Marketing - Financial Advisors

Sample Marketing Plan For Financial Advisors
Your biggest challenge, as it is for many financial advisors, may be to “find qualified leads” and “attract people to what I do.”

What’s holding you back?

For some financial advisors it’s squeezing time from your day, as you’re caught in a juggling act between being a marketer and being a financial advisor. For others, it’s not having a course of action that’s well mapped out. That leads to prospecting and lead generation that’s slapdash and unpredictable.

This example of a marketing plan provides a solution.

It hands you a direct path to more appointments and more clients. And that saves your precious time. You’ll be able to zero in on proven marketing tools that will be most effective for your unique financial advisory practice.

7 Simple Steps: Client-Attraction Sample Marketing Plan
Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 1 - State Your Desired Outcome

It may be to add 8 new A clients in 6 months; it could be to gain $10 million in assets under management in 10 months; it could be to become the premier financial advisor for family-owned businesses in the Atlanta region within the next year.

Just be sure you spell out your purpose in specific detail.

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 2 – Understand Your Target Market

We start with the “Who” for a strategic reason. The “Who” refers to your Ideal Prospects. Draw a sharp portrait of your Ideal Target Market with concrete details

How detailed?

You really want to grasp exactly what they want from you.

To do that you must be able to fill in blanks such as:

Their suffocating, won’t-let-go fears are __________

The roaring volcano of a problem that keeps them up at night is _____________

Their hopes, desires, and dreams are ______________

They live here __________________

The associations they belong to are __________________

There are additional vital questions that will fortify your marketing plan, but the point is NOT to build your plan on a shaky, wavering foundation.

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 3 – Differentiate Your Practice To Leave The Pack Behind

We call differentiation your Unique Strategic Positioning. It starts with vital questions like these:

What are my strengths as an individual?
How do I stand out as a financial advisor?
Where is my passion?
Then, you are ready to answer this one overriding question: How can I gain dramatic differentiation over everyone else in my field?

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 4 – Pack Your Plan With Proof

Proof is paramount.

You’ll need a superabundance of Credibility Builders and Believability Boosters to win over your skeptical prospects. People are more suspicious than ever. And this step is one that’s missing from most financial advisor’s marketing plans.

It’s a fact that financial Advisors cannot call on the one profitable tool other marketers rely on . . . and that is testimonials. You are always under the nervous eye of Compliance.

We had the chance to run all our best proof-building ideas by Compliance, and we came away with 14 approved ones that most financial advisors are not taking advantage of.

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 5 – Choose Your Marketing Tools

Now you’re ready to select the tactics that will be effective in accomplishing your purpose.

Create a list of possible marketing methods that seem to have potential for you. The more you know about yourself, your clients, and your ideal prospects the easier this step will be.

From a long list select your priorities . . . your marketing tools.

Warning: We said marketing tools. That's "tools" in the plural. Relying on one, and only one, marketing method is reckless and foolhardy.

The best marketing plan sets you up to engage in a sequence of contacts with various media over time. One marketing tool reinforces the other for extra marketing oomph.

A Word About Your Budget: It’s vital to invest time, money, and people into marketing. But how much? Two numbers are important in this decision: the cost to bring in a client and the lifetime value of your clients.

Know those figures and you’ll know how much you can afford to invest in marketing.

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 6 – Generate A Marketing Action Guide

In the Action Guide you fill in the who, what, when, where, and how of your marketing plan. One contact is never enough in the real world of distractions, clutter, and overload. Here’s where you set out your marketing sequence in full detail.

Don’t let your action guide disappear in the clamor of day-to-day business. Instead, put it where you can go face to face with it daily.

Financial Advisor’s Marketing Plan Step 7 – Assess Your Results

Keep a record of where each prospect and every client came from. Then, you’ll know with certainty how well each marketing tool is performing.

Lily Tomlin, the actress, said,
“The road to success is always under construction.”

At the end of your 6 month or 8 month plan, start over again. Pursue with all your might what is working. Drop the duds, and add a new twist or a new marketing tool to your mix.

Why Postcard Marketing for Financial Advisors?
Because postcards can become a cost-effective marketing tool for financial advisors if they are done right. They come in all sizes from small, medium, and large to extra-large dimensions. Yet even a small postcard can pack a powerful marketing wallop.

