If you want to be bland, no worse than anyone else, then this isn’t for you.

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This book may not be for you.

In fact, you may find you don’t like me; trust me I’ve heard that before. I’ll freely admit to being an acquired taste.

If you want to be bland, no worse than anyone else, then this isn’t for you. If you would be happy to just add a trickle of new clients to your practice that’s on a plateau,then frankly this isn’t for you, either.?

You may run from much of my advice screaming in terror. That’s ok, I have enough friends. I’m going to be “no holds barred” and perhaps politically incorrect in urging you to grow and take a fresh look at your business. This material is for the top 1%—for those “Maverick Advisors” who hit the highest rungs. It’s for you if you’re ready to hit those levels and beyond.

If you’re ready to grow, let’s do a bit of a mental catharsis together.????????????????????????????Together we’ll look at your business with fresh eyes.

I’m a financial industry outsider, and that’s a good thing. It gives me an ability to see the failings and fallacies from an objective vantage point. Although I’ve had a couple of toes dipped into your industry for over twenty years, I cut my teeth marketing in a completely different realm. I’ve worked with business owners from a wide range of industries.?

I got my start, strangely enough, while studying Economics at Georgetown University by running a branch of a multi-million dollar martial arts school chain. It was an organization that was famous in Washington, DC—in fact, I still see their TV commercials pop up from time to time on popular TV shows that are set in DC in the 70’s or 80’s. My instructor worked with everyone from Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali to politicians including hundreds of congressmen and other politicians that included Newt Gingrich, George H.W. Bush, George Allen, Joe Biden, among many others.

My expectations were to work my way through school managing that business then hit Wharton or Harvard for an MBA before heading to Wall Street in the heady days of the early 80’s. Instead, I moved to Denver and opened a hugely successful chain of martial arts schools growing to 2,500+ students across six locations within 30 months.

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does.???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Steuart Henderson Britt

Obviously, I had to quickly become really good at marketing to accomplish that much traffic. Over the years I had to have 120 new students each month to keep the momentum going, and mostly accomplished that with bursts up to 400 or 500 in a month. Over the course of my career, I was primary driver for all the marketing for my own organization (and still am for several companies and MANY clients 39 years later). I’ve created well over 25,000 clients for my own businesses having closed 1,000’s of them face-to-face. “In the trenches,” real world sales experience. For clients, it’s likely over 1,000,000 new clients through the years using my strategies and tools.

Throughout the years I created what I now call a “Parthenon” (having borrowed that term from Jay Abraham) of marketing strategies and tactics. These ranged from full page ads in major daily papers, TV spots on network shows such as Oprah, informercials, extensive direct mail, “Marriage Mail,” joint ventures, trade shows, community outreach, search optimization, pay-per-click, social media, and much, much more. Back in 1999, I dominated in our metropolitan with online marketing (back when Alta Vista dominated search and “GoTo” was the only paid search.)??Then I wrote a book about Internet Marketing and created several training programs on internet marketing. I’ve stayed on the leading edge of what works now, in real time, for marketing online.

Rarely did I resort to my sales staff knocking on doors or doing cold calls. Preferring for them to talk to already interested prospects, or to be in front of groups—hundreds (or thousands) rather than one-on-one. It’s not that “prospecting sucks” as some might say, but that you’ll get a lot more traction communicating with 100, 500 or 2,500 at once than picking up the phone and cold dialing, knocking on doors, or as so many do now, cold contacting on LinkedIn and other platforms.

I understand your pain. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve had the conversations with prospective clients who were unqualified or unimpressed without having been properly prepped and educated—and FIXED the systems to eliminate those issues.

With my incredibly high profile in the Denver area, I started getting contacted by a range of business owners to help them with their marketing, sales, and business management. For example, one was the managing partner of a large law firm, a number of commercial realtors and developers, commercial loan brokers, financial advisors, and a variety of other service and retail businesses.

They mostly had the same problem. As Gerber said in the book “E-Myth” they were accomplished “Technicians” at whatever their niche who never really thought to learn how to market that and often looked down on, or just failed to master the sales processes to support it. Mostly they thought that being good at what they did was enough and were shocked to find out that the world didn’t beat a path to their door.

When I “jumped into the deep end” of Financial Advisor Marketing I was SHOCKED at how bad the marketing is in this industry. Just how clueless so called “marketing executives” are in the nitty gritty of creating new clients. The vast majority of the “consultants” are just as bad, if not worse.

What’s obvious to me (and perhaps to you) is:

1.??????Most advisors have a “Manual Labor” sales job. Not a business. Not a career that can scale, expand, and survive without duplicating the “Manual Labor” sales job.

I continue to be reminded of that first “Stratton-Oakmont” movie?The Boiler Room?as being the model of grind it out cold calling, shifted now due to “Do Not Call” and Smart Phones to cold contacting on LinkedIn and similar manual labor.

There is a BETTER Way!

