Remember great epic series like The Game of Thrones, The Tudors or Spartacus. There’s always the bad guy (the king) and the good guy (the hero). Next to the bad guy (the almighty king) is always a personage who is called the king’s counselor. His job is to advice the king about what the king should do to avoid future dangers. You often hear him say things like ‘danger is coming’ or ‘the enemy has gathered’.
As Lennon and McCartney wrote a half century ago, money can’t buy you love. But in today’s world, where people have come desensitized by ad campaigns and marketing slogans , that maxim needs an update: money can’t even buy you like.
That’s because we’ve entered the ‘Relationship Age’ where the only path for financial planners seeking long-term success is to create authentic customer relationships. Not through old traditional marketing. Old traditional marketing is: interrupting your clients with whatever they are doing. You are disturbing your clients by shoving them your marketing message under his nose.
Before I’ll tell you how te create authentic relationships with new marketing, let me tell you why I think we are entering ‘the Relationship Age’. Here are 4 reasons:
Healthy competition is inspiring indeed. It encourages you to perform better than the others to succeed and survive. Well, same applies for the financial planning industry too. If you’re a financial planner, then don’t assume that you’re the sole ruler of the industry. You need to be more innovative and communicative with your clients to survive the tough competition and get a hold of your own. This will not only boost your standing as a financial planner and the industry will also prosper.
How a financial planner may go innovative?
Many financial planners don’t know how they should prepare for the future. They see a rapidly changing world. Large companies in the financial service business with innovative websites, offer free financial planning tools for their clients. With those tools they are apparently a threat for financial planners. As a financial planner you are faced with a dilemma. Do you accept these changes and choose to embrace the fast changing digital world, or not? Where should you focus on? How do you prepare yourself for the future? Questions you can answer easily if you know where you are going. Do you have a vision? The following blog shows you how to prepare for a rapidly changing future.
We live in a world were trust for financial services isn’t what it used to be. Since the start of the crisis in 2008 it’s only about bonusses, greed and abuse. Abuse of trust I mean by that. When people purchased a financial advice or product, we didn’t bother to tell what the costs were for our clients. So, in the mind of our clients advice is for free. While we were earning lots of money with commissions, kickbackfees and other untransparent revenues, people thought it was all for free. Now, times have changed. Commissions and kickbackfees are history. And people don’t trust us anymore. Now, we have to ask our clients for their money. So they will buy our advice (while at first people thought it was for free). That’s pretty difficult when people don’t trust us. So, how are you going to make people pay for your services while people don’t trust you? The answer is: you don’t make them, you let them. Watch this TEDtalk from Amanda Palmer, and you’ll see how you let people pay for your services.
When I was a kid my parents gave me this advice: get good grades, go to college and pursue a profession that delivers a decent living. If you’re good at english and history, you should become a lawyer. And if you are good at numbers, become an accountant. Later I became a financial planner. I guess the numbers had something to do with that. And if I were to be successful in my profession as a financial planner, there was only one thing to do: get my CFP (or in Holland it’s the Master of Science grade). Professor Peter Drucker gave these professions a somewhat wanky name: knowledge workers. “Knowledge workers are people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill”, according to Drucker. Compared to the time when I was a kid and today there has been a major change in the supply of knowledge and information. Which has an underestimated impact on the role of the financial planner. Continue reading
When we see things, we mostly assume that the way we see them is the way they really are or the way they should be. And because of that our behaviours grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act. Let’s take you to an intellectual experience which helps you to understand how your client sees you as a financial planner. Take a few seconds and look al the picture in this blogpost. Take a good look. Do you see a woman? How old would you say she is? What does she look like? What is she wearing? If you are like me when I saw this picture for the first time, you probably would describe the woman in the picture to be about 25 years old, lovely, fashionable and a small nose. But what if I were to tell you that you’re wrong?