Five Little Things For Your Monday: June 29, 2020

The first day of the week. While you’re making your to-do lists for the upcoming week, remember to take time to slow down. Our company recently gave all employees the opportunity to take a half-day for recuperation and recharge our minds. It gave many of us the chance to recuperate and recharge from the plethora of stressors presented by the recent events in our country. I can personally say, every employee was bettered by the executive decision to give each of us some extra time for ourselves. We formally recommend you do the same! But before you do, sit back, grab your coffee and read this week’s five little things we’ve put together just for you.

1. The Advisor Characteristics That Build Loyalty via Iris

Your relationship with clients is an important part of strengthening your advisory business. What’s the point of building up new clients if you don’t put time into building relationships with your current ones? This article dives into a recent study by Spectrem, an advisor research company,  which analyzes the different characteristics that clients value in their relationship with advisors. As shown in the graphic, the top characteristics surveyed were degrees to which competent personnel, track records without problems, absence of errors and genuine interest in client’s needs plays a role in how much loyalty clients feel for their advisor.

2. The Many Niches of Women — Heather Ettinger on the Becoming Referable Podcast  via  The Client Driven Practice

It’s clear to most advisors that the industry calls for specialized practices. It’s no longer enough to simply call yourself a financial advisor. If you’re trying to turn anyone into a client, you’ll turn no one into a client. You need a more finite, specialized niche to target. So, we’ve seen a higher rate of advisories for retired business owners, Military service-members, medical professionals and… women? This podcast addresses the so-called niche of women. 

It begins by pointing out the fact that a woman is not a niche market, seeing as there are female retired business owners, female military service-members, etc. Essentially, there are females all across the board in different professions and stages of life. Simply targeting your advisory firm towards women is no target at all. This podcast addresses how to support and understand women’s wealth needs, with separate segments about how the financial industry doesn’t ‘hear’ women and how to support the men in women’s lives.

3. Five Advanced Techniques for Using Google Like a Pro via Cision

Here are some helpful tips for using Google. I know what you may be thinking, “It’s not that hard, Laurel, you just type in what you want to find, then hit go!” Well, I have news for you. If you think you’re already using Google in the best way possible, there are ways to even further expedite your searching process. This article helpfully highlights some advanced Googling techniques such as:

1. Narrowing down your search to a specific domain
2. Searching only academic or government sources
3. Employing query string shorthand
4. Using Google News to find results from news outlets and sites
5. Using reverse image search to identify the source of a photo

 

Check out the full explanations to seriously cut down your Googling time and make your searching more efficient.

4. Five Advisor Sites with Great Visual Content via Advisor Perspectives

As a company with a thriving website design component, we strongly believe in the power of visuals. Thankfully, we have statistics to back up that passion. People process visual content 60,000 times faster than text. In this recent Advisor Perspectives article, five websites made by financial advisors are showcased, to represent the difference that thoughtful visuals can make in a website’s effect on prospective clients. 

For example, helpful visuals can be shown to symbolize different clients you cater to, to show visual aids for strategy and even videos to introduce yourself to clients. Including imagery has given these five websites a leg up, you won’t regret checking them out!

5. 10 Catastrophic Ways Financial Advisors Sabotage Their Own Success via The Advisor Coach

Self-sabotage is no joke. The accidental occurrence of creating problems and behaviors that interfere with your own success as an advisor happens regularly. It doesn’t have to be a scandalous or dramatic downfall; self-sabotage can occur in miniscule, difficult-to-detect ways. Here are 10 ways advisors may be self-sabotaging:

1. They set their goals too low
2. They associate with low achievers
3. They quit too soon
4. They don’t focus on productivity
5. They don’t develop boundaries
6. They try to please everyone
7. They act impulsively
8. They don’t invest in themselves
9. They drown themselves in self-pity
10. They get stuck on the prospecting treadmill

Read into these different ways to find where you may fit into one or two of these categories. It’s not too late to nix these habits!