Postcards offer an easy, inexpensive way to:

Send a message to clients,
Keep in touch with prospects who have not become clients,
Attract the attention of new prospects,
Add variety to an active marketing campaign which may include newsletters, letters, email, or phone calls, and
Prompt clients or prospects to visit your website for more information.
Postcards Win In A Simple Test
For a marketing campaign we tested a tiny postcard (6 by 4-1/4 inches) against a sales letter. The postcard was simple with text-only on the front and back (no graphics). Both the postcard and the letter went to the same number of prospects from the same list.

In this test the postcard brought in 1-1/2 times more responses than the letter. That equals 150 percent more prospects...at about 60% of the cost.

Next, we arm you with the vital few things financial advisors need to know to get the results you’re looking for when marketing with postcards.

5 Top Tips For Results From Your Postcards
Postcard Power Tip #1: First And Foremost, Be Sure Your Audience Is Right For A Postcard

If you are generating leads from high level executives such as CEO’s, CFO’s, or presidents of larger companies, think about a more substantial mailing for your first contact. It could be, for example, a three-dimensional direct mail package.

Postcards can work well for you in this example once you have established the relationship.

Postcard Power Tip #2: Solve The Right Problem

If you can solve the most compelling problem your prospects have, your marketing message -- whether it arrives in a post card, a letter, a brochure, an ad, or a newsletter -- will have the best chance to attract an outsize response.

What is this problem for your prospects? Do you know unequivocally?

If you don’t know, ask. Call up 10 prospects and clients to find out. Truly listen to what they tell you. If you are merely guessing, assuming, or imagining what is worrying them, you may be dead wrong.

Postcard Power Tip #3: Choose Your Mailing List Carefully

For our Tiny Postcard Test we tracked results from several lists. "Direct Marketing News," a subscriber list, in our mailing attracted a very respectable total of 3.16%.

To further test, we purchased a second list, a compiled list, from Dun & Bradstreet. The response was less at 1.45%: The subscriber list outpulled the Dun & Bradstreet compiled list by more than 2 to 1 in this situation.

Here's why it's vital to generate your own list.

Keep a database of prospects for your financial advisory practice. Be committed to adding to your list everyone who requests information from you or calls you even if they do not become clients . . . yet. Then, keep in touch with these individuals with appropriate messages, including marketing with postcards.

It's worth the time you invest in it!

In the Tiny Postcard Test we, not surprisingly, also tried our own in-house list -- people familiar with us. The in-house list brought in a 10.30% response – performing three times better than the best purchased list.

Postcard Power Tip #4: Call Out To Your Prospects With A Riveting Headline

Sharply focus on your target market and the major benefits they will get. Go back and re-read Power Tip #1. If the major benefit is the solution to a nagging problem, you will grab your prospect’s attention.

In our post card test our headline was a straightforward promise of two top benefits.

Postcard Power Tip #5: Give Them A Compelling Reason To Respond Now!

Make it easy for them to take action with an offer. We offered a free information packet so they could find out more. A complimentary informational packet or booklet on a subject that really matters to your audience can be a rewarding choice for financial advisors, too.

It comes down to this:

Postcard marketing for financial advisors stands to gain a higher success rate when it’s sent to the right people with a riveting message and a persuasive offer.

And Remember To Call On The Power Of Testing
Would a full-color postcard with enticing and relevant graphics on one side and a benefit message on the other work better for you than a plain low-cost text postcard?

Would a double-sided post card with a response card boost your response?

Only testing will give you your answer.

Will a mailing list be productive? Sending out a “scouting party” of postcards to a limited number of names first gives you valuable information.

A giant advantage of postcard marketing is that it hands financial advisors the ability to test easily and inexpensively.

Equally important in our time-starved age, it commands at least a glance from your prospects when they sift through their mail. Many people who hastily sort their mail can’t resist checking out the words on your postcard.

Postcards can contribute mightily to your bottom line. Why not add this simple, direct solution for uncommon results to your marketing plan for your financial advisor business?

Direct Marketing For Financial Advisors

The Five R's Of Direct Marketing
For Financial Advisors
1. The First Direct Marketing “R” for Financial Advisors: Start with the Right People (your ideal prospects)

The Right People for Erin Crowe’s were the Wall Street players who benefited from the Greenspan era from 1987 through January, 2006.

Financial advisors, home in on the people you most want to work with and the ones who give you the greatest emotional satisfaction. They can be people facing retirement, owners of family businesses, or families with more than $1 million dollars to invest.

