn an extra $10,000 per seminar. This is a great investment. Let’s proceed.”

But learning by itself is not enough. The fallacy in our culture is that knowledge is power. Not true. Applied knowledge is power. More accurately: Applied knowledge = money.

Let me share an example. Plenty of CPAs know more than you do about IRA distribution rules. But in the last few months, one new financial advisor took what he knew, arranged it into a system to fill a seminar room and has so far earned over $100,000 by "applying" his knowledge of IRA distribution rules. The knowledge by itself was worthless until he packaged into something other people valued and marketed it.


New financial advisors--welcome!


This post provided by Javelin Marketing.