Always be Marketing

Your Responsibility As A Business Owner – Always Be Marketing

The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer

Peter F. Drucker

You should always be selling — not strategizing about selling. Don’t test, test, test — that’s a game for big companies. Don’t worry about being embarrassed. Don’t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough. There will be plenty of time for refinement later. It’s not how great you start — it’s how great you end up.

Guy Kawasaki

Don't let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action.

Jim Rohn

What are you currently doing for marketing??

What is the one thing you can do?

What is the one magic pill?

How can you flood yourself with new clients?

How do you improve the quality or value of new clients?

The truth is, there is no one answer.??There certainly is?no “one magic pill” that will solve all of your problems.

In an average year I talk with 100’s of advisors.???Mostly they think that their clients love them.??That they’re maximizing their lifetime value from their current clients.???That if they could only get a few more good clients a month everything would be fine.

In addition to those beliefs (which are nearly 100% of the time wrong) they are looking for the ONE THING that will drive them new clients.??Preferably one thing that someone else will do for them to hand them plenty of new quality clients.???Preferably something that they don’t have to understand but only have to “accept the meeting.”??Something that can be delegated (they mean abdicated) to someone else.

If you really want to be a maverick.???To build a big practice with high net profit.??To build a sustainable business.???Then it’s essential to realize it just doesn’t happen that way.??There’s no magic pill anymore.??In fact, there never was.

To have a consistent flow of quality clients you have to build a robust marketing system, make sure it’s working well, then build another, and another.??There is no magic, no one-stop-shop, no fix-all-my-problems answer.??And?you can’t abdicate your way to success.

Some advisors will argue that they are getting all their clients by referral, but when asked about their “referral systems” all that results in is a blank stare.????By “systems” I mean an organized process that can be replicated over and over.???A process that can be replicated with client after client.??A process that can be replicated through staff. A process that sometimes can be automated but always is systematized.

So, where should you start?

We were having a meeting of clients many years ago now.???After a couple of hours talking about various steps and systems that I was using in my own business, my associate Jeff Smith interrupted.??

His comment was: "You have an MBA, but really you were an ABM first, you learned to?Always Be Marketing"

Most financial advisors think their job is understanding planning and investment basics and having in-depth conversations with people about planning their retirement; however, the reality is the that technical stuff is the easy part. The important part is to Always Be Marketing to your desired audience, to always be working on getting your message out, to always be positioning yourself as the authority.?

The real task of your business is to create and retain a client. A business only really has two roles—to create a customer and to keep a customer.?That is all you should be focusing on.??You must be focusing on creating and retaining clients – EVERY Day.

Even when one marketing strategy or two marketing strategies are effective, even if you get an effective lead flow with referrals, you should still be working hard on additional marketing.?

By the way, what do I mean for instance when I say referral systems????I’ll spend a lot more time on that later in the book however, as a for instance:??Do you host client appreciation event where clients bring friends????How about having a book that you send multiple copies to every client as pass-along gifts.??How about creating a small new book every few months to send in multiples to your clients????Do you host education events in person or via Zoom or Webinar for your clients to invite friends to attend????I could go on and on, but you get the idea.???Pass-along tools.??Live Events.??Virtual Events.??Three of many systems that you can implement to stir up quality referrals.

The other reason why you need multiple systems is the reality that various media may grow and die as well as fact that different things will work in different months.???For example, let’s say a business had good success with doing Facebook marketing. If the government changed their rules about privacy laws, that could totally dry up and they would be left without their main source of new clients. What then?

In the past forty years of running businesses, I’ve had great results with Yellow Pages (remember that?) with long-form “infomercials,” with short-form spot TV Ads, with full-page ads in the Sunday TV Guide section of several major newspapers along with “ROP” ads, with newspaper inserts, with broadcast fax advertising, and with a “boiler room” full of outbound telemarketers.???Some of those media have disappeared altogether. Others just don’t work as well anymore.???The only thing constant is change.???