2. The Second Direct Marketing “R” for Financial Advisors: Craft the Right Message (to reach their hearts and minds)

In Erin’s case it was her oil portraits of a dominating figure (Alan Greenspan) for their homes or offices.

As a financial advisor, you are an artist, too, but your art is to create a message that zings to the hearts of your Ideal Prospects. And, remember, your deliberate stand-out-from-the-pack differentiation can reinforce your message.

3. The Third Direct Marketing “R” for Financial Advisors: Call on the Right Medium

The right medium for Erin’s portraits was the art gallery in Sag Harbor where she easily caught the attention of the prosperous Wall crowd on vacation, when they had time to browse and shop.

What’s the Right Medium for financial advisors? What’s your equivalent of a Sag Harbor art gallery? The answer is wherever your Ideal Prospects hang out and where you can reach them.

It will be a lot easier for you if you don’t have to track them down one by one, but can uncover them in a crowd.

Does someone in a complementary business have a mailing list you could use for a targeted mailing?

Are there CPA’s, attorneys, or other professionals who has a practice with a throng of your favorite prospects? How can you form a strategic alliance with them for your mutual benefit.

Can you rent a mailing list that holds your choice prospects? For instance, you may be looking to specialize in financial advisory services for women. And suppose you discover that many of them read Real Simple magazine.

Renting a list of Real Simple subscribers in your region could be a profitable direct marketing tactic.

4. The Fourth Direct Marketing “R” for Financial Advisors: Act at the Right Time

The peak time for Erin was just before Alan Greenspan’s retirement, when he was incessantly in the news. The right time also included leisure vacation time for her target buyers.

The right time for you depends on your understanding of the Right People for you. A simple example is if you learned that a plant is closing in your city and you are a 401k expert, then you would take steps to get in front of plant employees at once with your financial advisory expertise.

Sometimes the Right Time is seeing your target market as a moving parade. That says that you must be visible when the parade is passing by. And that means that a one-time direct marketing appeal is insufficient.

And I’d like to talk about one more aspect of timing. And that is what happens to be in the news right now. An example is the recent press given to social security woes. You may be able to use the bad news as a reason to call on you, the financial planner who can ease your prospects’ fears.

5. The Fifth Direct Marketing “R” for Financial Advisors: Attract the Right (Your Desired) Response.

Erin Crowe sold all her paintings for enough money for a very long, even luxurious vacation in Europe.

Erin’s lesson for financial advisors is that she knew exactly what she wanted to achieve with her painting. And she had a definite marketing plan to gain the outcome she was after.

For financial advisors the first step in your marketing plan is to be precise about the results you want to see from your plan.

Email marketing

Email Marketing Basics For Financial Advisors
And Other Financial Service Professionals
Email Marketing can be as easy as 1-2-3.

Email Marketing Step #1 - Start Out With Your Best List

“Best” means a list where you already have a relationship with the people in it. Yes, that would be your own list in your financial advisory practice.

If you don’t have e-mail addresses for the clients and prospects in your database, you may be able to collect them. Encourage the prospects you encounter at:

a trade show,
an association meeting, or
on your web site
to give you their e-mail addresses along with permission to send them email.

Where you don’t have email addresses, offer an enticement -- perhaps an article, tip sheet, insider’s checklist, an ezine, or access to a restricted area of your web site in exchange for their e-mail addresses.

A Word of Warning: Remember always to get their permission to send email to them.

Email Marketing Step #2 - Grasp What Your Target Audience Wants From You

Email marketing isn’t any different from direct marketing offline for financial services professionals.

Knowing the problems, frustrations, and the trends buffeting your prospects’ lives along with their desires is vital to email success for your financial services practice.

Email Marketing Step #3 - Develop A Can’t-Refuse Offer

That’s exactly how Bob Hanson, Jr., increased the responsive of an email list by 350 percent over the usual lead-generating emails the firm sent out.

Best Practices To Make Email Marketing
More Effective For Financial Services Businesses
The financial services industry has been one of most successful categories for email marketing.

It’s Not About Snazzy Effects

Unlike what you may imagine, though, it’s not about glitz and Flash. What’s most important is developing content that will be valuable to your list, or a selected portion of your list.

It’s About Sending The Right Message
To The Right People

Segment your list so that your message resonates with your chosen group of prospects or clients.

What could it be?

Your target segment will tell you. You could send tips for retirement planning or even ideas for looking at their healthcare options in the light of their total financial picture.

Here's another example: According to information from a Forrester Research report, Schwab “generates trades and contact with its investment consultants through emails it sends when the value of a customer’s portfolio changes.”

