While there are undoubtedly some who haven’t changed their sales development practices to reflect this new world, there are many advisers who have really dug in and changed their approach to maximise their opportunities. So what are these advisers doing differently today than they were doing 5 years ago to maximise their potential sales in this extremely difficult trading environment? Here are a few ideas;

Get active!

One feature in common of all the brokers I’ve spoken to, who are best dealing with the new sales environment is how pro-active they all are. Each of them have spoken to me about how they’re working harder now than they ever did, trying different activities to drive sales. They are not sitting in the office, sending off the odd email and making a few phone calls! These people are out putting themselves in the way of traffic; meeting people for coffee, networking, attending events, organising events, as well as putting their effort into a whole range of marketing activities.

Plan your activities

Another feature of these successful brokers is they are planning out their sales activities, not just going about them in an ad hoc fashion. Most of them have pretty limited financial resources for their sales activities so they are putting in the time and effort to plan in order to ensure they maximise their bang for buck.

These advisers are getting very clear on the target groups of new customers they believe offer the greatest opportunity for them and in relation to their existing clients, are identifying those individuals that offer the best chance of success. They are then mapping out the optimal set of sales activities for each and then religiously recording and measuring as they progress.

Be valuable

Another characteristic of advisers who succeed in this difficult market is that they’re seeking out every opportunity to add value. Typically this is through investing their time in order to build new relationships or further cement existing ones. These people are putting their hands up to speak at conferences, to give presentations to Chambers of Commerce, even in situations where there is no obvious benefit for them. They are also seeking out all opportunities to refer their clients to other clients. They are working on the premise that “what goes around, comes around”.

One adviser that I’ve been working with used to host a golf day for clients each summer. He has now replaced this with more informal games of golf, spread throughout the year. He fills the fourball with 3 people who potentially will transact business with each other. This has been really appreciated by clients, who recognise him as working in their interests and not his own. This approach costs less money, but does take up more time. However the goodwill to be gained makes it very worthwhile.

These people look to add and show value at every opportunity. When meeting with clients, communicating with them and when trying to build new relationships. They don’t focus on products or their own services; instead they are working out the issues their clients are grappling with and helping them address these. Their own sales opportunities inevitably follow.

It doesn’t have to cost a fortune!

These successful advisers are also putting their time into low cost but effective marketing channels. There are now loads of examples of brokers who are using email marketing and social media really effectively to get their sales messages out there. There are now thousands of financial advisers in Ireland with a presence on LinkedIn. However only a very small number are actually using it and getting value from it. There are also a growing number of examples of brokers who are using Twitter effectively, connecting well with hundreds (& sometimes thousands) of people who are following their insights. If these large groups of people find your musings valuable, there is a better than even chance that they might consider actually doing business with you in the future.

At the end of the day, it comes back to your deep desire to actually make it happen. Are you one of those whose energy is dropping in line with the economic environment or are you out changing your world yourself? Thankfully most of the advisers I meet are in the second camp!

If you’ve any thoughts or comments, I’d welcome them below.

B2B selling requires a different skill set than that needed to successfully advise consumers.  This article attempts to identify those skills needed. Hopefully they will help you re-awaken some of your own dormant skills or indeed might help you if you are hiring someone to develop your business client base. Also, excellent account managers working for product providers, promoting their products to financial advisers, also demonstrate these attributes.

So what does it take to build up your corporate client base?

Research capability

Good B2B salespeople will never approach a potential customer without carrying out detailed research of the company. While it might be ok (but certainly not preferable) to meet an individual and know little about them, this won’t work with companies. As there are so many rich sources of information now with websites, LinkedIn profiles and company reports available, you need to use them! As you set out to impress a potential company, you had better be able to confidently articulate how your proposition will be an excellent fit to meet their needs. To do so, you need to know their business.

Be a good listener

However I’m not suggesting in the previous section that you arrive with your pre-prepared solutions to the company’s problems because you’ve first of all got to find out what they are. Don’t dive into solutions! You need to start with strong questioning and close listening to ensure that the solution you eventually propose will address the right problem. Lots of “Open” questions needed here!

