Ken Haman

As desktop publishing has become less and less expensive and more advisors are building brochures to advertise their practices, marketing organizations are encouraging teams to articulate their value proposition to the marketplace. Here are two glaring errors that advisors must avoid.

For a variety of reasons, there is often far too much fluff and hyperbole in the language being used to describe the typical advisory practice. Follow these guidelines to improve your marketing language.

Is your marketing material as effective as it could be? Here are some basic guidelines to help improve your message and practice brochure.

Time and energy are an advisor's two scarcest resources. Adding performance goals helps allocate these resources and transforms a business plan into a living document that can meaningfully contribute to greater success.

Working with clients can be difficult. You need to balance rational tasks of navigating capital markets with non-rational challenges of managing client emotions. In many ways, navigating client behavior is more complicated than navigating capital markets, since human emotions can swing wildly and less predictably. Check out some helpful ways to stay ahead of the curve.

Driven by difficult market conditions and higher levels of anxiety among investors, the question of whether or not advisors are "stealing" client has been coming up more frequently in the past few years. The overall growth rate for advisory practices has been stagnant for a decade, which is pushing sales management to scrutinize who is growing and why.

Advisors with growing practices quickly realize that it’s helpful to pass as many tasks to a strong support team. Ken Haman offers some practical insights and suggestions for how you can more efficiently develop a great support team and then manage their focus on deliverables.

If you’re like most advisors, plan growth is one of your highest priorities. However, for many, growing a business is an elusive dream or a worst nightmare. The typical advisor spends very little time on outreach, relying instead on referrals or direct-to-plan-sponsor marketing. Ken Haman writes that this “brute force” marketing worked in the past, but plan sponsors have become increasingly unresponsive to it.

Many financial advisors struggle with the issue of efficiency and complain they simply don’t have enough time to execute new ideas in their practice because they are so busy managing clients. Ken Haman says advisors spend too much time responding to incoming telephone calls from clients—in fact, prioritizing the demands of various clients above their own business priorities. Its time for all of that to change.

As advisors, we work in a disciplined world of risk management and probabilities, while our clients rely on feelings and “gut” decisions all day long. We shouldn’t take our discipline for granted. We need to remember the vulnerabilities that lurk in the hard-wiring of the human central nervous system.

There are certain common traits and behavioral patterns of the more effective advisors, according to blogger Ken Haman. Of course, not all advisors demonstrate every one of these characteristics, but most of the highly successful people he's been privileged to work with exhibit at least several.

Client advisory boards are a great way to get clients and advocates even more engaged in supporting the business. If you are considering developing an advisory board, here are some points to consider from blogger Ken Haman.

Few advisors are encouraging their clients to take action now and prepare for the challenges their investments will face in a rising interest-rate environment., according to blogger Ken Haman. How could this cost you business in the long-run?

CPAs and attorneys are great sources of referrals, but every advisor already knows this. According to Ken Haman, what your competition doesn't know (and what you are about to learn) is how to hone your message, stand out from the pack and generate more referrals from key influencers.

Building (and rebuilding) credibility with clients and with potential referral advocates must be an ongoing commitment. Ken Haman said that he suggests advisors allocate significant time each month to proactively reaching out to existing clients and to “centers of influence” with a thoughtful message about the markets, where we’ve been, what’s currently going on and what is likely to happen next. How can you use proper messaging to grow your book of business?

After experiencing nearly 30 years of benign, cooperative capital-markets behavior, Ken Haman says many advisors are baffled or frustrated by how difficult it has become to get clients to accept new investment ideas. But if we can understand more accurately how humans cope with anticipating various outcomes, we can structure our messaging to be more effective at getting clients to take the right kinds of actions.

In every organization, there are a few top performers who set the pace for everyone else. Ken Haman says advisors need to explore what the top 20% of your colleagues do differently and what you can do to join them in the top tier.

If you’ve built a productive advisory practice, you know that the single most important resource for prospective clients is your existing book of clients. Unfortunately, Ken Haman says asking for referrals from your current clients can do more harm than help.

Financial advisors know there’s a lot of competition in the marketplace today. And they know they need a unique value proposition to help market their services and attract new clients. But creating the right unique value proposition can be a challenge.

There are lots of ways to talk about what you do. Unfortunately, most of them aren’t terribly effective, and many actually turn people off. Ken Haman says there are some ways prospect effectively in social situations and make the biggest impact in a short period of time.