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Guerrilla Marketing for Financial Advisors

by Grant Hicks and Jay Conrad Levinson

290 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0768; ISBN 1-4120-0399-7; US$34.97, C$39.97, EUR26.00, £18.02

Over forty ways to leave your marketing miseries behind. Through the eyes of two Guerrilla Marketers, this book shows you Guerrilla Marketing ideas to help you make more as a financial advisor than you ever thought possible.

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About the Book Over forty ways to leave your marketing miseries behind. Through the eyes of two Guerrilla Marketers, this book shows you Guerrilla Marketing ideas to help you make more as a financial advisor than you ever thought possible. Albert Einstein once wrote "The significant problems we face today, cannot be solved at the same level of thinking as when we created them." Today's financial advisor must change their thinking and upgrade their marketing not only to survive but stay ahead of the competition. Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the highly successful Guerrilla Marketing series of books has teamed up with Grant W. Hicks, CIM, FCSI , a financial advisor for the last fourteen years to uncover all aspects of marketing for financial advisors including prospecting, client management, referrals and professional image. Look at the most successful advisors today and you will find that they lack systems and strategies to attract top clients and prospects that work. This work is a collection of fourteen years of researching and testing the best ideas for financial advisors. From Jay Conrad Levinson's upcoming "Guerrilla Marketing for The 21st Century," this describes guerrilla marketing: "I'm referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always -- achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money. I'm also referring to humanity which is relatively unchanged since the first book, indeed, since the first human. Guerrilla Marketing started out a single volume and has since acted biblically by being fruitful and multiplying into a library of sixteen books and counting, a CD-ROM, an abundance of video and audiotapes, a print newsletter, an online newsletter, a consulting organization, a valuable website (at www.gmarketing.com), an internationally-syndicated column for newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, and presentations and speaking in enough countries for us to consider forming our own Guerrilla United Nations. Go to any bookstore and you will find hundreds of books on marketing. Try and find a book on marketing for financial advisors, and you will have a difficult search. Now try the internet for websites on marketing ideas for financial advisors. You will find a few websites, but the resources are scarce. This book is the answer to immediate sales and marketing ideas to increase business. Jay's website www.gmarketing.com has all the tools to turn you into a Guerrilla Marketer. Grant's educational website www.financialadvisormarketing.com has links to hundreds of additional resources to help any advisor at any level become more successful. Most advisors today do not have the time to devote to a time consuming or expensive marketing development program. This easy to read book will be an abundance of resources advisors need to dramatically change and grow their business. Guerrilla marketing is needed because it gives small businesses a delightfully unfair advantage: certainty in an uncertain world, economy in a high-priced world, simplicity in a complicated world, marketing awareness in a clueless world. Inside you will find nine chapters to help build your business. The following is a chapter summary that will take the reader through forty business and marketing ideas, principles and examples that have been used successfully. Chapter 1- Build a Better Business and Marketing Plan Chapter 2- Getting New Clients from Outside Sources Chapter 3- Getting New Clients from Internal Marketing Chapter 4- Welcoming New Clients Chapter 5- Wowing Clients Chapter 6- Mastering Service for All Clients Chapter 7- Taking Your Business to the Next Level Chapter 8- Marketing Principles for Financial Advisors Chapter 9- Guerrilla Marketing Tools and MArketing Action Plan Worksheets This is the ultimate time for advisors to become more referable, improve their brand and build their business. Guerilla Marketing For financial Advisors is an action plan. If you want to be a successful advisor in your market and improve your client service levels, then Guerilla Marketing For Financial Advisors is your marketing blueprint. It is time for advisors to take action. Here is the man to transform you into a marketing guerrilla - Jay Conrad Levinson. Jay Conrad Levinson is available as a speaker and consultant. Jay Conrad Levinson Guerrilla Marketing International P.O. Box 1336 Mill Valley, CA 94942 tel/fax (415) 381-8361 (800) 748-6444 www.gmarketing.com In addition to being a Retirement Planning Specialist and author, Grant Hicks is a professional speaker. Grant can be reached at 771 Shorewood Drive, Parksville, British Columbia, Canada V9P 1S1 Tel: (250) 248-2824 or (250) 248-0343 Fax: (250) 248-3837 Email : grant@financialadvisormarketing.com Website: www.financialadvisormarketing.com