Ability to interact at multiple levels

Financial advisers who are dealing with business clients will typically begin a corporate relationship through CEOs, business owners, finance directors or HR directors. These people will share some common characteristics. First of all they usually have pretty good knowledge of their financial services needs as they will have covered the subject areas previously or indeed will have researched the areas themselves. Secondly they have very little time on their hands and they don’t suffer fools gladly! So if you want to be successful, make sure you are on top of your game when it comes to your advice proposition and product knowledge and get to the point – be professional and business-like at all times.

However this is not about being high-brow. If you gain a business client, you need to be able to engage with people right throughout the company, to empathise and build relationships at all levels of the organisation. Your relationship with the company will ultimately fail if you get on great with the finance director but no one else wants to do business with you. So deal appropriately with everyone throughout the company.

Be a problem solver

Company clients will expect you to make their lives easier, to add value both in terms of financial benefits for them and also in terms of addressing any problems quickly. They will expect you to proactively address any issues they might have with any financial institution and to solve these problems quickly and effectively. So basically you need to be more than a salesperson. You need to be a service agent too who will add value to the relationship on an on-going basis. If they feel that they have been left to manage issues themselves, they will question your value and ultimately replace you.

Corporate clients will expect you to be resilient, to manage stressful situations and then to come back looking for more problems to solve!

Use technology and innovative solutions

Business clients will typically use technology in many areas of their business to help them reduce cost and improve efficiency. They will expect no less from you. They will value access to key information online and the use of technology to make on-going servicing easier. And they will expect you to continue to seek out more innovative solutions for them, both in terms of your actual advice and product propositions and also in terms of your service to them.

The best financial advisers dealing with B2B clients realise that this area is not just the responsibility of product providers but an area in which they can actually differentiate themselves.  I’m seeing this in systems being used by advisers to identify the emotional factors influencing individual investors, risk profiling tools, fact finding tools and of course CRM tools.

Highest ethics and integrity

Most companies place huge store in their reputation and actively seek to have a positive impact on their employees, customers and community. While this is of course the right thing to do, they also recognise the benefits they gain through better engagement with these groups, which ultimately will yield financial benefits. As an example, Corporate Social Responsibility programmes are very important processes within a lot of companies today.

The last thing these employers will want is to introduce an adviser who doesn’t share these aspirations. So never let your high ethical standards slip.

These are some of the characteristics I’ve seen in the best B2B salespeople I’ve encountered in both financial advice firms and in life companies. I hope they describe you to a tee!

Are there other characteristics? Please feel free to leave comments below.

Do many advice firms just continue on in a never-ending sales cycle without proper planning? Well of course some do. However these businesses are really missing the opportunity to reinvigorate their sales effort every year. Carrying out structured planning gives you valuable focus on your customers, your market and your own internal capabilities. It gives you a structure to work to and a basis on which you can track progress. It also helps you identify dependencies your sales team have on other areas of your business to help them achieve their numbers.

Sales planning needs to happen at every level of your organisation. There needs to be an overall sales plan for the business as a whole. However this then needs to be translated into a relevant sales plan by every region, team or indeed every individual sales member. Yes, each individual sales person needs their own sales plan to ensure they maximise their own opportunities. A sales plan gives the individual sales person the focus and structure needed to achieve their goals. It also gives them a mechanism to report fully on progress and indeed to highlight supports they need from other areas of the business.

So what should you expect to see in a well thought out sales plan for a financial advice firm or sales person? Here are a few thoughts of what might be included.

Know your numbers

It might seem obvious but it is really important to be crystal clear on your sales numbers, whatever the most relevant numbers are. What level of income do you need, what level of assets do you need to secure, how many new customers do you need? You’ve got to be clear exactly what is needed to ensure you can achieve and indeed exceed expectations.

Consider external impacts

There are lots of factors at play in the market over which you’ve no control that will impact your sales effort – some positive, others negative. Identifying these at the outset is really important. How will you leverage these positive impacts (maybe the opportunities offered by technology for example) or deal with the negative factors (what if tax relief is reduced on pensions in the Budget this week – your income needs won’t reduce with this!).