2.?????Advisors seem to be having a contest to see who can be the?least?memorable. With my staff we’ve started to think of every LinkedIn profile, website, and business card as being “the guy in the J.C. Penny’s Suit at an Oak Desk.”???I’ll admit to sort of stealing the characterization from Tim Ferris’s description of “The Bald Fat Guy in the Red BMW Convertible” from his “The 4-Hour Work Week” book. My friend, marketing great Dan Kennedy, used the theme of the TV Show weeds:??Little Boxes to describe advisors, “Where they were put in boxes, and they came out all the same.”

There is a BETTER Way!

3.?????The big companies, who should know better do?absolutely worthless advertising. Objectively making no effort to actually feed new quality prospects to their “sales team” of 6,000; 7,000; 10,000; or more advisors. While providing extensive training (mostly product knowledge) the marketing approach is really no better than the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman from years ago, or the old fuller brush man. The?failure rate is no better?either with the vast majority washing out in the first 12 to 24 months.?

You Don’t Have to Be TRAPPED into One-On-One MANUAL Labor!

4.????“The Sales Prevention Department” Pretty much every company in this industry has what Bill Glazer used to call the “Sales Prevention Department.” Don’t get me wrong, everything you do should be compliant. I’m no more interested in getting FINRA or the SEC to breath down our necks than you are.?

However, pretty much everyone in this industry has?a team of people “running blocker” to prevent hard chargers from doing much more than hitting up their warm list of friends and family. I don’t see many people who’ve been in the field, who are focused on sales chipping in on discussions happening about compliance.?

Even the “marketing people” in most of these companies have?never sold anything.?They definitely never sat where you sit, worrying about where their next client will come from, and selling face-to-face, belly-to-belly. Their teams create mostly pretty stuff, non-offensive, non-memorable, boiler plate crap for marketing that?does nothing to help their advisors create new clients.

You CAN do VERY Effective Advertising and Marketing WITHOUT running afoul of real compliance concerns.

5.?????“The Bozo Explosion” I’m sure I’ve upset any number of what I pretty uncharitably call the “Bozo Explosion” of coaches and consultants?teaching stuff that doesn’t work or which is extremely limiting.?

Some of them grew from within and have a myopic view of what can be accomplished. Dan Kennedy, marketing guru would call what they teach “Marketing Incest.” That’s essentially when advisors look around at what everyone else is doing in the niche and copy what they see. With these consultants, often actually being responsible for “Selling Something” is a distant memory (or vivid nightmare). Perhaps they had some success; often they didn’t. Either way, rarely is what they teach “replicable” across your business.

NEVER take advice from someone who has not made sales face-to-face and belly-to-belly, and who has not been responsible for creating a huge flow of new clients for themselves.

Others are from outside the industry but have only one or two “tools in their toolbox,” and therefore a very limited range of ideas and strategies. They’ll teach you cold contacting on LinkedIn, how to do Facebook Advertising, or give you a template for hosting lunch or dinner meetings. Rarely do I seen anyone with a broad range of tools and strategies for marketing along with sales systems to manage the flow.

To be consistently successful you must create a “Parthenon” of marketing systems. Many different feeders to create new clients.

Again,?NEVER trust the advice of anyone who hasn’t had to create new clients, who hasn’t done sales face-to-face. The best marketing experts, copywriters, sales trainers, started with knocking on doors making sales belly-to-belly over and over before learning better “Direct Response” methods. Most of the folks running around giving advice (and a bunch in the executive suites at the big companies) have never been in that situation. I can tell you that having a BS or MBA in “marketing” is not a qualification for really creating new quality clients. There are many who can talk a good game, but can they help you create a steady flow of qualified clients while helping you structure all aspects of your sales and client retention systems?

Throughout this book I’ll discuss time proven marketing principles, walk you through effective strategies, and share the key tactics that make them work when the “rubber meets the road.”

Unfortunately, there is no ONE THING. There’s no “magic pill” that creates an endless stream of new clients.?

Wealth and rarity go together. The rarer the art, the piece of jewelry, the designer gown, the travel experience, the first edition book, the celebrity’s autograph, the professional expertise, the higher the price paid, the greater the appreciation, the greater the demand.??????????????????????????????????Dan Kennedy

And, let me point out one more consideration before we really dig in. In everything you do, you should be very aware of your own positioning. Are you cold calling begging for business or are you sought out???Are you seen as easily available or are you the guru at the top of the mountain? You are always giving an impression to your prospects and clients about your desirability as an expert and about your competency by every action you take.

There’s a reason why the metaphor is of the guru at the top of the mountain. If the guru was as the bottom of the mountain, the value would not be nearly as much. It’s the seeking out and the difficulty of accessing the expert that creates the belief of value.

The guru that you are looking for to guide you rarely knocks on your door or pesters you repeatedly in your LinkedIn in box.

Here is a graphic for the basic marketing process for most systems.

1.??????Define a target market.

2.?????Create an offer to attract that particular group (and repel any and everyone else)

3.?????Choose media to get your offer in front of them.

4.????Give them an opportunity to “raise their hand” for your offer.

5.?????Collect their contact information.

6.????Communicate and educate until they convert to an appointment.

7.?????Have an effective sales process with a high closing rate.