With your clients, I’d assume that you’d never bet their retirement on one stock or, even market segment or asset class.????I doubt you’d have the conversation “let’s put it all in Apple that’s been a winner so far, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Building your marketing systems really is the same thing.???You want multiple channels, multiple media.???You want online and off-line marketing systems.???You want multiple referral systems. You want multiple “circles of influence” working on your behalf.???Well, you get the idea.

There are a lot of different reasons that one marketing strategy can work for a while. It could be a home run, and there are a lot of home run strategies out there. Some may work and some may not.?

If you're attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn't, you have all the advantage, and it will show up in your increased success and income.

Jay Abraham

So, the problem with being dependent on one or two strategies is that even the best ones may work, or not, so you need to have enough stuff going on so that you remain a healthy and growing. You need a healthy practice, and you need to have enough qualified prospects each and every month.

Maybe you want to work with clients that have a higher asset base to build your AUM. Ideally, you want to work with people that you like to work with and with whom you have some existing affinity. Maybe you want to work with clients that are within a certain niche. For example, you might want to work with doctors or dentists or contractors. If that is the kind of client you want to work with, that’s great, but you must be good at marketing to be able to reach that niche. All these things tie together to create the kind of business you want to have.

Many advisors that I meet with ultimately have?built a practice randomly. They have a crowd of clients that are fairly random. People whose only commonality is that they’ve been rounded up with little forethought.??If there is one question advisors ask just after the “magic pill question” (you know, ‘What’s the ONE Thing I Can Do to Dramatically Improve My Income?’), it revolves around?frustration with clients. How do they fix their existing clients???That is a huge complaint I hear in the industry.???It happens when you fail to really think about who you want as a client and then build your practice around that vision.

The important thing to remember is that if you do a good job of “filling your pipeline” with quality prospects there is always another client around the corner if the one in front of you is a bad fit, or just chooses not to become a client.

If they choose not to buy, if they are not the right person, if they are not qualified, there is always another bus coming if you do your job right. This new bus will come around the corner and they are going to unload, giving you another group of people to work with. However, if you are not good at marketing, these buses may be few and far between.?Your attitude and selectivity changes dramatically if you have a huge flow of new prospects in your pipeline.??You don’t have to ever “sell hungry” if you are flooded with quality prospects.???You never have to accept a client who’s a bad fit if there are more that will be a good fit in your pipeline.

You should only want to surround yourself with people who are a joy to the spirit, people who you want to work with. In an ideal world, you would only ask someone to become a client if they are a 100% perfect fit.??However, this all depends on your marketing actually reaching and interesting your perfect customers.

A number of years ago now, a branch of one of my businesses was having problems. (Generally rude clients, client retention problems, unhappy staff, and more.) I decided to fire the bottom 20% of existing clients. While there was a huge initial drop off from the loss of that business, the remaining 80% of clients were suddenly a lot happier. In fact, everyone was happier.??That business quadrupled in just a few months.

The company referrals went up, the revenue went up… everything went up!??Around 80% of your business problems come from the bottom 20% of clients. 90% of your problems come from the bottom 5%. So, naturally, by removing them altogether, you also cut away the vast majority of your problems.?

Despite all of this, all the frustrations and headaches and heartaches that come with those bottom twenty % of clients,?if your marketing is bad, you will be desperate to keep them. Without a decent lead flow and without attracting an abundance of ideal clients, you must take what you can get, so to speak.??The most exciting place to be is to have so many quality prospects flowing in you’re having trouble keep up with it.??The worst place to be is being afraid to terminate a problem client because you need the revenue stream.

I’d love to take credit for this strategy, however I’m sure it came from Tom Peters in one of his books where he talked about an accounting firm that used this strategy to turnaround their business.