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About the Author Grant Hicks is the co-author of the book "GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR FINANCIAL ADVISORS" Secrets For Making Big Profits from your Financial Advisory Business, from Trafford Publishing. Grant has teamed up with Jay Conrad Levinson who is the author of the best-selling marketing series in history, "Guerrilla Marketing," plus 29 other business books. His books have sold 14 million copies worldwide His guerrilla concepts have influenced marketing so much that today his books appear in 39 languages and are required reading in many MBA programs worldwide. Grant's background includes building up a financial planning firm from twenty advisors to over sixty advisors in three years. He personally built up a book of business rapidly from one million to over forty million under management in just over two years. He won the best ideas contest in 2001 for Canadian financial advisors for his innovative marketing ideas and was featured across Canada at the Advisors Forums and in Advisors Edge, Canada's magazine for financial professionals. His ideas have also appeared on Advisor.ca, a Canadian advisors marketing and business building website. Grant speaks to audiences of financial advisors, mutual fund wholesalers and insurance professionals on a regular basis about how to build your business through his marketing ideas. His website www.financialadvisormarketing.com is a virtual search engine for marketing for investment professionals and the financial industry with hundreds of links to the best marketing ideas and speakers in the industry today. He holds the Canadian Investment Manager, (CIM) portfolio management designation from the Canadian Securities Institute and is a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute, the highest mark of professionalism in the Canadian Securities Industry (FCSI). Grant is a long-standing member of the Canadian Association of Financial Planners (C A F P) and The Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (C A I FA, now called Advocis) and the Federation of Independent Deposit Brokers ( FCIDB) . He owns Hicks Financial, a fixed income management company and is also President of Hicks Financial Consulting, a marketing and consulting firm to the financial services industry. He focuses on helping investors increase their income and afford an Island Lifestyle through his Island Lifestyle Program. Grant writes a weekly column on financial topics in his hometown newspaper in Parksville, British Columbia. He is married with two children. Grant played professional hockey in Europe, before starting a career in the financial services industry in 1989. Jay Conrad Levinson is the author of the best-selling marketing series in history, "Guerrilla Marketing," plus 29 other business books. His books have sold 14 million copies worldwide. His guerrilla concepts have influenced marketing so much that today his books appear in 39 languages and are required reading in many MBA programs worldwide. Jay taught guerrilla marketing for ten years at the extension division of the University of California in Berkeley. And he was a practitioner of it in the United States -- as Senior Vice-President at J. Walter Thompson, and in Europe, as Creative Director and Board Member at Leo Burnett Advertising. He has written a monthly column for Entrepreneur Magazine, articles for Inc. Magazine, and online columns published monthly on the Microsoft Website -- in addition to occasional columns in the San Francisco Examiner. He also writes online columns for several Internet websites, including Netscape, America Online, Fortune Small Business and Hewlett-Packard. Jay is the Chairman of Guerrilla Marketing International, a marketing partner of Adobe and Apple. He has served on the Microsoft Small Business Council and the 3Com Small Business Advisory Board. His Guerrilla Marketing is series of books, audiotapes, videotapes, an award-winning CD-ROM, an Internet website, and a breakthrough online marketing advancement called The Guerrilla Marketing Network, a marketing support system for small business, a way for business owners to spend less, get more, and achieve substantial profits. Grant can speak at your next conference or meeting - contact us now to find out how

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Sample Excerpts

Secrets For Making Big Profits From Your Financial Advisory Business

By Jay Conrad Levinson and Grant W. Hicks, CIM, FCSI "Based on the Best-Selling Marketing Series of All-time"

What is Guerrilla Marketing? The first Guerrilla Marketing book was published in l984. Today there are sixteen volumes in 37 languages and well over 1,000,000 copies have been sold worldwide. "I'm referring to the soul and essence of guerrilla marketing which remain as always -- achieving conventional goals, such as profits and joy, with unconventional methods, such as investing energy instead of money" says Jay Conrad Levinson. Inside you will find a wealth of ideas and strategies to achieve success in the investment industry.

