5 Levels of Financial Planning – What’s Your Level?
“Am I getting better?”
It may be the most important question you can ask yourself as a financial planner. If you’ve never thought to ask it before, go ahead and do it now. And be honest.
Are you a better financial planner than you were three months ago? A year ago? Three years ago?
If the answer is “No” (or even “Yes, but not much”) then you might face a serious problem.
Can I tell you about a very personal experience?
“If this is going to last any longer, I’m jumping off the roof”
Yes, it sounds crazy, I know.
You might think it’s about more leads, fees, AUM, or commissions. But no, it’s not.
The real reason is far more interesting. And it’s something most financial planners don’t know.
So before I’ll tell you the truth about how you are able to double your income while having highly satisfied customers, let me first tell you a story.
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:
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.
There is hardly any product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. So, how do you sell your service? You manipulate or inspire people. Now please, don’t get me wrong. Manipulations are just a good tactic to increase sales. In fact, almost everybody is doing it. Do you recognize that companies drop the price, run a promotion, using fear or peer pressure? I’ll bet you do. When companies don’t know how to inspire people they tend to rely on a disproportional number of manipulations to get what they need. And for good reason, manipulations work. But rarely the manipulation tactic turns to one stop shop customer into a loyal customer. Continue reading