Dear Advisor
If you have been a student of my systems for any length of time, you are no doubt familiar with the 90 Day Dazzle. It was voted Client Marketing Campaign of the Year by the readers of HorsesMouth. It has gained praise in Bank Investment Consultant, Registered Rep, Financial Planning, On Wall Street and is often voted the “Best of the Best” at trade shows and due diligence events.
It has been the “Go-To” System for anyone that desires to build a referral only practice. Change firms (and actually bring their clients with them), or put a their referral marketing on auto-pilot, so they can literally have their new client acquisition goals met from referrals only.
Every one of my Elite Coaching Clients begins their coaching program with this system.
It is the fastest way I know to put gobs of revenue on an advisor’s books, and reset the way that their clients look at them forever.
In 1998, I was the second in command of the 5th biggest complex in our firm. We had just merged with another firm and I had been the complex manager of another office. I was pissed that I had gotten knocked down but that was the politics of the day. I was responsible for driving revenue and through April of that year, we were number one!
I gained success through that some described as a weird combination of Drill Sargent and Cheerleader. The results got senior management’s attention, I felt like the strong armed left hander in the bull pen, and I had just gotten the call to warm up.
But a funny thing happened on my way to the pitcher’s mound.
All the advisors that I was in charge of started managing my expectations. “Hey you know it will slow over the summer” was the mantra of the season. In their defense we were in a very seasonal region of the country. Every year, depending on the weather, the snowbirds return to west central Florida, with the regularity of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano. Sometime, around Easter the flight path is back north, that combined with many of the more wealthy Florida residents taking refuge from the heat, and humidity of summer, makes for scarce prospecting for some advisors.
Many people did leave the area over summer (in fact, in some cities population dropped 90%) but others were still around, we wanted the revenue stream to continue.
I had been studying two unrelated fields, direct mail marketing and stage hypnosis. Although, these are seemingly unrelated subjects they share a few key concepts, two in particular caught my attention.
This same principal is at work in direct marketing. Send out many messages and it is like having hundreds of polite sales assistants calling your clients, running ideas past them and finding the ones that raise their hands. As they do of course – an adventure is afoot.
That year, you might recall, the markets were booming. The tech wreck was nearly two years away, a diversified portfolio had Intel and Microsoft (maybe even a little Cisco) just to round things out. This was a time that performance was shooting the lights out, which brings us to or second key concepts
Social Proof
Social Proof what you are hearing if your child says some version of…but why can’t I go sky diving? Jimmy Harper’s mom and dad are going to let him go! The same psychology is at work, when you see two or three people looking up at the sky and you think, what are they looking at?
Social Proof is at play every time you get a referral!
Your good client loves you, tells their friends they should love you too…suddenly the sales process gets a whole lot shorter. If they hear it from two of their friends, there is no sales process, clients just show up and show you their portfolio and ask, “Can you help me?”
You might not have noticed already, there are two times that referrals pick up naturally. In times of great prosperity, and in turbulent times. It makes sense if you think about it, these are the two times that our most contagious fears are at work: fear and greed.
So in the summer of 1998, we rode a big wave, got lots of business from clients via a campaign called the Annual Review campaign, or as my coaching clients call it “Shaking the Money Tree”.
The advisors in my office continued to roll right through summer, July was the best July for that office, August was even bigger (that was the second month of the campaign and momentum was really rolling), that month was not only the best August, but it was the best month the office had ever had. All the previous office records were Decembers and Januarys.
Then something really neat thing started to happen.
Clients were giving us referrals, more than normal (nice side effect of taking the relationship beyond the next level normally). In our sales meetings, some of us started asking some very important questions. Questions in fact, that you should be asking yourself:
This was a great set of questions to be asking, and in fact, led the the birth of the 90 Day Dazzle(TM) (actually back then it was the 30 Day Dazzle). One of the things that I had been preaching for a long time, and still use as a mantra today, this is the good things that happen to you in your life and your career happen to you by one of two ways:
Accidentally, or On Purpose
This had been been a saying for so long, that the best advisors in that office (and we were fortunate to have many of the top dogs in the firm), had so completely internalized these ideas they knew on almost a cellular level…
If you want good things to happen to you consistently, you better design it into the system.
So, we began to reverse-engineer making ourselves as advisors, more referable.
We discovered over a period of several years a mountain of strategies, ideas and tactics, to increase the likelihood that we would receive referrals from clients. This early R and D team, would ceaselessly tinker and test every step of the process and look for something that would give us an even greater likelihood that when we asked for a referral the answer would not only be yes…it would be an enthusiastic yes.
Over time we discovered nuggets of gold, oftentimes digging through a mountain of coal to discover that each tilted the likelihood a little bit more toward yes. Some of these nuggets were pretty big, others not so much. But through trial and error, we cracked the code to make the likelihood nearly 1 out of 2, in the first 90 Days.
We learned:
MY FRUSTRATION!
I love this campaign because it’s so simple and it solves one of the biggest problems advisors have with the referral process. My frustration has always been getting people to implement it.
People tend to fall into four different categories:
- The implementers – there is a group of advisors who seize the brilliance of this plan, they like it, they jump on and they get phenomenal results.
