Advice for Financial Advisors

My name is Jason Knell. Many of you know me as the Academic Director here at SeeWhy Financial Learning. What you may not know is that prior to my career as a trainer, I spent several years as a financial advisor with a few major financial institutions. Now, in my experience, and I think many of you may find this as well, the skills required to be a good student can be vastly different from those required to be a successful financial advisor. With this in mind, our students recognize that SeeWhy is there to help when it comes to preparing for exams. But they often ask, “What additional help is available after I’m licensed and pursuing my career goals?”

Well, this week as a treat for our viewers, I’m pleased to introduce special guest Dan Collison, keynote speaker, author, industry expert, and managing partner at Advice2Advisors. We had hoped to have Dan in the studio with us for the video, but due to present circumstances, we decided to do this virtually. We asked Dan and his colleague, Tina, “If you had only a few minutes to offer some advice to kick off 2021, what would it be?” Dan’s advice was to stop asking for referrals. To be candid, this surprised me a little bit. But as always, Dan’s advice is tried and tested. It makes a lot of sense. Check it out.

Stop asking for referrals, ask for introductions.

Tina:
So Dan, a lot of advisors are really surprised to hear you say, to stop asking for referrals. When that’s what they’ve been trained to do. Tell me why you’re telling them to stop asking you for referrals.

Dan Collison:
Yeah, great question. The reality is that I was trained to ask for referrals from day one. Like most financial advisors I was told to ask, “Who do you know that could use my services?”, and I did that and I did it a lot. Sometimes it worked, more often than not it didn’t. I’d ask the question and I get the age old, “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it”, but the moment the appointment was over, they didn’t think about it. So it left them uncomfortable, left me uncomfortable and the research shows it just does exactly that. It makes everybody uncomfortable when you’re asking for a referral to God knows who.

Tina:
Okay. So what do you suggest they do?

Dan Collison:
I met some advisors in Chicago a number of years ago, who brought me into the loop on getting introductions and that’s all they did from a prospecting base. It’s very simple. You ask to be introduced to somebody specific that they know, somebody that fits your ideal client profile. You’re asking to be introduced to the type of people you want to work with and it makes absolute sense that you should be talking to them. So ask for introductions or even to self introduce. “You mentioned your brother that does this and that. I was hoping to introduce myself. What’s the best way to do that? Should I email them? Should I phone them? What do you think?” It’s such a better method. You control it fully. You control who you want. You’re not trying to have your client guess who they should refer to you and you’re doing it into your own ideal client prospect.

Thanks Dan. That sure is some great advice. If you want to learn more about Advice2Advisors, be sure to check out advice2advisors.com.

Hopefully we will be able to welcome Dan and his team into the studio soon so he can share even more of his insight. As always, if you found this content helpful, make sure to smash that Like button and Subscribe so we can keep the content coming.