When it comes to marketing, the key is to be really good at all the tactics and the individual pieces. Whether it's a live event, a webinar, or a referral system, you need to be really good at the various strategies and implementation tactics. In the past, I have organized some incredible events with loads of clients coming in from far and wide, only for it to get cancelled due to unforeseen issues.??One was cancelled due to a tornado, as a for instance. The same can happen online, you can have everything set up and ready to go, then the internet drops out and cancels the entire thing. I’ve had marketing events that worked incredibly the month prior, completely flop this month. Yet, other times I’ve had strategies far exceed expectations.?

However,?if you have a lot of things going on and many different events, then one or two things flopping won’t hurt you as much. You are just losing one stream of new clients rather than your only stream. You should never be utterly dependent on one single event, one single media, one single strategy. Have a bunch of things going on all the time to create new client flow. Be consistent and ongoing with your efforts.

The Navy Seals have a saying: “Two is one, one is none.”???Never rely on just source for your business growth.

In an ideal world, you will have a palette of prospects. You have people to choose from. You can be selective. You can pick and choose. This is why so many people are really afraid of niching. There is the feeling that you need to go out and get absolutely everyone you can get. You can’t be afraid of really targeting in and creating the customers that will make your business thrive, and the customers you can confidently provide a great service for.?

Never run your practice out of a fear of scarcity.??Focus always on Abundance.

You must operate with?expectation of abundance if you want to be successful. An expectation of abundance is when you expect there to be enough leads coming in, no matter what. How you do that is by having enough things happening simultaneously that you are not dependent on any one process, on any one source, or on any one person. Not only should there be different things going on at the same time, but you also need to make sure that each of your strategies is actually effective. After all, there is no point in having ten sources of marketing if none of them is truly working. Even if you are great at live events, if your marketing is ineffective then none of the clients you want will show up.

Out of the twenty or thirty different marketing things you can do, as I explained earlier, you want to make sure that each and every one is as effective as it can be. This way, you will feel good about maintaining these twenty streams of marketing and will eventually reap the rewards. Many people claim to have tried this and to have tried that, claiming it does not work. The truth is, often it does work and can work, you just missed the little pieces to complete the jigsaw, little pieces that make all the difference in the world.?

Visualize your marketing as a “Parthenon” of different strategies and tactics. Each month some may fail, others create mediocre results, and some may be home runs. The reality is the order may well be reversed next month.

All you have to do is look back to the Covid shutdowns. For Advisors, the market crashed and clients were panicking. Oh, and by the way your AUM took a huge hit. If you were dependent upon dinner meetings, guess what? You were dead in the water.

However, if you were on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, using Direct Mail and were nurturing a huge prospect list then?there was MORE OPPORTUNITY than ever. While some crashed others hit new records. That’s the difference between having that Marketing Parthenon going on as opposed to being dependent upon one or two strategies.

When I meet with a new client, my first questions for people are always,?

What have you done in the past?

What were the results?

What should you have done differently?

I hear every day about advisors or other businesses who have done something VERY effective in the past.?Our joke is that it “Worked So Well, They Never Did that Again.” You’re likely guilty if you’ve been around long enough.?

I?bet there are things you did in the PAST that would work just fine again perhaps worked great.???Get it “off the shelf,” dust it off and, IMPLEMENT.

On the other hand, plenty of advisors close themselves off to doing a certain thing or trying a certain method with the excuse, “I tried that before and it didn’t work.”??Often, it’s the reason behind the failure must be studied. Did it get advertised well? For an event, how many showed up? Were they the right people? How did I do capturing leads? How many turned into appointments? How many of those did you actually meet with? How qualified were they? How many turned into a client????Once you really look at what was done there’s often just a simple tweak or two to their tactics that will make a huge difference.???

I’ve worked with clients who shifted one type of event from creating two or three leads to creating twenty or thirty clients with a couple of seemingly minor changes to how they ran the event. A process that seemed barely worthwhile to one that created a massive win.??By the way,?that’s the advantage of a “been there done that” coach looking at what’s happening and giving objective feedback.

