Strategy Highlights
Week 32
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Strategy 7: Become the Expert the Wealthy Want
Why you should be a thought leader
Thought leadership plays a key role in the three most important areas of business development:
- Maximizing current client relationships. Being a thought leader positions you as the leading authority and reinforces and strengthens your relationships with your clients. Not only will this help you retain these clients over the long term, but it also can result in new business in two distinct ways: additional assets to manage and introductions to qualified prospective clients.
- Attracting affluent prospective clients. The wealthy—and all prospects, for that matter—almost universally prefer working with thought leaders. By becoming a thought leader, you will dramatically improve your ability to source new high-net-worth prospects and convert them into clients.
- Garnering referrals from centers of influence. Clients are generally not able to accurately evaluate the knowledge and capabilities of financial advisors. This means that they frequently rely on the opinions of their professional advisors, such as attorneys and accountants, to choose their financial advisors. And to whom do these centers of influence prefer to introduce their affluent clients? Thought leaders.
From Hidden Talent to Talented Expert
Technical capabilities, as important as they are, do not automatically translate into business success. So don’t make the mistake of believing that simply being an expert will make you successful, or even make you a thought leader. You must also deliberately act to be seen as an expert and to profit from that recognition.
When it comes to expertise and the effective use of thought leadership content, financial advisors generally fall into four different categories:
- Talented Expert. A high level of expertise coupled with a strong professional brand makes you a Talented Expert. You are as adept as any of your competitors, and the “right people”—wealthy clients, prospective clients and centers of influence—know who you are and what you are capable of doing extremely well. Clearly, this is where you want to be.
- Hidden Talent. If you truly have a high level of expertise but are not well recognized for your knowledge and capabilities, you are a Hidden Talent.
- Incompetent. We call advisors who have neither expertise nor a professional brand Incompetents. These financial professionals can usually scrounge out a living, but it’s unlikely they will accomplish very much.
- Incompetent Expert. These are financial advisors with a very solid and attractive professional brand in the right circles: wealthy clients, prospective clients and centers of influence. The fact that they are not very capable is not a deterrent, in the short term, to their ability to generate a lot of new business. However, over the long term, their lack of real expertise becomes apparent.