What makes you different

What are the unique strengths and opportunities that will help you stand apart from your competitors? What areas of your proposition, your skill set or your relationships can you leverage to your benefit? On the other hand, what weaknesses do you have, gaps that you need to close or particular threats that you need to prepare to deal with? Now is the time to be thinking about all of these.

Plan to beat your competitors

Who are your competitors, what are their particular strengths and weaknesses and what strategies have you considered to win against each of them? What do you need to do to get yourself fit to face your competitors down?

Capture your target market groups

You obviously need to know who you hope to sell to. You need to articulate these groups and write them down. Further on in the planning process, you will need to tailor your sales activities depending on the profile of each group. Your approach for example to prospective business owner clients will be very different to how you drive sales from within your existing personal lines clients.

Know your sales objectives

At this stage, you’ve actually broken the back of the planning process as based on all your earlier work, your sales objectives will start to become clear. Typical sales objectives could include the likes of,

• 10 new SME business owner clients secured during 2013
• Carry out financial reviews, identify additional needs and cross sell an additional financial product to 20 existing clients who currently have a single policy with you.
• Secure 3 new clients from introducer relationships.

With each of your sales objectives, you then need to put a measure against them. These measures in turn should add up to 100% of your sales target identified at the outset.

Identify the activities to achieve the objectives

For each of your objectives, what activities will be needed to achieve the goal? These might include making a set number of phone calls to prospects each week, securing planning meetings, presentations, seminars, entertaining etc.

Then it is a case of using your CRM system (or mapping out on a spreadsheet) the sales activities needed to be carried out with the actual target customers. This then becomes a dynamic business process that is updated every day. As you target a new customer, they are added. As you carry out an activity, that customer record gets updated. This will quickly demonstrate to you gaps or areas of particular activity needing more focus in your sales effort.

Make the activities happen!

Your next step is to make sure the activities actually happen. For “big” activities such as seminars, these should be planned out for the year and the customers to be targeted identified at the outset. Yes, this picture will change as the year progresses.

For the more “day to day” activities, it is important to set aside time (and allow your sales people time) to  plan your activities for the upcoming week. This then should enable you to also have identifiable periods during the week that are solely for time out in front of customers.

Review Relentlessly

If your sales people are planning at the outset, keeping the plan updated and producing realistic sales forecasts, it makes your conversations with them more meaningful and gives you the opportunity to help them. If they plan effectively, it also ups the ante on you as any reasons for sales under-performance that are outside of the salesperson’s control become more apparent. These are your challenges to address!

These are just a few thoughts in relation to sales planning. Yes it takes time, particularly so at the outset and it takes ongoing commitment to continue planning and monitoring throughout the year. However the focus and structure that you gain will result in the rewards outweighing these costs through increased sales!

What tips do you have for sales planning? All comments are very welcome.

Develop a plan

The first consideration should be to bring some structure to your marketing activities. Develop a plan for the year to ensure your marketing activities are neither ad-hoc nor based on fads that might look attractive today. Develop a plan that is achievable for your business. Capture the plan on only one or two pages – the days of 20 page plans are over. Readers might read the executive summary and that’s usually as far they get… Finally, include some time for delivery into your work schedule and then really commit to delivering the activities.

Be crystal clear about your objectives

The temptation can be to dive in and start delivering an activity, maybe a newsletter, an email campaign or an event. My advice is – less haste, more speed! You need to be really clear about what your objectives are first. Are you trying to build your brand locally, increase leads into the business or possibly reconnect with existing clients? Depending on your objective, some activities will be a much better fit than others. So the first step has to be to get crystal clear on your objectives.

Know your target markets

It is vital to also be really clear about who it is that you’re trying to reach with your marketing campaigns, your communications and your sales campaigns. Is it individuals in a certain geographical area or is it business owners? Is it a particular occupation, a particular age profile or a particular segment of your existing clients? Knowing your audience will shape the activities that you choose, as different activities are more likely to succeed in grabbing the attention of different target markets.