For More Effective Email Marketing
Coordinate With Other Marketing Channels

You may see a lift from a direct mail communication, for example, when you follow up with an email. This synergy can multiply results! Or how about following up an email contact with a prompt phone call.

Use The Speed and Ease of Email To Test

Your response is almost immediate and it’s relatively inexpensive. What can you test:

a segment of your list,
a list you’ve acquired in a joint venture,
your subject line, or
your offer.
You won’t know for sure unless you test.

P.S. Remember, including a P.S. at the end of your email can pay off. It provides a last chance in your email marketing message to reinforce your offer and leave your prospects with a durable message. And it’s a final place to put a link to more details or your sign-up form on your website

Web Marketing Strategies
For Financial Advisors
A smart web marketing strategy can open a current of qualified prospects for financial advisors or financial planners. Or it can sap your time and money.

So what do you need to know about web marketing to pump prospects into your financial advisory practice?

Most smaller businesses, a recent survey revealed, count on their websites to “provide credibility.”

That’s OK as far as it goes. But if that’s all your website strategy does for your financial advisory business, you’re missing out on its much greater potential.

Here is a larger vision for your website and how to get there. Let’s start at the beginning with web facts:

Your Competition
Your competition is the more than 101,435,253 websites (as of November, 2006, according to a Netcraft survey) in existence.

True, they’re not all financial advisors shouldering each other for attention in your local area, but they do compete for your prospects’ attention.

Your Opportunity
Your opportunity is the approximately 91 million searches done on Google per day as of March, 2006. That doesn’t count the searches on Yahoo, msn.com, and the other search engines.

And your opportunity is the blossoming of local search.

According to recent research, 70 percent of adults in the US use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.

We’ve set the stage. Now we’re ready to expand the advantages of your web marketing strategy beyond demonstrating your “credibility.” And it starts with enticing qualified prospects to your website (gaining traffic). Then, it’s your task to convince them to give you your desired response.

Sage Advice From Walt Disney

“You don’t build it for yourself. You know what the
people want and you build it for them.”

A Web Marketing Strategy
For Financial Advisors To Attract The Right People
Web Marketing Step 1 – Select your best, most lucrative keyword phrases BEFORE building your site. Single words probably won’t do much for your financial advisory practice (retirement is an example).

Go for profitable phrases – 2, 3 or more words strung together that people are actually using to find financial advisers like you.

How do you know what these are?

- Do research at http://inventory.overture.com

- Or get suggestions from http://www.wordtracker.com (about $8 for a one-day use, which is all you’ll need)

Web Marketing Step 2 – Build your site as a search-engine magnet to take advantage of free search engine traffic.

That’s what search engine optimization is all about…putting your keyword phrases to work for your financial services practice in all the right places such as your URL.

Another prime place for your keyword is in your page title. Yes, every page needs a keyword-rich title.

Want another? In your headline. Yes, again. Every page needs a headline.

The best free resource we know for do-it-yourself search engine optimizers is Jill Whalen’s site at http://www.highrankings.com

Web Marketing Step 3 – Call on Google Adwords to whisk traffic to your website. Yes, even for Local businesses like your financial advisory practice.

Use your research in Step 1 to gather the right keyword phrases.

Google provides decent directions about how to set up your campaign. We’re not going into the nitty-gritty, technical details here. To help you maximize these pay-per-click ads, though, we’ll arm you with these Google A-B-C-D-E’s.

A - Add as many keywords and keyword phrases as make sense for your practice.

Some 150, or more, variations aren’t out of line. That way you won’t miss the top few that will be most profitable for you.

B - Build your campaign around tightly clustered groups of keywords.

For a brochures campaign we did we organized our campaign around groups like write a brochure, business brochure, create brochure, marketing brochures, etc.

Each had a slightly different slant and a headline that keyed in on the key phrase.

C – Call on every bit of persuasive power you can muster for your ad.

When you’ve finally settled on one ad, go right back and write another. That way you can test one against another and go for higher and higher results.

D - Deploy tight controls over your budget until you see how everything plays out.

E – Eliminate the duds (and unnecessary expense) by tracking everything you do on Google so that you know what’s working

Web Marketing Step 4 – Know Your Numbers

Simply, track the vital elements of your site so that you know where you are improving, or falling off.

Start here:

1 – It’s not “hits” that are essential to know, but the unique visitors arriving on your website.