In working with clients. I immediately insist upon very accurate numbers. Keeping a daily “statistics” sheet that keeps track of all the marketing numbers is crucial. How many visitors to your website? How many opt-ins? How many made an appointment? How many discovery meetings? How many converted to a new client???Keeping accurate numbers and bench marketing against what’s possible will make a huge difference for you.

In 98% of cases, the failure comes from a mistake in the tactics rather than the concept itself.

If you are having a tremendous success rate once you get a face-to-face meeting with a potential client, but are still experiencing problems, the question is at what point in the process is the problem? Too few leads? Crappy follow up? Low show rate? The more people you get in front of you, the more you can close, but you’ve got to figure out where the deficits are in your lead conversion process.

Often an advisor is creating plenty of traffic but have sloppy conversion rates at each stage. Sloppy follow up on new leads. Scheduling problems. Failure to adequately nurture prospects. The majority of the time, fixing these sloppy ratios rarely requires more work or money to fix the closing ratios. What it requires is tracking the numbers and the know-how to fix the challenges. And the proper implementation.???Frankly,?many advisors that I talk too, massively over-estimate their personal sales effectiveness.??They’re evaluating themselves subjectively rather that tracking numbers and benchmarking success.

The difference between a highly successful business and an unsuccessful business, even if they are both run by advisors working equally as hard, is that the former has a?better strategy and better implementation. This better strategy comes in the form of more marketing activities, with each of those being done correctly, and with successful tactics that lead to conversions.

Of course, sometimes it comes down to a bad strategy being a bad strategy. But most of the time, results could have been drastically improved by implementing better tactics within the strategy. If you tweak the tactics in a positive way, your results can multiply by 5, 10, even 100.?

As Dan Kennedy says, “Once you go into business for yourself, you are now forever and a day in the business of marketing whatever it is you're doing. After all, it is not the expert in planning that creates money-making opportunities but the person who can get the clients in the room in the first place.” High Producers create new client flow and close sales. Also, the person who can put the systems in place to keep the clients and multiply the clients by turning them into referrals. “Retention and referral” are the name of the game.

Too many businesses outsource marketing without thinking about a grand plan. You can be our LinkedIn marketing person. You can be on Twitter. You can be on Facebook. There is nothing wrong with outsourcing, but?you must first master the marketing and understand the process. Logging on and spending an hour a day randomly clicking around Facebook is not going to bring you marketing success. Nor is posting an endless series of videos on TikTok.??You don’t have to be an expert or a programmer, you just need to be smart and understand the marketing process with clearly defined objectives, in order to intelligently outsource any piece.?

Delegate, not abdicate. You must master creating clients for your practice.?

That’s ultimately priority #1 and the highest value role.

Understand what the results are for marketing and understand the numbers. Understand the marketing well enough, because tossing money over a wall and hoping the person it hits is going to throw leads back at you is not a good strategy.

When you're responsible for your own outcomes, you're not on salary with somebody doing the technical aspects behind the scenes. When you're really there as a producer, then you’ve got to create your business. I recommend using a simple method: The Blank Pad.?

Start every day by sitting down with a notepad and writing down, what am I going to do today to fill my new client pipeline?

What am I going to do this week? What am I going to do this month? What's my quarterly plan? What's my annual marketing plan look like? Start looking at what your new client flow is each day and focus on what the right strategies are, what tactical implementation is needed to keep your client flow. When you go to bed at night, put your subconscious to work on what you need to do to grow your practice and your brain will come up with the answers overnight.

I can’t tell you how many meetings I witness or sit in on where the team discusses what they need to do each morning, mainly about existing clients, but they never seem to cover where the new clients are coming from.??They discuss conversations that’ve had with clients but, miss huge opportunities presented.?