This focus on your target groups should also carry through to any customer engagement content that you write. You’ve got to find a way to stand out from the crowd, perhaps as an expert in a particular area or perhaps as a valuable, local specialist. You want to become the “go to” person when your target market is seeking out opinions or expert writing in relation to financial services. Build this position as a thought leader in their minds and they are more likely to come to you for your advice. To do this, you’ve first of all got to be clear about who it is you want to reach.

As part of this, manage your customer data religiously. Please see the StepChange article “Good data = more sales for financial advisers” for some insights on this topic.

Put measures in place

This is the area that gives marketing a bad name! As the great pioneer of advertising, John Wanamaker famously said, ““I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t know which half”!

How do you directly attribute sales to that article you wrote in the local paper? Well unless a client tells you that’s where they became aware of you, quite simply you can’t. However this doesn’t mean that you simply cross your fingers and hope for the best. With a bit of thought, you can come up with a range of metrics to measure the impact of your various marketing activities. Depending on the activity, these can include sales, number of leads, website hits, level of enquiries etc. For your online activities, the problem is somewhat reduced as there are a great range of metrics available to you. These can include search engine results, clicks through to your website and enquires via your website. For your social media activities, these can include shares, likes & retweets! While these in themselves aren’t revenue measures, they’ll give you a picture of whether you are engaging your key audiences or not.

Tidy up your current marketing supports

This is a big challenge for everyone. We all go through bursts of activity from time to time and do a complete overhaul of website content. However outside of this, you’ve got to eradicate out-of-date information on your website. There’s nothing worse than going to a website and seeing the most recent “Latest News” item or Newsletter is from a few years ago, and indeed time sensitive information such as Social Welfare rates etc. are years old.  Either bring them up to date or remove them.

Your prospective clients will research you initially on your website. They want an adviser who has their finger on the pulse. Out of date information will give them the opposite perception of your business.

While each of these points are relatively straightforward, they will take time and commitment. I think that they’re worth it if you want to get off to a fast start in 2013.

If you’ve any observations, comments or further thoughts, I’d welcome them below!

Good data of course is central to your service and ongoing advice to clients. You need to have access to the information contained in the customer fact find and also your client’s existing policy information to enable you to provide robust financial advice. However I’m going to focus here on how having good data will really help your marketing efforts.

I’ll start with an obvious one. Do you have email addresses for all of your clients? Many advisers don’t and this is quite understandable. Email has only emerged as the default communication method in the last decade or so and many client relationships go back much further than that. However most clients have email addresses today and email offers a no-cost means of communicating with your clients on an ongoing basis. So what should you do? Well obviously you can write to all clients asking them for their email addresses – this may yield some results but if you’ve lots of clients, it may be an expensive exercise. At a minimum though, I would suggest that you introduce a business process that ensures that before anyone in your company finishes a conversation with a client, they check with the client have you got their current email address. Everyone has a role here, every single time, every conversation. This will refresh and enrich your data, allowing you regularly reach your clients at no cost.

The second area is in relation to the source of leads and customers. If you capture this religiously, it can provide excellent insights when deciding where to apply your (usually limited) marketing budget in the future. This will tell you which activities worked in the past and should be carried out again or maybe tweaked, and which ones bombed and shouldn’t be repeated!

Data also provides the foundation for successful client segmentation. While this can be quite a complex area and will be covered in detail in a future article, there are many ways that you can segment your clients and then target them with specific campaigns or offerings. Examples of segmentation dimensions at a client level include;

• policy type
• income levels
• earnings per client
• premiums being paid
• funds under management
• age
• occupation etc.

There are many potential dimensions and indeed as businesses become more comfortable with segmenting their clients, they begin to use multiple dimensions.  This enables you to focus your offerings to make them as relevant as possible to your target clients. Good data helps you to make better decisions in relation to your marketing activities and can really enhance those activities through enabling you to provide relevant campaigns aimed at carefully identified groups of clients. The quality of your data is key – remember the old saying; “Garbage in, garbage out!”

As a result of more targeted marketing efforts, greater confidence and expectations can be placed in relation to your sales return as you move from a scattergun approach to carefully crafted and targeted campaigns.