Chapter summary
Chapter 1 - Build a Better Business and Marketing Plan
Chapter 2- Getting New Clients from Outside Sources
Chapter 3- Getting New Clients from Internal Marketing
Chapter 4- Introducing New Clients
Chapter 5- Wowing New Clients
Chapter 6- Mastering Service for All Clients
Chapter 7- Taking Your Business to the Next Level
Chapter 8- Marketing Principles for Financial Advisors
Chapter 9- Follow up Plan- Guerrilla Action Plan Worksheets

Guerrilla Marketing For Financial Advisors contains over forty dynamic marketing ideas for Financial Advisors, wholesalers, insurance agents, stockbrokers and their assistants.

Here is a sample of some of the Business Building ideas. Business Plan - Your 10 Year Vision
Build a Marketing Plan Guaranteed to Increase Your Business
Successful Franchise Like Production Systems
A Secret to Rapid Business Growth
Success Secrets for Leveraging Your Time
Learning From The Best
Marketing Team Builders
Finding Your Ideal Client
Secrets of Selecting Marketing Methods
What Sets you Apart From the Rest
Have Everyone Calling You!
Finding Great Partners- Working with Wholesalers - Part I
How to Double your Business by Cloning Your Top Clients
Referral Strategies Part 1- The Getting Married Philosophy
Gathering Millions of New Assets- Finding and Tracking Them
Educating Your Clients
The First Five Minutes -Key Questions to Ask Millionaires
Add Incredible Value- What Sets You Apart
The Best Client Appreciation Ideas
Guerrilla marketing ideas for wholesalers
Guiding Marketing Principles to grow your business today.
Guerrilla Action Plan Worksheets

For more information on his book, speaking, marketing ideas, website, Guerrilla Marketing tools, or just want to talk marketing for financial advisors, you can contact us at: Grant W. Hicks, CIM, FCSI
2A-147 Harrison Avenue, Box 337
Parksville, British Columbia, Canada
V9P 2G5
Tel: 250-248-2824 Fax: 250-248-3837
Email: ghicks@financialadvisormarketing.com

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What lies behind you and what lies ahead of you pales in comparison with what lies within you. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Build A Better Business Plan-Your Ten-Year Vision

Concept:

Writing out your goals is one thing. Establishing a system and framework for accomplishing your goals is crucial to your success. Working on your business on a regular basis will create results that are dramatically better than working in your business. I guarantee that working harder in this business will not make you more successful. Working on your business and regularly developing ideas for success will. Why do the greatest athletes such as Tiger Woods keep practicing on a regular basis? Each day they are trying to get a little better. They are working on their game, not playing the game.

Objective:

As financial advisors we plan our clients' long-term financial futures every day. So why do we neglect to do it for ourselves and for our businesses? I have asked several financial advisors what "long-term" means. They usually answer that they develop five-, ten-, or fifteen-year plans for clients. Then I ask, "How long is your business plan?" If it is not ten years, maybe you don't plan on being in the business that long. I dare you to look at your financial plan and share it with your peers. Then look at your long-term business plan. If you have one, congratulations! You're in the top 20% of financial advisors in the world. If you're like most financial advisors, however, you wrote it a few years ago and never updated it. As advisors, we develop long-term financial plans, yet the average business plan for financial advisors is one to three years. Develop your plans as one-year (must-do), three-year (achievable), five-year (goal-oriented), and ten-year (long-term vision).

To sell you on the benefits of the business plan, I would show you that projections into the future based on what you know today would be of huge benefit to your success. The challenge is to think how you can grow and do things differently to achieve higher goals. Start by thinking what your ideal business plan would look like, if you could design amazing financial targets and goals, then think of a business or advisor that you would like to emulate. Think of the possibilities. The only limit is how much you can imagine. Challenge yourself to become the most successful financial advisor you know, not because of the money you will earn but because of the person and advisor you will become.