One of the most successful businesses I have ever worked with had a mysterious piece of paper hanging behind the reception desk. Every time I went in, the number would be slightly different, and I eventually asked what it was all about. It turned out that it was the number of different prospects they currently had in the pipeline. The number of appointments for discovery meetings and fact finders that’d had that hadn’t converted yet to clients.??They liked to keep track of the number and make sure everyone at the company knew it. If that number were below 20, they knew to panic and get together to figure out a fix. If it was above 20, they would concentrate on maintaining that and converting the prospects into regular clients.?

Knowing what your pipeline is and keeping it active in the company conversation is half the battle.

Keeping track of your pipeline numbers is both an indicator and motivation. Many businesses I work with do not know their pipeline number, at least not off the top of their head. Frequently, that number is very low. It might be one new client every month. That would be 12 a year, and that's pretty anemic for what can be accomplished.?

I used to joke about my own staff that if I woke them up at 3 am, they’d better know their numbers top of head, without having to go look it up.

I often ask advisors what they want their assets under management to look like in 12 months, 24 months, 36 months. Then I ask how many new clients you want to generate to hit those numbers. Those are magic numbers. If you don’t know what you are targeting, you don’t know what you need to do next. Once you do then you can work backwards and find a pipeline target from that.?

Those are all 5, 10, 20 or more new clients every month are doable numbers if you have the right marketing strategies in place. However, at least have that number in mind as a starting point, otherwise you kick things off without clear direction. You are just hoping. You're throwing it to the wind, and if you get zero, you get zero. If you get one, you get one. If you get three, you get three, and you're going to end up having whatever results you get. This is a very stressful way to live.???It’s amazing what a difference just paying attention every day and “stirring the pot” makes to your business.

You must know what the lifetime value is, what the current year’s value is going to be, how much money is going to come in immediately, and what each new client is worth. You start with what your end is in mind. So, what do you want the revenue to be this month and this year? What do you want the assets under management to be? What will you want your reoccurring revenue to be??

One common mistake to avoid, is beating your clients up for referrals every meeting. There are strategies and scripts that will help you accelerate referrals from face-to-face meetings, but you need to have multiple referral systems in place to have adequate client flow.??Again, we’ll discuss in detail in a different chapter.??You want to always be perceived as exclusive and busy.??Never as needy or desperate.

Without the right strategy, you may come across as a little desperate. It will seem as if you are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The very clients you are asking for referrals are now wondering, why can you not find customers on their own? Am I placing my trust in the right person? You want to look busy, and you definitely don’t want to beg for referrals. You want your clients to be excited about what an expert you are, which is what will trigger the natural referrals. I’ll show you how to create multiple referral systems that keep creating new clients each and every week.

This is the area that is holding you back from your business, and your lifestyle, and everything that you're looking for, which is why I are emphasizing it so much. This idea that you have got to have enough things going on is the concept you need to get your head around first. Fortunately, I am here to talk you through all the tactics and strategies you need to make that happen.?For now, I just want to be clear that new clients and a full prospect pipeline are the starting point.?

Way too often advisors look start their month realize they have no prospects in their pipeline, before proceeding to freak out. Often, when I ask them what they do for marketing, they reply that they rely on word of mouth. Honestly, most of the time this answer is a clue that they are doing little or nothing beyond hoping for someone to walk through the door.??

Advisors often start with asking their friends and family to work with them.??Then they beg them for their friends to get themselves off the ground. They concentrate on these few clients and then a new one starts popping up here and then. That is never really going to get you to a high level quickly. No matter how good you are,?it just doesn’t scale very quickly. I have met countless advisors who are fantastic at what they do and have a lot to offer in their niche, but that alone is not enough and never will be to grow a big and stable practice quickly.

And a quick last point – for most advisor’s their marketing is episodic, not systematic.

You really must focus on doing at least one thing every day to market your business.????It’s essential to plan out your month, quarter, and year to have regular advertising, educational events, referral systems, and other systems that are all designed to create new clients.

