Whites Of Their Eyes

I know an advisor that has sold a boatload of life insurance over the past 5 years without even bringing up life insurance… people just ask him about it.

Simply put together a table (See below) with your favorite UL company’s numbers for people ages 65, 70, 75, 80 (if you work in the retiree market… otherwise fit ages to your target market). 

The table shows a current death benefit of $100,000, the annual premium, and the number of years that the same deposit in an investment earning 5% (or any return you choose) would take to grow to the same amount.

The advisor puts this handout in everything he does… seminar folders… client and prospect newsletters… in his waiting room… everywhere.  He has sold a ton of life insurance without every bringing it up.

What are you doing to capitalize on the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 (TIPRA)?  You might think that a tax payer in the 15% tax bracket paying 0% is old hat… but many tax payers have forgotten about it.

More importantly, many tax payers have forgotten that it ends at the end of this year… just a couple of months away.  This is a great way to get people interested in moving their money around before the end of the year.  You can provide a great service to them by helping them do some tax planning by moving assets that have high appreciation at a 0% capital gains tax.

If you are interested in a postcard that you can use to drive some end of the year business leveraging this once in a blue moon opportunity…click here and enter the email address you would like us to send it to and we’ll get it right out to you.

We would all love it if we could get all of our clients through referrals.  They are so much easier to make into a client, aren’t they? Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to create a highly successful practice based solely on referrals.

But… what if you could get leads to act as if they had been referred?  That’s just as good because the reason referrals work out so well is they trust you based on the referrer’s opinion of you. (i.e. “You should work with this guy!  He has always found ways to get us tax savings even our accountant didn’t know about.  You can trust this guy.  We’ve worked with him for ten years.”)  —  It’s called transference of trust.

There are other ways to create transference of trust that you can easily utilize to make sure all of your leads feel like referrals.  Please understand that every positive contact you have with people builds the sense of trust they have with you.  Think about how that works in your everyday life… you trust things and people that you’ve interacted with a long time.

So, if you have been in business for a year or more, you should have a warm list of prospects.  If you haven’t already, you need to start contacting them with:

• Newsletters
• Postcards
• Invitations to seminars or client get-togethers
• Articles of interest
• Research
• White Papers

Every time you contact them, that sense of trust grows creating a relationship closer and closer to that of a referral.   When the finally do come into the office… they will actually be easier to sell than a referral.  I’ve seen it dozens of times with my own practice and hundreds of times through my coaching clients practices.

1. Making it about you.  People don’t care about your logo…name…or accomplishments…They care about themselves and their own problems.  So, what do you think should be prominently placed on all of your marketing?  Your Logo? Or how you are going to solve their problems?
   
2. Spending money on “Branding” marketing.  Any advertising professional will tell you that branding takes MILLIONS of dollars…not thousands.  Save your marketing dollars for marketing that makes people contact you directly.
   
3. Holding unrealistic expectations about marketing results.  Compare your results with other “like” marketing, just as you would investments. And understand, there is no holy grail, so maybe it’s time we all stop looking for it.
   
4. Paralysis by analysis.  Make a decision and go with it…the only marketing guaranteed not to succeed is the marketing that doesn’t happen.
   
5. Relying on only one type of marketing.  You need to be doing short, medium and long term marketing.
   
6. Stop and Start marketing. Make sure that you don’t start and stop your marketing.  You should have your marketing calendar laid out 12 months in advance.
   
7. Poorly executed marketing.  Misspellings…bad photos…lousy copywriting and graphics…You never get to make another first impression; don’t blow it on a bad one.  Do your homework and get professional help to make your marketing first class.
   
8. No follow-through on leads and not nurturing your warm list.  Most people need to be touched several times before they will buy from you…how many times are you contacting them?
   
9. Disjointed marketing.  All of your marketing should work together to promote your most valuable theme. 
   
10. Blaming marketing for poor sales ability.  All marketing creates crappy leads.  If marketing created clients, the product companies would cut us out of the food chain immediately and go directly to the public.  Our job is to take crappy leads and turn them into clients.  I have seen two advisors working on the same block.  One making over $1 million a year and the other barely $100,000.  Both doing seminars…to the same demographic.  Want to guess what the guy making $100k’s complaint was?  Seminars only attract plate-lickers.  Hmmm.  Apparently the guy making $1 million had some magical way to avoid plate lickers…NOT!  He was just better at converting plate-lickers.  Make sure your selling skills are up to snuff.
    

When you understand how and why people buy… your job goes from the hardest, low-paying job in the world… to the easiest, high-paying job in the world.  When you understand what gets people to buy, your marketing and selling becomes easy.

There has been a huge amount of science being conducted on this very topic in the last few years.  The book, NeuroMarketing, by Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morlin explores the Neuroscience of persuasion.  They nicely break down the 5 things we can do to persuade people to purchase from us. 

Here’s an easy way to remember these 5 important elements:

S   Simplicity.  Keep the message short, sharp and simple and we’re more likely to believe it is true.

P   Perceived self-interest.  Con men agree it’s the key to getting us to do something we didn’t think
      we wanted to do.

I    Incongruity.  Surprise people.  Tell them your cupcake is 400 cents rather than $4 and they are
      far more likely to buy it.

C   Confidence. The more confident you are, the more we believe you’re right.  Even when we know
      your facts are wrong.

E   Empathy.  Look people in the eye… nod when they nod… tell them you believe the things they
      believe… we trust people who are just like us.

You may have noticed that con men actually do use this formula very successfully… that does not give you the license to do so.  Use this knowledge ethically.

I personally made $967,000/yr. income… in a territory with only 12,000 target market households… by selling to…

Crappy Prospects!

All marketing creates crappy prospects… if financial product companies could come up with marketing that pre-sold people, they would cut us out of the loop in a heartbeat. We’re their biggest expense!

All marketing creates crappy prospects.  Anyone that tells you different is trying to get you to buy their marketing (and I’ll bet the only million they’ve ever made, was getting advisors to buy their marketing).

You see it’s our job to turn crappy prospects into clients.  All the guys I know that make over a million a year (over a dozen of them) all make that money with crappy prospects.  They’re just very good at converting crappy prospects into clients.

So, absolutely find marketing that puts people in front of you… but make sure you are also getting a selling process that closes those people… even if they are crappy prospects!