Strategy:

Start today to develop one-year (short-term), three-year, five-year, and ten-year (long-term) written business plans for success. Most advisors love to feel they are independent and work for themselves, yet they lack the discipline to run a successful business. If you work for a firm, structured goals and targets are set for you and followed up on a regular basis. As an independent financial advisor, I know that it is one thing to write a business plan, but to be disciplined and accountable for it is another. Make yourself accountable to someone and share your business plan. This may be a spouse, an associate financial advisor, a wholesaler, or someone in your peer group (discussed in a later chapter). A business plan has the benefit of creating a blueprint for even greater success.

Grant's Tip:

Review each section of your plan every month and set goals for certain dates in each category.

When you review each month, make sure you revisit and check off completed goals. Have a place to keep ideas to review and develop. For example, I keep a folder with business planning ideas that I pick up. Each month when I review, I also review these ideas so that I might implement them into my business (with a time frame for completion). If I see a new software program, I keep the idea for review at the time I planned to spend working on my business, not in my business.

Review the ideas with your peer group or people who help you be accountable in the business. Have you ever spoken with someone who said they are busy because it's month-end? Why don't you have a month-end where you review production, business planning ideas, your business and marketing plans and goals? Do you think this exercise each month will bring greater results?

One idea to use when you are developing your plan is to find a boardroom-type space where you can take each section of your business plan and freely write out the benefits. Do this exercise with someone else (or your peer group) to make yourself accountable and to give you feedback on your process. Remember, success leaves clues. Ask other successful advisors for their business plans and invite them to a strategy session. Surround yourself with literature on building business plans. Our web site has hundreds of successful sites devoted to developing business plans and marketing plans. Hundreds of books are written on this topic. Ask the wholesalers or marketing representatives with whom you work, or even your company, for help on this area.

At the end of this strategy is a sample confidential business plan. If you want to see what other companies do with business plans, check out corporate annual reports. Usually a company's vision and plan are there. Questions I receive from audiences are, "What is included in a business plan?" or "How much time does it take to prepare a business plan?" The answers are simple and straightforward. An effective business plan holds the fundamental information to manage your business as it will look five years from now. Then start working backwards. What will you need to have in place when the business is successful? What business is successful now and how is its business plan laid out?

The easiest way to build a business plan is to start by writing down your goals. Take a blank pad of paper and start writing. Combine business goals, family goals, spiritual goals, lifetime goals, travel goals, etc. Write them all down, then break them down into time segments-per year, per month, per week, and per day. For example, if your goal is to have 30 new clients this year with average investable assets of $300,000 for a total of $9 million new assets, how much per month and per week do you need to achieve the goal? Do this with all of your goals.

More importantly, activity drives production. What activities do you need to do to arrive at those numbers? Some experts suggest you make your numbers based on three assumptions-best-case scenario, likely numbers, and worst-case scenario. After you have completed your business plan, the key area should be a one-page summary of key objectives and key actions you need to take to follow up and complete your plans. One tip I will give you is to review your results for the past week every Monday morning, rewrite your one-page summary of goals and plans, and plan your week. One definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Each month and year, what are your targets for improvement? Would you invest in a business that targets growth of 5% per year? Not likely; you want businesses that target plus-10% to plus-20% growth per year. What is your target for growth per year?

A final note: Work on your vision. Here is a story from Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth Revisited (HarperBusiness; 1995), that tells you why we ask ourselves these questions. Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was asked to what he attributed IBM's phenomenal success. He is said to have answered:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

Jay's Comments:

The first insight is that guerrillas plan backwards, beginning with the attainment of their loftiest goals in the future, then working back to the present. If you can allow yourself to visualize success, the path to it will be easier to find. Most companies see the beginning of the path in front of them, but don't see where it leads in the distance. Their short-sightedness gets them in trouble when change or unforeseen circumstances occur.