Managing your data however comes with real responsibilities, both in relation to how you use this data and also in relation to keeping this data secure. You need to understand your requirements under the Consumer Protection Code and also your data protection obligations; how and when you can contact your clients and also the permission you need to send further sales messages to them. In relation to security, I’m sometimes concerned about how lax some businesses are particularly in relation to the easy access to data on smartphones and tablets. Is access to confidential data within some of your emails only a 4 digit iPhone password away from someone who could make trouble for you? This is also exacerbated now with the explosive growth of cloud computing. If you use cloud computing on your phone or tablet, is your data constantly accessible on your device, potentially giving someone full access to all of your client files?

Your data is hugely valuable. It is central to your planning, your decision making in relation to your activities and can really enhance your sales effort. Give your data the attention it deserves, make sure that your whole organisation is constantly focused on improving your data. And finally, manage your data securely.

I hope this article was of interest. If you’ve any comments or further observations, I’d love to hear them!

I’ve had the privilege over the last year of working with a number of advisers, helping them develop really compelling value propositions. The reason I was asked to work with them was because these advisers felt that they just weren’t turning enough leads and prospects into clients. They were meeting lots of people but weren’t successfully bridging the gap from that pre-sales point to actually engaging the clients in the advice process.

We identified that this was because they weren’t clearly articulating the value that they offer to these potential clients through the advice that they give. From my experience, advisers are often more comfortable getting straight to the solutions (products) rather than spending time talking about the advice process, which is where you add your value!

So with these advisers, we mapped out their advice processes, articulated the value gained by the client at each step, wrote these down and turned them into presentations of their advice propositions. So now the initial discussions focus on where the adviser adds value to the client. The result is prospects now understanding the value of the adviser, more of them turning into clients and much easier justification of fees and charges as the client now has a clear sense of the value added by the adviser.

So what are the steps to winning more clients with a strong value proposition?

Clarify your advice process and the value of this
First of all, think through all the stages of your advice process. Think about how you start your advice meeting, how you move through your fact finding stage and build your client profile. Then think about how you go about making recommendations to identifying and implementing product solutions. Finally think about the value at each step for your client, what they gain by having you involved.

Make it visual
The next step is to develop this advice process into a visual diagram. Many clients don’t want to read long documents but you really want them to see this one……so capture it in a simple graphic that you can walk through with them.

Also capture your advice process and the value to clients longhand in a printed document to be given to every client that you have an introductory meeting with. This will ensure that it remains with them after the meeting.

Make it a critical new step of your process
So now before you start giving advice to a client, you should now explain the journey you are going to undertake with the client, rather than just diving in.

I suggest that you build an introductory presentation about you, your business and what you offer to clients with this being the nub of that presentation. This presentation in my mind should be delivered using technology rather than paper, and an iPad or other tablet being far preferable to a laptop as it removes the screen as a barrier between you and the client.

Is this worth doing?
Well first of all I agree that it’s going to take a bit of effort to actually map out your process and identify the added value, turn it into a presentation and a takeaway document for clients. Indeed it also will mean that your initial meeting will take longer than before as you walk through the presentation.

However the benefits will significantly outweigh these negatives. First of all, I believe that showing this value will help get more prospects “across the line” and to the factfind stage. Secondly taking the time to set out your advice process and the value to clients will help you win that all-important trust of the client. They will take comfort in you demonstrating a robust process behind the advice that you give, that your advice is well structured and well thought out. This is likely to increase their willingness to commit with you.

Finally the client will “get” what you do. They will see the expertise that you bring and the value this offers to them. And the benefit of this? A greater understanding and acceptance of the fees and/or commission that you receive to provide advice to them and help them to achieve their financial objectives.

How do you portray your value to clients? Do you use a particular approach? Please feel free to leave your comments.

Understand the importance of your website

Your website at the end of the day is your most valuable digital asset. It can inform your audience, engage them and indeed be a key source of leads for your business. So view your website as the hub of your online activities. All your activities online in relation to your business either through social media or indeed lead generation through advertising and search optimisation should lead back to your website. It’s really important as a result that your website shows your business in the best light possible.

