Picking up the pace
It’s been more than a month since our 99-Day final sprint seminar and we hope that you have been well and been applying the lessons you have learnt from the summit to boost your performance in the last lap of 2020. During the summit we covered various topics ranging from how to harness social media and tech adoption and we hope that you found the sharings by our speakers valuable!
During the Circuit Breaker period, there were several restrictions in place, from not being able to have in-person client meetings to events being cancelled. These things may have caused your career to take a backseat. Now that the Covid-19 situation is improving, restrictions are being lifted and the pace of things are slowly picking up, you may find yourself struggling in overcoming the inertia in getting back to where you used to be during pre-covid times, or exceeding how you used to perform in the past. You may be searching for more tips on how to boost your performance, and you are in luck. Here are some tips that can help you boost your productivity and outdo your competition.
Don’t blend in with the crowd
By now, you would have already known that there are about 20000 advisors in the finance industry and thousands more in the region. This means that your potential clients have thousands of professionals to choose from when they want to engage a financial advisor. So before your clients engage your services, they are likely to wonder, “Why should i choose this guy?”, “What makes this guy so special?”, “What value can he give me that someone else can’t?”. They are right to be asking those questions and you need to be asking yourself the same questions.
You may have been doing everything right so far, you have a passion for the industry and have all the right certifications. But you are still struggling to do better than your competition. You find yourself losing high quality leads to your competition. You are struggling to stand out from the rest. This is where the importance of positioning comes in. Positioning refers to the strategies you use to differentiate yourself from the competition and the strategies you undertake in order to sit in the mind of your clients. Before you start selling to your clients, you need to know how to sell yourself.
In order to win over your clients, you need to have a solid personal image. One way to achieve this would be to understand your prospective clients inside out and connect. Doing this requires that you understand the motivations of your clients. When you are able to understand their needs and investment goals, you will be able to create a long-term partnership with your clients.
Your role as a financial advisor is extremely impactful. You bear responsibility for the financial success of your clients by assuring them that they will reap the benefits of their investments, which in turns allows them to live life to the max and without any worry about their finances. allowing them to live their lives without worry, and assuring them that their investments. When you position yourself as someone trustworthy and knowledgeable about their industry, you become someone your clients can easily turn to and confide in. Often, when people search for a financial advisor, not only are they looking for someone who they can trust their finances with, but also someone who can give them value and impart them with advice that no one else can, someone who is easy to work with and most importantly someone who has a good grasp of their values.
Did you know that one of the best ways for you to bolster your credibility and reach out to potential clients IS FREE? That’s right, social media is an excellent platform to showcase your expertise and brand yourself as an opinion leader in the industry while forming a personal connection with your clients.
Can you recall Eric Feng sharing with you strategies on how to harness the four superpowers of social media during the 99-Day Final Sprint Summit? Covid-19 might have disrupted roadshows and networking events, but don’t fret, social media is here to take over those functions. If you attended the webinar last month, you would know that the four superpowers are:
- Deepen relationships with your existing customers to get repeated business
- Build your personal brand to get discovered by new customers
- Generate quality customers without running ads to enjoy predictable sales
- Attract partnerships and collaboration to get access to new markets
By using these tips, and coming up with relevant, informational and engaging content with your followers, you will be able showcase your personality and touch base with your potential clients on a deeper level. You should also be putting up content consistently in order to build a loyal customer base. If you go weeks or even months without posting anything, people are going to forget about you and you wouldn’t be the first choice that comes to a client’s mind when they need an advisor.
Always stay curious
While positioning is an excellent strategy, you cannot stop there. Another crucial strategy you have to adopt is life-long learning. You may feel that learning is a long-term process and you are unlikely to become an expert on a subject overnight. This leaves you feeling unmotivated to expand your knowledge and you navigate your career with what you have always known. Well you are absolutely right! Learning is indeed a long-term process, which is exactly why you have to start now.
“The only thing that is constant is change”
A cliche quote, yes, but it wouldn’t be repeated so often if it wasn’t true. Nothing stays the same. Just like how you would want your doctors to be aware of the latest advances in medicine, and your business to be using the newest technologies ,you clients expect you to be in the know of what is happening in the industry as well. When you continuously find ways to remain knowledgeable about the industry, it highlights to clients that you have their best interests at heart. So besides positioning, you need to update yourself, always learning and keeping up with evolving industry trends. Even if you are already at the top of your game and feel that you have reached your maximum potential in financial advisory, there is still room to improve. Additionally, learning new things will definitely give you a confidence boost! When you pick up new skills or learn about trends, you feel that you are better equipped to handle any challenges that come at you.
Tests, after tests, after tests. Sounds familiar? Well, learning today doesn’t have to be a drag like it was during your schooling days. Due to the pandemic, many learning resources have shifted online and you can learn at your own pace and time, in the comfort of your home. Knowledge has now become easily accessible, and if you don’t capitalize on this opportunity, you are going to lose out to your peers sooner or later. As financial advisors, some resources you can tap into are networking events,workshops and webinars where you will be able to tap into fresh perspectives from your fellow advisors.
Seize the opportunity
By now, I hope I have managed to convince you on why you need to weave in positioning and lifelong learning to your career game plan and you that I have got you gearing to seize every opportunity to improve yourself. As mentioned previously, webinars are one way you can improve your knowledge. As such, we are currently organising a summit that is sure to give a head start to your career in 2021!
The insurance advisory and financial planning industry in Asia is undergoing a systemic shift from conventional single need product selling to holistic client-centric wealth advisory. With a fast-growing population of the educated middle class across Asia, consumers are leaning more towards getting information and transactions online. The recent Covid-19 Pandemic has significantly accelerated tech adoption across South East Asia. To stay above the regulatory pressures and ahead of fintech disruptions, there is an ever-pressing need to adapt and transform our thinking, our advisory skills, our knowledge on finance and wealth, our workflow and client experience.
At our next major event, The Wealth Strategist Summit – A Flying Start to 2021, we will be bring you experts from around the world who are the top of their game to reveal to you exclusive strategies on online marketing and offline sales techniques, exponential business growth and hacking strategies to transform the average financial sales professionals and agency leaders to be better advisors, investors and influencers. If being an all-rounded financial advisor is your ultimate goal, you would want to be at the summit.
Our tentative keynotes and panel sharing topics will encompass the 4 key segments:
Here are the details for the event:
Date: 5-6 Jan 2021
Time: 0900 – 1800
Sign up here: https://www.pppacademygroup.com/wss-2021/
We’ll see you there!