Tips for financial advisors: What it takes to be a winner

We recently asked two award-winning advisors to share some of the steps they took on their way to the top. They share their tips for financial advisors interested in joining the ranks of the winners.

The value of belonging to a study group

The first advisor we spoke with was Kathleen Owings, principal and financial advisor of Westbilt Financial Group, and a recipient of Advisor Today’s Four Under Award. She also made the list of the Women in Insurance and Financial Services’ 2022 Circle of Excellence Qualifiers.
For Owings, participating in a study group was a major contributor to her success. She has been a part of a study group for several years now, she said, and “it has been one of the best things I could have done for my personal growth and development in this business.”

“Our group is unique as we are all female financial advisors and business owners,” she added. “I look forward to our calls every month. I know I can bring a problem or question to the group and I always receive honest feedback and helpful advice. Honestly, I do not know where I would be without my study group. They have helped my business grow and we have developed lifelong friendships along the way.”

A recipe for growth and success

For Brian Haney, NAIFA board member, a recipient of Advisor Today’s Four Under Forty Award, and a NAIFA YAT Leader of the Year, there are a few key critical elements for achieving early growth and success.

The first and perhaps the most important tip for financial advisors is to strategically define the niche markets they want to work in, said Haney, founder, CEO of The Haney Company.

“I learned quickly two simple truths: One, that I was not a good fit professionally for every opportunity out there, and two, not every opportunity out there was a worthwhile fit for me either. If I wanted to make the magic happen, I needed to hone my marketing efforts on finding those ideal clients, and reducing the numbers of “other” opportunities that really were not a good fit.

“How does properly defining your niche accomplish this?” Haney asked. Simple, he responded. “It helps you create a substantive profile for the best clients you want to work with, and that profile becomes the channel through which the majority of business-development efforts go through. I went from “spray and pray” to laser-focused targeting and it had an immediate impact on my growth.”

Tip for financial advisors: Avoid being ‘salesy’

The second tip for financial advisors is to develop a superior marketing hook and approach (my process), he said. This involved developing and refining a sales methodology that was “not salesy.”

Haney said that he had a minor in psychology coming out of college and spent a significant amount of time early in his career “being trained by some of the best sales managers, learning a ton about body language and how people think, mastered techniques such as Sandler and several other behavioral economics-based approaches, and was rabid in my pursuit of perfecting my process.”

In the end, he said, “I learned how to draw opportunities in through attraction marketing, develop genuine connections not built around a traditional sales process, and most importantly, find out early if it was going to be a good fit or not, so that I could move on once it seemed obvious it wasn’t a match.”

Haney said that he got extremely comfortable with saying no, and with helping potential clients understand who he was as a professional and how he liked to work with his clients so they could see “if that kind of synergized with what they would be looking for.”

“When you combine a fully developed niche that is more than just a basic demographics profile, but gets into personality, likes and dislikes, involves the digital dimension of your ideal client type WITH a prolific sales process concentrated on attracting these ideal clients, and developing a genuine connection based on a real synergy between what they are looking for and how you work, then, that’s when the magic can happen!,” he said.

 

Ayo Mseka has more than 30 years of experience reporting on the financial services industry. She formerly served as editor-in-chief of NAIFA’s Advisor Today magazine. Contact her at [email protected]. 

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