Be Clear on your Goals

What are you trying to achieve with your website? Are you trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in financial services or are you simply trying to inform the readers on your site of the products that you sell? Or maybe you’re trying to generate leads through your website?  You need to be very clear what you’re trying to achieve as this should impact the structure and layout of your site and the content that you place on it.

Spend time thinking about this, don’t just dive in and start writing content! Get very clear on your objectives and then constantly “sense check” your content against these objectives to ensure you’re delivering what you’ve set out to achieve.  Otherwise the audience won’t be clear of your message and what you’re trying to say to them…..and will just leave the site.

Talk about what you actually do!

This is quickly becoming a big bugbear of mine….. There are too many financial adviser websites out there that to my mind miss the biggest opportunity of all.  And that is to tell the readers of your websites what you actually do and how you do it – that is of course giving advice! So many adviser websites are like mini brochures for life assurance companies, talking about all the products of theirs that you will sell to everyone. That’s all well and good but it completely undersells the real value that you bring to your clients – the excellent advice that you give them to help them plot their financial course. The products are of course a very important part of the overall equation, but at the end of the day, they are simply vehicles to help you and the client reach their financial goals. So tell the world what you do!

Keep an Eye on your Layout

There are some Financial Adviser websites out there that hide away some of their real nuggets! Make it easy for the reader to get to the key messages that you want them to see. Have a sensible navigation menu structure that will lead people easily through the site to your key messages. If people can’t get quickly to the page they want, they’ll just leave the site.

When the reader finds themselves on the correct page, make sure the key messages are easily found. Have your key messages high up on the page, “above the fold”, so that the reader doesn’t have to scroll down to reach the key message. Often people just won’t bother scrolling, and will leave the page or even the site without reading that all-important message.

Have Clear Calls to Action

What do you want the reader to do when on your website? Do you want them to pick up the phone and make an appointment with you or do you want them to fill out a form on the site to make contact? Maybe you’re trying to establish yourself as a thought leader and you want them to share your content? Well make sure you ask them to do whatever it is that you want and give them the opportunity to carry out that action……again and again. Make the call to action very obvious, very clear and very easy.

Make sure your Content is Current & Accurate

When prospective or existing clients look to explore your views for example on recent market turmoil, they will probably check out any links you have to pages that contain “News”, “Blogs” or “Newsletters”. If you have old content here, this may suggest to the reader that you don’t have your finger on the pulse. Don’t be afraid to take content down if it is old or out of date! Sometimes “less is more” – this is certainly one of those instances!

Also, read and then re-read your content for accuracy. Are all spellings correct and is there good use of grammar? Lack of attention in this area can send out a signal of shoddy practices which is very damaging for Financial Advisers as your clients expect the highest levels of attention to detail in relation to their finances. So don’t undermine your business offering by not putting in a few extra minutes checking the quality of your content.

I hope these pointers are helpful to you. Coming into the summer might offer you the opportunity to catch your breath and review your online presence. I would of course be delighted to discuss this area further with you, please give me a call! Or indeed, please feel free to comment below this article.

Regards

Eamonn

One area of the market that has very pleasantly surprised me in the market has been the proliferation of all kinds of partnerships that advisers are utilising to help develop their businesses. Yes, advisers continue to gain tremendous benefit from the support of the life companies, who are working closely with their distribution partners to drive business development and other business support activities. Advisers are also benefiting from the important support activities of the broker representative organisations. However it’s the more informal partnerships and wide use of external experts that I’ve found a bit unexpected!

 Increasing Market Reach

My biggest surprise has been at the amount of collaboration going on between advisers themselves. Advisers are realising that they can’t be everywhere and all things to all potential clients, and are instead partnering with other advisers to address market reach challenges. How is this actually playing out on the ground?

Well first of all, there are a number of excellent advisers with nationwide propositions but without representation in every corner of the country. These brokers are maintaining a truly nationwide presence through collaboration with other advisers in those area where they don’t have a presence. What’s the result? Satisfied clients receiving an excellent, prompt service.

