4 Scientific Success Factors for Raising $25 Million a Year in AUM Through Seminar Marketing

Rather then build up to some great, profound, life altering secret on seminar marketing – let me just tell you what it is:

It’s not a secret, it’s a science.

Truth is, so many mail houses, insurance marketing organizations and product wholesalers WANT, no NEED you to believe there’s something THEY know that you don’t. Something that will keep you feeding their children and buying them Porsche’s and winning them vacations.

You Don’t Need Them, They Need You.

Once you see the science behind winning seminars, these guys and gals that make a living off from your hard work and marketing dollars all seem to be full of the same hot air. Today may be a defining day in your career; so please pay attention.

There are FOUR primary areas of science involved with creating massive return on investment when doing seminars as a financial advisor:

1. The Right Market
2. The Right Marketing Message
3. The Right Market to Message to Service Match
4. The Right Support

I’ll briefly go into each of these areas in detail; but first let me prove why you should listen to me.

More and more financial advisor’s hear my story each day, but briefly let me share it right here, right now.

I began this practicing in the year 2000 with one of the largest wirehouse brokerage firms in the United States (good timing, I know).

I was 20 years old, hadn’t a relative within 50 miles of my office, had no money in the family and knew virtually nobody in town. I started my own firm 2 years later after modest success cold-calling and offering the wirehouses crappy products.

My clients deserved better so massive action was in order.

I began to study marketing (Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, Larry Klein, Michael Masterson and many more). Over the next 3 years I made my first million dollars and by age 26 my second.

I manage a rather monstrous Registered Investment Advisor firm for 101 very affluent clients. In the year 2008 my recurring revenue alone will be around $1 Million with extraordinary profit margins.

None of these clients came from elevator speeches, cold calls, professional introductions or any of the seemingly limitless hokey financial advisor marketing tactics spewed all over the Internet and industry magazines.

If you’re like me, that stuff gives you nausea.

Rather, I’ve spent $250,000 plus (and counting) on perfecting my marketing and business management.

Then in the summer of 2005 my efforts became available to other advisors for the first time via AMS.

So please, understand I’ve done exactly what most advisors want to do.

I’ve built a wildly successful business, with a huge resale value, a great staff that does 90% of the grunt work and live a truly blessed life. For all of this and much more I am very grateful.

OK, now back to the 4 Scientific Success Factors:

1. The Right Market

If you want to have any success building your business via seminars a very natural consideration should be what market to select. This isn’t as simple as the industry conspires it to be.

For example, just about all the marketing material you see is geared toward seniors. While this is a decent generalization, there are many markets that can be successfully penetrated. To name a few: Dentists, CPA’s, Small Business Owners, Insurance Agents and Parents of College Bound Students.

The key, is making sure the target audience is clearly defined, has time for your event, and will value your offer more than anything else they may be able to do the time of your event.

That’s pretty simple, right? So how do you do this effectively?

Well…think about the perfect client.

Not your wholesaler, branch manager, or IMO’s perfect client. The client that you enjoy working with. That’s monetarily rewarding to work with. That values your advice and doesn’t complain about paying a fair value for some honest advice.

That – Is YOUR Market!

To be sure, you need to figure out if it’s a viable market for seminars. That’s were clearly defined part comes into play. Remember: …has time for your event, and will value your offer more than anything else they may be able to do the time of your event…

My market is becoming more and more age neutral. It started out as primarily seniors and is getting younger and younger every day.

I’ve found I love this.

I love working with fascinating people, who love having a good time, enjoy the company of their family, have deep religious values who have comparable financial means to myself.

They happen to all be between the ages of 50 and 80, but hey – not many people my age interest me or have any investment assets.

Your target market has to have similar financial goals and concerns or you’ll never be able to market effectively to them. This is how you should approach your market.

Now you have to get this target market to your seminar…

2. The Right Marketing Message

Once you know who you want as clients, and have confirmed they are reasonable candidates for seminars – you must now figure out how to get them to come to your event. This is a lot harder than it seems.

Many advisors have abandoned seminar marketing forever, shunned it as an absolute waste of money swearing six times til’ Tuesday never to try them again because they couldn’t fill the room. Or worse – they filled the room with all kinds of the wrong people. Ouch.

Screwing this up kills everything and is one of the most difficult tasks to master as a financial advisor, planner, etc.

There are a plethora of reasons for this, but they seem to happen over and over again to countless unsuspecting souls. It’s kind of like that great idea you had, that worked so well you quit doing it.

I hope you know what I’m talking about. It's the financial advisors definition of marketing insanity: Continuing to do the same thing over and over again, somehow expecting different results!

So here’s how to get this right:

A great marketer once told me:

“You have to know what things your prospect secretly desires and what things worry them so much it keeps them up at night. If you know these two things – you can market effectively to your target audience.”

He is 100% right.

3. The Right Market to Message to Service Match

Truth be known – no matter how well you match your message to your market; if your service (or product) stinks or is not appropriate, it won’t work. So you absolutely must have a desirable service your offering.

Here’s a few keys to a desirable service/product:

1. Boutique Proprietary is Best. Big company proprietary scares potential clients away. However, when only YOUR office or YOU as an individual are the only place a particular service is available – now you’ve got leverage. Keep in mind this only works if what you have is good.As an example, let’s say you have a proprietary way of screening mutual funds so that your clients allocation, selection and monitoring of funds is always measurable and client driven. This process could be ‘named’ and now you have a Boutique Proprietary Service.
2. Clients Want Solutions. I hope this is obvious, but if not, clients don’t care about products. They don’t care about riders and ratings and slogans.
   
   What they want are solutions. If you can bundle your proprietary services into being turnkey solutions for your clients deepest desires or guards against their deepest fears: You’ve got a winner.
3. Client LOVE Disclosure. If you have to hide how your paid with tricky one liners or walking in the grey; then you’re destined to never enjoy true advisory success. This is why fee-only RIA’s will absolutely dominate the industry within 10 years.As more fee only financial advisors emerge there will be little reason for sleazy sales forces at monster firms so if you’ve thought about taking the leap and going RIA only – now is the time. You’ll be handsomely rewarded down the road.

If you can determine the services that fit your market and have a powerful marketing message that reaches your audience…you’re well on your way to building a superb financial advisory practice.

There’s just one missing element:

4. The Right Support

Building something from scratch is gratifying but hard work. If you can learn from someone else’s experience, pain, investments and mistakes – it just makes sense to do that instead. Having support allows for faster and more efficient growth.

Many advisors have a hard time raising $2 million in assets under management per year. But we now know many advisors who are raising $25 million or more per year by following these secrets.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes and spent a lot of money to get to this point. With continued investment, knowledge, staff and strategic partners I hope this is not the pinnacle; but rather just another step in my businesses evolution.

Finding the right support for your business is huge. When I hired my first assistant my firm experienced a small step back in profit margin but a huge leap forward in revenue. When I began doing seminars the same thing occurred.

As the firm continued to grow in both staff and marketing knowledge we continually grew, and grew and grew. All advisors will need to go through these same steps if they want to reach big goals.

Advisor Marketing Systems is designed to be one of these very important support pieces in your marketing. Whether it’s direct mail marketing or seminar marketing for financial advisors – we’re pretty good. Almost scary good.