23 years ago, when I stopped practicing law after a prolonged illness and started working in financial services at First Investors, I was excited to be learning the differences between how I had marketed my six-figure law practice, and how Financial Representatives were marketing themselves.

My first discovery was that the reps in this company weren’t doing seminars. There was only one rep in the entire salesforce doing them—and there was just one approved seminar. Over the next two years, our team developed 8 new seminars, had them approved and made them available to all reps. This was a game-changer for them.

Another thing I discovered was that very few of the reps had a target market. This was true even for the veteran reps. A typical week for them might be sitting in school cafeteria to talk with teachers about their 403(b) program, attending a BNI breakfast, dropping in on local businesses, manning a table at a Home Show, calling their ‘warm market’, using a referral sheet to ask for referrals, and making cold phone calls.

It was painful to watch reps who couldn’t hack all that struggle and leave.

But I noticed that the reps at the very top, the Chairman’s Council, were not marketing themselves in this way. They were targeting niches and building relationships, just as I did as an attorney.

Some were 403(b) specialists. One of these had narrowed his niche to focus on university professors. Some focused on “Middle America,” choosing how they dressed and what car they drove to appeal to their client base. One was focused entirely on the coaching staff of the Miami Dolphins.

It became clear to me that top advisors generally specialized, and cultivated relationships with clients, while the rest kept doing what they had been taught.

Over the next 17 years, as reps became advisors, and I transitioned from sales training to coaching and consulting, I spent thousands of hours studying two things:

What made top advisors different, and

What marketing gets advisors the best results.

A phenomenon I discovered was that once advisors got past the early growth years—somewhere above the $100,000 gross revenue mark, they would often plateau, ending up with very little growth year-to-year.

If they’re not satisfied with that, they start buying program from industry “gurus”, wasting thousands of dollars on shiny new systems and strategies that don’t work for them.

What they often fail to understand is that they don’t need new systems or strategies, they need to tune up what they’ve been doing: get targeted, build better relationships, and maximize strategies that are already working for them.

My work over the past decade has been to help advisors think, act, and market like top advisors, including how to manage a growing business and put systems in place to make their lives much easier.

But a critical part of this work is the marketing piece, so I created a separate program, the 90-Day Marketing Tune-up.

If you’ve passed the $100,000 mark and are having difficulty growing your business to the mid-six figures and beyond, let’s chat about whether this program makes sense for you. Use the link below and we’ll set up a short conversation.