A “hit” is the retrieval of any item like a page or a graphic from a web server. A simple web page, as an example, could have 4 graphics plus the page itself for 5 hits.

2 – Get stats about how long people are staying on your website.

This number is valuable. Otherwise, how do you know that people are reading your site content? Consider this: The longer people stay on your site the more likely they are to give you the response you’re after.

Look into the median length of time people remain on your site. This is more reliable than the average time, because the average can be skewed by someone who enters your site and keeps it open for hours.

This is just tracking kindergarten. Remember, tracking starts you on the fast track to web marketing success!

Web usability guru Jacob Nielsen riffs on Walt Disney’s about “knowing what people want and building it for them.”

Sage Advice from Jacob Nielsen

“The web is no longer a marvel of innovation, it’s an everyday tool,
and you differentiate yourself by providing both better content
and better solutions to users’ problems.”

And that’s a smart web marketing strategy both for attracting the right people and for prompting them to give you the right response.

Visit http://www.marketingplanfinancialadvisor.com/ for more articles and ideas

Brochure Writing

Avoid These Brochure Traps
And Marketing Illusions
Simply, you can gain out-of-the-ordinary results when you write your brochure by NOT being taken in by these 5 traps and illusions.

Write A Brochure Trap #1 - An Eye-Catching Brochure Makes Things Happen

If design is your brochure’s prime ingredient, your results will let you down.

Design alone CANNOT rocket your brochure to its ideal outcome.

Of course, a trained graphic designer can produce an attractively designed brochure. The truth is, though, that graphic effects and photos alone cannot tell the unique story that’s yours to reveal about your business.

If you don’t call on proven marketing basics and principles to give life to your brochure, then you will waste much of the time and money you invest in your brochure.

Write A Brochure Trap #2 – I Can Tap Into My Graphic Designer’s Or Printer’s Experience For The Essentials That Will Make My Brochure Really Work

Your graphic designer and printer keep abreast of changes in their field so that they can provide the best possible service to their customers. They don’t have time, though, to keep up with the marketing tools that light up a successful outcome.

Too often, marketing know-how is the missing ingredient in a financial advisor’s brochure. If your marketing fails, then you’ve lost the chance to demonstrate your quality, and your business suffers.

Write A Brochure Trap #3 – My Readers Are Smart; They Will Figure Out What To Do Next After They Receive My Brochure

Too many brochures leave what happens next to their readers’ imagination.

Perhaps, you haven’t thought out ahead of time exactly what action you want your prospects to take. Or, possibly, you aren’t aware that your brochure’s outcome depends on creating an irresistible reason for your prospects to contact you.

Listen, your offer is one of the two most critical elements of your brochure. And for maximum results you need an offer that’s so compelling that your prospects will put their lives on hold to call you, fax you, or respond by mail.

Write A Brochure Trap #4 – Once I Produce My Brochure,
I’ll Find Multiple Uses For It

No one intentionally decides to produce a brochure that doesn’t work. But if you don’t make this one important decision BEFORE you create you brochure, you are setting up your brochure for hit-or-miss results or worse, no results.

So what is this decision?

Invest strategic time up front to aim your message and multiply your results.

If you dilute your brochure to please all possible prospects and to suit all conceivable situations, you’ll turn out a wishy-washy all-things-to-all-people marketing message that will fall on deaf ears.

Write A Brochure Trap #5 – The “Ultimate Goal” Of My Brochure
Is To Showcase My Professional Status

Today advisors are so concerned with being “professional” that they strip
every sign of life from their brochures. Their brochures end up as a boring list of education and licenses … about as exciting as Minute Rice.

And being boring is a fatal marketing flaw.

Let me give you an example.

A client, a financial advisor, grew up in a tough New York City neighborhood. Almost all of his peers are in jail or dead. Yet when we met him, his brochure included something like this: I was born and raised in New York City. I graduated from high school and went on to Queens College of The City University of New York. I am currently licensed and practice in 18 states across the country. You get the idea.

To bring it to life we asked questions such as:

- Why did you rise above the odds?

- How did you become a financial advisor?

- What does all this mean for your clients?

That’s the story that only he can tell.

Above all, Be a person not only a financial professional. Inject a one-of-a-kind character into your marketing: And that character is YOU.

It comes down to this for financial advisors:
Avoid these 5 costly traps and adjust your thinking to become a strategic marketer when you write a brochure. Be sure your brochure takes a prominent role in your marketing plan. And you’ll see a brochure that pays off again and again for your financial advisory practice.