The hardest job in the planning of marketing is seeing the target. You must remove the shackles of insecurity and fear in order to travel to your final destination. So you've got to think as though you've been attaining your goals all along as you plan for your distant future. You must see your company at its finest in 20 years in order for it to operate at its peak in ten years. By knowing what must be accomplished for such optimum performance, you can see where you must be in five years. That helps you concentrate upon what must be done by the end of one year. And that points the way to what you've got to do tomorrow, to do today, to do now.

When the golf ball is in the middle of the fairway and the green 200 yards away, the great golfers don't aim for the green. They aim for the cup. How do you come up with a successful business plan? As Grant suggests, you evolve it over time. Revise and revise it until it is a powerful plan packed with enthusiasm and excitement about the future. You put it to work and then you stay with it no matter what (in most cases). You watch it slowly take effect, rise and falter take a bit more effect, hold on even more, stumble, then fi nally grab on and soar, taking you with it. Your plan is working. Your bank account is growing. And it all happens because you were committed to your business plan.

What usually happens if you weren't patient enough during the time your plan slowly took effect? You might have changed the plan. Many entrepreneurs do. What if you dropped the plan the moment it faltered? You would have lost out. What if you lost your cool when your sales slid backwards? You might have scrubbed the plan. Suppose you dropped the plan when you stumbled, as virtually all marketing and business plans do. You tell your clients to be patient when the market changes and stick to their plan. If you change your plan what will happen? Disaster may have ensued. But because you stayed with the plan, because you were committed to it and believed in the long-term benefits, it finally took hold and did what you wanted it to do. Your success was very much due to your understanding of the concept of commitment. If you had not been in touch with the essence of the concept, you probably would have taken one of many tempting opportunities to kill the plan and would have killed your chances along with it. However, you understood what commitment means, and it paid off for you.

Additional Resources:
Web site: Visit "Business Planning" on www.financialadvisormarketing.com.

Examples:
See the following Sample Confi dential Business Plan.

Action Summary:
To add to my marketing plans: Yes         No        
Additional information required: Yes         No        

You'll go out on a limb sometimes because that is where the fruit is. -Will Rogers

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Guerrilla Marketing Action Planning Worksheet

This worksheet is designed to build your Guerrilla Marketing Arsenal for attack in the next year. It lists all of the ideas presented in the book. Start by reading the chapters that you want to develop into your marketing plans. Then use the summary worksheet to start building your plan for the next year. Keep this book near your marketing fi les and use it as a resource to develop incoming ideas further. If you require further information, use the resources listed in the back of this book or log onto www.financialadvisormarketing.com for your source of information. It's all right here to start building your business today!

Ideas to build into my marketing plans:

Yes = Y; No = N; Additional info Required = A

Chapter 1 Building a Better Businees and Marketing Plan

1. Business PlanÐYour 10-Year Vision
Does your business plan cover 1, 3, 5, 10 years?
How big could your business become in 10 years?

2. Build a Marketing Plan Guaranteed to Increase Your Business
Do you have a written marketing plan?
Is your marketing bringing you the results you desire or expected?

3. Successful Franchise-like Production Systems.
Do you track your production results?
Do you make month-to-month and year-to-year result comparisons and numbers?

4. Secret to Rapid Business Growth
Are there any books of business you would love to purchase?
Are there representatives considering retirement that you could take over?

5. Success Secrets for Leveraging Your Time
How do you leverage your time now?
Could you get more time?
Do you use a handheld device to save time and stay organized?

6. Learning From The Best
Do you have a mastermind group?
Do you have a successful business model which you can copy or emulate?
Who could you invite to a mastermind peer group?

7 Marketing Team Builders
Who completes your marketing initiatives now?
Do they love marketing?
Do you need to hire or train staff to improve your marketing?

8. Finding Your Ideal Client
Do you have a detailed ideal client profile?
Do you share this with clients and centers of influence?
Do you have a target market?

9. Secrets of Selecting Marketing Methods
How many methods do you use in your marketing?
Which strategies are working now?
Which are not working?
What are you going to change?

10. What Sets you Apart From the Rest
Do you have a large list of prospects?
Are they qualified?
Are they ideal?
Do you have a well-organized database and call system?

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Catalogue Information

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