I’ve also been very impressed by some advisers not trying to be “all things to all men” and referring clients seeking specialist advice in certain product areas to other more specialist advisers. Obviously they are ensuring this is a “two-way street” to the benefit of both parties by each offering specialisation that the other doesn’t offer! Both win, as of course do their clients who receive the very best possible advice! The days of feeling threatened by another adviser to the expense of missed opportunities have been replaced by trust in each other to mutually develop profitable futures for all!

Of course the more traditional partnerships with business introducers such as accountancy firms, solicitors continue to abound with great success by many advisers.

 Business Proposition Development

One of the main reason that I set up StepChange was to help advisers to develop a bespoke business proposition and then to help them reach clients in a structured and creative way. If I had a Euro for every time I was told “but brokers don’t invest in their businesses” I’d be a wealthy man! Thankfully this most definitely has not been my experience. There are numerous different ways that progressive financial advisers are partnering with external service providers to help bring their business forwards.

As I mentioned above, advisers are working with specialists such as myself in developing their business strategy, addressing sales and distribution challenges and of course marketing. Often, it’s to take a fresh, new look at their overall business proposition, sometimes to address a particular commercial or marketing challenge. Advisers can’t be skilled in every single area, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to call in the experts! Certainly I have experienced ambitious financial advisers willing to invest in order to improve their commercial propositions.

Another example of partnerships at work, is where financial advisers are developing a truly unique client proposition by working with experts in developing a bespoke investment proposition. This is enabling them to communicate a well-developed and unique proposition to clients and helping them to stand apart from other advisers. It helps them to communicate their independence and still enables them to access the best funds available in the market. The expertise of their investment partners also adds a deeper level of credibility to their propositions.

Yes there’s a cost in each of these partnerships. However the benefits of more clients being reached, with a bespoke proposition, and then being effectively communicated with to enable deeper relationships far outweigh these costs.

 Business Efficiency

The final area is where some advisers are investing in partnerships to make their businesses more “fit for purpose”. This is demonstrated in areas such as compliance support, technology support, customer service and staff training. Again, there are a vast range of external partners with deep knowledge of our market available to financial advisers.

Yes, times are tough and income is very hard-earned by financial advisers today. However I’m seeing a fine cohort of ambitious financial advisers out there who are looking at a brighter future by investing in external expertise to maximise the potential of their businesses. They are seeing short-term costs being negated by both short and long term benefits that I think will help them to be the winners of the future.

 1. Be Clear on your Objectives

Why are you sending out the newsletter? Unless you’re very clear about this, it’s unlikely to have the desired effect. Often newsletters are used as a tool to reconnect with existing clients – a good reason for doing them! If this is the case, don’t oversell. Focus on the reader and what will engage their interest. Are they worried about protecting against a life event or are they concerned about how they will fund their later years? Focus on these types of needs, the approach that you take to helping clients plan to deal with these events and the benefits of your approach. Only after this stage do you talk about your product as the solution to addressing the need.

Too many newsletters talk only about products. This won’t be of interest unless the reader can make the jump themselves to the need that the product provides a solution for.

 2. Make sure you’ve enough Content and are Committed

Hands up how many of you have had plans to send out 3 or 4 newsletters a year and ended up sending out just a single edition a year……or a single edition ever? This is a very frequent occurrence and usually is down to 2 factors.

Often it is because there is great enthusiasm to produce the first edition and this energy then wanes after the effort of producing the first one. Don’t start with newsletters unless you (or someone for you) is going to put the effort into producing the future editions.

The other factor is that all the good ideas go into the first edition and you end up stuck for good content for future editions. The way to avoid this is to plan at least 75% of the content for the first 4 editions before you start at all. This will help you avoid “writer’s block” with future editions.

3. Have a time sensitive article

It’s a good idea to have an article that is based on very current analysis or relates to a current issue. This will show the timeliness of your newsletter and usually will be of interest. The challenge that this creates is that once this article is written, you’ve got to quickly swing into production and also to get the newsletter in front of the reader quickly.

If you’re not going to be able to turn the newsletter around quickly or indeed want to use the newsletter over a long period of time, leave out the time sensitive article.