- We have other people who start to implement it and implement the first part of it pretty well. They get the first 30 days, which is before we ask for the referral, but they really don’t execute on the call strategy. They are still getting some referrals because of the increase of the level of services you are providing will still exceed your client’s expectations. And when we do that people do become compelled to talk about you.
- We have the non-implementers. Those are people who invest in the system and we shop it out to them, they get it, so they have good intentions. But they never get it out of the box!
But here is the thing the 7% of those who do return it; about 80% of those don’t ever open the box. The cellophane is still on the books, its still on the audio package. They have never even broken the seal.
4. The excuse group! These are people who may sit in a room and listen to a presentation on the dazzle, like it and come walking up to me at the end and say, “what was really great! That was such a good presentation, I wish I could do it but…….” They would then have an excuse;
- I am too young
- I am too old
- I am too late in the business
- Some excuse
That part has always puzzled me.
We always follow up with people to find out what type of results they are getting and people who are getting good results, they love to report it. They love to brag! And they would get back to us and the numbers are really good.
Last time we measured it, it was about 883,000 a month in new business that was coming from either referrals from new clients or increased amount of money being deposited by those new clients.
I don’t know what sort of fee you get on the average new assets that you bring into your practice. But even if its 1% that is a fairly significant bump per month, to be able to add to your revenue stream.
Some people wouldn’t report back to us and when we first did this in 2005 we would chase them down and try to figure out, “why aren’t we hearing back?” We wanted to hear the numbers so we want to be able to report it. And we would find out those people hadn’t implemented or only partially implemented.
And this would drive me crazy but I have recently cracked that code.
The big difference for these guys was mindset!
The whole reason people don’t get referrals today is that they don’t ask. And the reason they typically don’t ask is:
- They are afraid they are going to get rejected
- They are afraid its going to put stress or strain on the relationship
- They are afraid they may end up looking weak or needy
- They are afraid they haven’t earned the right, they haven’t done a good enough good in the service they are providing that they have justified it in their own mind.
People in platinum coaching never had that problem. And one of my coaching clients said to me not too long ago, “you do a lot of mindset coaching, in fact about 70% of what you teach is mindset.”
That was the missing ingredient!
Introducing the 90 Day Dazzle Master Class Academy
This is your change to be on board for the realize of 90 Day Dazzle 2.0. I realize to make this product much, much better I needed to be able to ride along side you and help you implement this process properly.
And I want to be able to do that because implementing this process properly is a practice changing experience. The benefits of doing it properly is:
- You earn the clients trust faster. You have a strategy to get them thinking of you not just as an advisor, one of many. But they think of you as an indispensible resource. You get a larger share of wallet more quickly.
- You get more of the right clients more easily.
- And when you really master the mindset you even close more business faster
In the master class academy this is a 90-day coaching program to help you implement the 90-day dazzle. We are going to meet by phone and by webinar every other week for 90 days so you can:
- Implement the process perfectly.
- Increase your referral quotation
- Master the mindset
- If you have any roadblocks along the way I will be able to help answer that for you.
Implementing this process is easy when you do it right and with the advent of the 90-Day Dazzle 2.0 Masterclass academy it has never been easier or quicker to implement this strategy into your practice.
The new year is the perfect time to be doing it, clients are already mentally trained that it’s a good idea to sit down and do some financial planned and we use a marketing campaign called the ‘Shaking the Money Tree’ campaign. It’s an annual review campaign to loop this into your clients who maybe haven’t exactly been getting dazzling service.
It’s a way you can implement it, get them involved as well so you have more and more people going through the 90 Day Dazzle process. And you are getting referrals right away.
I have a campaign to go back to your existing clients and be able to get referrals from them now.
You will be able to easily and effortlessly get referrals from virtually everyone that is in your book.
You will learn how to structure the referral call in a 3-step process that uses a little bit of a covert mind trick on your client that makes them significantly more likely to give you a referral when you ask it. But you have to do it in the 3-step process and we will teach you specifically what to do.
You will also learn a client appreciation event that when you execute the strategy properly will have approximately 75% of the people who are showing up giving you a referral. It’s masterful!
You will also learn a way, outside centers of influence, professionals, accountants, attorneys on how to approach them in such a way that they are significantly more likely to enter into a referral process with you.
This program is going to get your year in gear, get you off to the fastest start you have ever had and virtually guarantee that 2012 will be your best year yet!
The first thing you will receive when you click the link below to invest is our 90-Day Dazzle 1.0 program. We are completely revamping it but that program does have it in many of the strategies, tools and tactics that are going to be available product version 2.0
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You will get access to a private 90-Day Dazzle Forum
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You will get all 8 classes in the Master class academy which will be recorded and will be available to add as a part of your permanent library.
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You will get SURF and First Meeting Mastery
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And when the MasterClass is complete you will get a copy of the 90-Day Dazzle 2.0 product as well.
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But by joining the class today you get me riding along as you copilot for the first 90 days of the New Year. You get all of your questions answered and tons and tons of bonuses.
So click on the button, get your year off to a great start!