Financial advisers who emphasise services and skills have missed the point and are unlikely to convince new clients of the need for advice, according to a personal branding expert.
Speaking at a recent XY Advisers event, Dent Co-Founder and Managing Director Glen Carlson said the skills, talents and expertise of financial advisers were commonplace and widely available and advisers should focus on what made them credible and unique within the advice sector.
“If you think this is still about product or about services then you have missed the point, which is that your role is about getting clients to where they want to be,” Carlson said.
“The language of financial advice is not your intellectual property anymore but what is yours is the ideas in your head that resonate with clients and works for them.”
He said advisers struggled to reach the 80% of consumers who were unaware of their services or ability to help them and felt it was not the job of advisers to educate consumers to motivate them to seek advice.
“People buy things to solve a problem and there are many people unaware of their needs so they are unmotivated to act even though they have the same problems that advisers address. They need education to be motivated, which is not the role of advice, particularly when advisers are paid for services and not education,” Carlson said.
“If you think this is still about product or about services then you have missed the point…”
“Advisers do have the intellectual property in their head to move people but it stays in their head and it takes too long to meet and service more people. If they could lift the level of people with access to that information, it would lead to greater motivation and more consumers approaching advisers.”
To this end, he stated that advisers needed to see their knowledge and ability to create client solutions as an asset that created value by making people aware of advice even without the presence of the adviser.
He said advisers needed to package their intellectual property and place it in markets with unadvised clients to begin moving them towards an awareness of financial advice.
“This style of personal branding and marketing takes people on a journey to what they want to get done and if people have moved with you into the lightbulb moment and you have the services and skills they need they will continue with you trust you and the competition becomes irrelevant to them,” Carlson said.
He also stated this was a better approach to building a business than targeting the 20% of people who already received advice because they were already being targeted by other advisers as well.
“Your competitors are also targeting this part of the market because they also believe it is easier to secure new clients but is actually harder because you have to compete for interest which impacts profits. When you target people unaware of advice you can ignore that competition,” Carlson said.
When a person talks about credibility, they should have the background to back it up.
Unfortunately, there are some people masquerading as experts because they are good as speakers from stage. They could probably sell ice to Eskimos because their pitch is so convincing that they leave people believing everything they tell them.
Not all people who stand up on stage are to be trusted because they are just salespeople with the gift of the gab and in the old days they were called “snake oil salesmen.” Today they are still well dressed, well presented and can still provide a convincing story.
But behind every pitch and person, there should be unquestionable ethics and morals.
Then again, I guess people even paid to see and buy the package from Jordan Belfort better know as the Wolf Of Wall Street.
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