 4. Have a Call to Action

Make every effort to get the reader to engage in some way with you. Obviously encourage them to ring or email you as a follow-up. Find a way to encourage them to visit your website – maybe there’s more detail on one or a number of the articles on your website? Ask them to send in their email address to allow you send them more, relevant information by email. Maybe consider a competition? Use the newsletter to start an ongoing engagement.

 5. Use all Distribution Channels

Many financial advisers will post out their newsletters as they don’t want to exclude clients for whom they don’t have email addresses. However also post the newsletter on your website. When you’ve done this, send an update to your LinkedIn connections, pointing them to your website. If you use Twitter, tweet the link too. Finally, email all your clients too, encouraging them to read it. Online distribution costs nothing so use all these channels!

Newsletters take effort. If you’re willing to commit and produce excellent content, they can be very effective. If they under-deliver in terms of frequency of issue or indeed quality, they will turn your client off and should be avoided. It’s up to you which camp you’re in!

1. Build the Foundations

All good plans are built on a foundation of solid research. This is particularly true in relation to the marketing plan of a financial advice business.  First of all, you’ve got to understand the environment that you’re operating in and the impacts that this external world has on your business. There are external factors out there over which you’ve no control that could decide the fate of your business in the future. You then need to get clear on what makes you different from other advisers by taking a hard look internally at your own business. Finally you need to get clear on who are the customers you want to reach through your marketing plan.

2. Develop your Marketing Positioning

This is all about identifying how you’re going to stand out from the crowd, that is from other financial advisers. It’s no accident that the more effort you’ve put into the research and the more thinking you’ve done at stage one, the easier this piece becomes. In fact if your research phase is very strong, your market positioning will often just fall out in front of you! It becomes very obvious how you’ll differentiate yourself. This is really important as this sets the theme and the backdrop for the marketing plan and will really guide you as you move towards delivery of the plan.

3. Get Crystal Clear on your Objectives

While all 5 points are really important, this is the most critical of the lot. Are you trying to grow the brand of your business, are you trying to get new customers? Or is it all about hanging on to and developing your existing customer base? Is it about developing partnerships? Until you get absolutely clear on what your objectives are, you’re really just throwing whatever at the wall….. The answer is usually not “all of the above” as this will result in a huge range of unnecessary activities at significant cost. You need to focus and make hard choices that are deliverable. Once you get clear on your objectives, now (and only now) can you identify which are the right marketing activities for you to carry out.

In my business in which I help advisers with their planning and their marketing activities, I see a lot of wasted effort and money, and also some poor results. In 99% of cases, it’s down to a lack of focus on the above 3 areas or a financial adviser not having the skills to complete this work themselves. Sometimes it’s right to call in some expert help!

4. Make sure you’ve the Capacity to Deliver

A plan is not just a wish list of all the things you’d like to do. A plan needs to be achievable and to make a marketing plan achievable; first of all, it needs to be written down. The plan then needs to clearly identify how much money it will take to deliver and either who in your organisation will deliver it or how much it will cost to have the activities delivered externally. If need be, you then make choices to fit your budget. Now you have activities that you’re confident can be delivered.

Then put dates and measures against each activity too. Yes, I agree it can be difficult to link every marketing activity directly to sales – how do you know how much of your sales came from the monthly column you write in your local newspaper? However every single marketing activity is measureable in some form or another so a target should be set for each activity.

5. Make sure the plan is Reviewable. And then Review it!

A marketing plan does not have to be a 20 page document that will sit in a drawer and be forgotten forever! In fact, I’m a huge fan of marketing plans that can fit on 1 page or 2 pages at a real stretch. These plans can be reviewed in 10 minutes at a staff meeting, or indeed can be just taken out by you and reviewed. If there are clear dates for delivery and names of people responsible for delivery, it becomes obvious where and why your plan might be falling behind.

Then with the measures that you used for your targets, you can see if the activities delivered as expected. This is invaluable in helping you decide whether to repeat these activities in the future.

I hope you found this article useful. A well-developed marketing plan will save you money, increase the chances of success of your marketing activities and will help to build your business through connecting better with potential and existing customers. I’d love the opportunity to help you!