For example, one of my clients who is extremely successful (a significant 7 figure personal net income) didn’t really have regular referral systems and events. However, once we ran through a list of possible ways he could regularly generate referrals, he recognized things he had done in the past. One of these was a customer appreciation event that his clients brought their friends to. He had held one in an art gallery and the clients loved it. He generated several high-quality new clients directly from this event. I asked when this event took place. His response? It was eight years ago. I asked when the next one is. He didn’t have one in the works; he claimed he hadn’t held another one because it was a lot of work.?

What he didn’t realize was that the first event is always the hardest because you are starting from scratch. The second is easier because you have your checklist and contacts to help set everything up. By the third, fourth, fifth, you have it down to a fine art and it becomes easier and equally rewarding. He should have been holding this event twice a year and would have a consistent source of new client referrals from that one alone. It doesn’t always have to be a huge event at an art gallery either, it could be an online webinar, for example.???

Ideally, you want to aim to have one or two client referral events each month.?The reason for this is that each event may appeal to a slightly different audience. If you had 250 clients, you’re going to have some that have friends who need college planning and some that need succession planning and some that need estate planning, etc.?Different topics for different segments make for different crowds of people, different friends, and different clients. You want seven or eight referral strategies that do not involve just asking existing clients.?

You want to stand out from the crowd rather than blending in. Clients should pick you because you offer something that no one else does for their particular needs, while reaching them in a way no one else does either.?

You never want to behave as if you ‘are worse than anyone else’ rather than ‘I’m the exactly right advisor for your particular needs’. As soon as you revolve around what your rivals are doing, you have already lost what makes you… you. As Michael Kitces once said, “It’s a horrible strategy to have clients pick you by zip code. You need more!”

To summarize. You must have 10, 15, 20 or more things going on each month to market your business. In part,?you need a lot of things going on because Murphy's Law is real, and even the best strategy with the best tactics is going to run into the blizzard, the tornado warning, the internet glitch, whatever it might be.??Sometimes things just don't work. I mean, I get great results from Facebook, LinkedIn, live events and more but every month is a little bit different, right? So, you got to have a lot of things going on. I call that the Parthenon, having a lot of pillars driving your traffic.

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. “It’s simple,” he said. “I love fish but I hate fishin’. I like eatin’, not catchn’. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of ’em. So if I only cast one or two, I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there’s enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want.”?The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need—which suppresses prices—is: too few lines cast in the ocean.?

Dan Kennedy

If you want 20 new clients each month, you should have 20 different things going on. I like to have 20 different things going on even if that only includes three or four real high-value, likely “home-run” ones. Just make sure that each one has the strategy and the tactics put together well.???

An advisor client said to me this week when talking about this principle that “nothing you can do to market a financial practice works very well” and that’s why you need a lot of things going on.??He was quoting a well-known personality in our field.???

It’s not true that nothing works well.??In fact, often promotions or advertising campaigns will almost work too well if done right.

There are many things that I’ve done over the years which created an overwhelming amount of new prospects and ultimately clients.???There are a number of things that when they hit right, they can fill your business all by themselves.???I just hate to rely on homeruns that may or may not happen in any given month.???Certainly “swing for the fences” but have lots of guaranteed “base hits” as well.?

One final thought….

End every night and start every day by asking yourself what can I do to market my practice? What do I need to be doing to keep that client flow where it needs to be? Focus on marketing every day in the morning and just before bed.?Never ever end a day without having done at least one thing to generate a new client. That is the golden rule you need to live by. It should be your mantra and it should become second nature to you and your business. If you can keep that up consistently you eliminate starting the month without a pipeline of prospects. Some of what you do in any given month will flop however some will be homeruns. What’s interesting is the homerun activities will be different from month to month.???Just?keep track of your new client pipeline, set your targets, and actively look for new ways to reach new people, including multiple events each month. That is the start of being successful, and I will share specific strategies later in this book.??By the way, as you add staff make sure that they all have this same focus.??They should focus every day on creating new clients and keeping your existing clients solid and growing.