A Fountain Of Referrals
For Financial Advisors
Yes, you, too, can experience a fountain of referrals. And here’s a simple 7 Step System for financial advisors that removes the mystique from referrals.

First and foremost, make a commitment to marketing. That means creating a marketing plan and keeping it in plain sight at all times. Place referrals front and center as a heavy-duty tool in your plan.

Then, put into play a process that promotes referrals.

The 7-Step System From A Referral Champion
I’m turning to technology consultant Roger Prichard for his winning system because it’s a process that can promote a cascade of referrals for financial advisors.

For Roger, marketing is never a separate activity, because it arises from and permeates every aspect of his work. That means his referrals strategy and his consulting practice are one.

Now this may sound more like smart business practice rather than a strategy for more referrals. The truth is . . . it’s both.

From our interview with Roger, we arranged what he told us into a 7-step process that prompts referrals. And I show you how to adapt what he does to your Financial Advisory Practice.

While each single step is simple, together they can make a profound difference in adding to your Book.

1. Know Your Client's Business Or Learn About It --

As financial advisors it’s essential to grasp your clients’ and prospects’ concerns, issues, fears, and desires. If they are a business owner or executive, it’s equally vital to know about the business issues and trends they are grappling with.

2. Speak Your Client's Language --

Roger has a slogan, "We talk computers and speak English." He speaks the business language of his clients and is careful not to load up his communications with techie talk.

For financial advisors take this to heart. Do not get caught up jargon that your listener might not be familiar with such as Black Swan event, Super Bowl Indicator, or HIFO.

3. Solve the Right Problem --

Most often, Roger's not solving a software or hardware problem. He is answering the question: What's the business process trying to accomplish? For a financial advisor ask, What is the individual in front of me trying to accomplish? That’s your focus.

It's not on what you think he or she needs or what you want to sell.

4. Question and Listen --

"These are the most important skills," Roger said.

When meeting with a prospect for the first time, distinguish yourself by asking valuable questions and listening. What does the prospect really want? What are the real issues? For a business person, what are the critical business issues?

“Don't be afraid to ask what might be a dumb question. You need to know basic things and the only way to find out is to ask. Nobody knows everything."

And here's Roger’s corollary, "Never ask the same question twice."

And we add this: Through questioning you are positioning yourself. You demonstrate the breadth of the service you provide and the thought and expertise that contribute to results for your clients. The relationship deepens.

5. Choose Your Clients Wisely --

Questioning and listening reveal something else . . .

You get an idea of what it's like to work with that particular individual or organization. "Some problems are insoluble, and the majority of the time you can determine that ahead of time," Roger said.

"If you have a chemistry fit, you'll know and they'll know if you are right for each other. If it's a near miss, you may decide you can work with each other. The match is so important!"

6. Develop Good Relationships --

He calls this part of the process "sticking close to your client."

He is willing to do what it takes to get it done for a client. In his case there are disasters that arise because the software is flawed or doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. He puts in the extra effort to get it right.

Another essential element in "sticking close to your client" is educating him or her. "Make sure your clients know where you are heading. Roger shields his clients from the minutia of his work but keeps them "informed so that they don't get the impression that you are making excuses."

7. Keep in Touch With Your Clients --

Once a project is completed, Roger calls to ask, “How has it worked out? What could we have done better?”

As a financial advisor, you may have had the experience of attracting a prospect who was dissatisfied with his or her current advisor. A common reason is, “The Advisor didn’t pay attention to me.”

This step, the seventh, makes sure that you are NOT the discarded advisor.

Roger makes these calls consistently even when his time is fully booked.

Sometimes he asks an additional question, “Do you know of someone who is growing a business or starting a new one and needs help with networks or databases” (or whatever type of work he’s looking for)?

As a financial advisor you could ask, We are looking for _______________ (Describe your Ideal Prospect). Who do you know who fits this description?

"If I don't talk to them periodically, they are not going to call me," Roger said. These calls encourage them to think of you, and they demonstrate something equally compelling -- that you care about them.

"Happy clients are your best credentials," he said.

Talk about being in charge! Roger has all the work he can handle. And that gives him the luxury of choosing his clients, and you can, too, by following this 7 step process to promote referrals.

Referrals are not a once-in-awhile, now-and-then activity. The overriding key to success for financial advisors is to infuse every nook and cranny of your financial advisory practice with your referrals strategy.