Andy Gluck's Blog

MBA student Jonathan Poyer contacted me in late June for help with a research project on investment advisory marketing companies. I vaguely remembered Jonathan contacting me five years earlier when he had an internship at Orion Advisor Services, but don’t know him. Advisor Products tries to be transparent and behave nicely, however, so  I directed him to our website and offered to connect him with our marketing and sales department.

A month later, after completing his research, Jonathan contacted me again to thank me. In an email, he told  me how difficult it was to get straightforward answers from marketing companies specializing in serving investment advisors but that  Advisor Products was different.

Because he was indpendent and unbiased, I asked Jonathan to summarize what he learned in doing his research. Here’s what he says.   

This summer, as an MBA intern at Brigham Young University, I chose to work for Gemini Fund Services; a company I worked for previous to business school.  I worked on a great project putting together a business plan for a new entity that Gemini has been looking into.

A major portion of my project this summer was to obtain market research on third party marketing firms in the investment advisory space; especially those that provide marketing services for mutual funds.  I spent over a month working on this project; speaking with over 30 firms as I wanted a comprehensive understanding of the industry.  Since I had been in the business a number of years, I obtained information through contacts at the major custodians.  In addition, I found a number of firms through Google searches, marketing events, and others through references on marketing collateral or websites.  All told, I was able to interview almost 30 different people that focus on assisting investment professionals with their marketing initiatives.  The two major questions that I sought to answer included: what key services do you provide and what is the general pricing for those services. 

I discovered there are ample resources available in the investment advisory space when it comes to marketing.  I had great conversations with some very impressive people. The breadth of services offered is equally impressive: website development, marketing collateral, branding, logo development, drip content, newsletters, outbound email, outbound calls, third-party wholesalers, etc.  Many of these firms have people with great experience in the industry and can see things from both sides of the table.  I did not speak to a single firm that I questioned whether they could craft an advisor’s story into an effective marketing plan.

However, in regards to the second question that I sought to have answered; I found direct answers much more difficult to obtain.  Only a handful of firms were straight forward with their pricing.  I specifically asked for a “high level idea of your pricing”, so I could put something in place for my pro-forma documents and outline.  I heard many vagaries but very little specifics.  There were a couple of companies that I spoke with that provided detailed pricing.  Among them was Advisor Products.  I was extremely impressed with their transparency and willingness to outright share detailed pricing directly on their website.  They did not shirk at all from their expertise.  It was clear that Advisor Products stands firmly behind their services and is confident that a better solution cannot be found elsewhere; to the tune of complete transparency before one even begins to work with them.

It seems to me that in our industry, there is a fear of sharing information about fees and pricing.  I think that this is a mistake.  It is frustrating and disingenuous to see a firm unable to commit to how much they charge for their services.  If one is proud of what they do, one ought to stand behind their expertise and that includes standing behind pricing.  After all, you are worth the price people pay for what you do!  Advisors do not have the time to fill out forms and take the time to have conversation after conversation while marketers “figure out” the appropriate fee.  It should be provided up front for the sake of time and out of respect for potential clients.

I spent a lot of time speaking with marketing firms and clients to understand their marketing needs and what type of message they are hoping to present to their clients and prospects.  I found that with so much competing for peoples’ attention and time, those on both side of the table are seeking transparency and an understanding of what “bang” they are getting for their “buck”.  When it feels like one party is holding something back in a conversation, it puts me on the defensive and I almost immediately put that firm to the back of my list.  Whereas firms that are open and willing to share as much as possible, move to the front of my list and become trusted partners.

Jonathan Poyer

BYU MBA 2011

You can get 38 hours of CFP^â continuing education credit on Advisors4Advisors, a practice management portal for advisors. And if you sign up for a free six-month membership to A4A, you get it for free!

Simply register for our next webinar and you’ll receive an email with six-month free trial of A4A after the webinar.

Already a member of A4A? Just click on one of the webinar titles below and sign in to A4A to view the session. Watch the session for at least 50 minutes and take a 10-question quiz when it’s over to receive CFP® CE credit.

• Compliance Issues Posed By LinkedIn, Blogs, And Social Networking 
• Secure Solutions To Protect Client Data And Comply With New Privacy Laws
• Appointing A Trust Protector To Improve Estate Plans
• Deeper Client Connections Through The Power Of Story
• Financial Services Reform Update
• Trends In Family Offices And Multi-Family Offices
• Advisor Compliance Update
• Managing Portfolio Risk With Stock Collars
• Roth IRA: Beyond The Basics
• How To Talk To Clients In A Post-Crisis World
• Tactical Asset Allocation In Today’s Market
• ETFs: The Good, Bad and Misunderstood
• Roth IRA Conversion Techniques
• The New Estate Planning Landscape
• Precious Metals: Can The Rally Continue?
• The 401k Upheaval And How It Affects Advisors
• Seizing The Roth IRA Opportunity With Clients And Prospects
• Privacy Law, Data Security And Financial Advisors
• 2010 Compliance Planning For RIAs
• Using Client Feedback To Drive Referrals
• One Year After The Global Financial Crisis
• A New Model For Life Planning
• Researching Your Prospects On The Web
• Regulatory Reform: Will You Be A Fiduciary?
• Navigating The Maze Of Exchange-Traded Products
• Advisor Self-Care: A Primer And Check-up
• Serving Middle Income Clients
• Actively Managing An ETF Portfolio
• After The Fall: Asset Allocation And Rebalancing
• Crucial Financial Conversations With Clients
• Restoring Investor Confidence
• Life Planning And The Financial Crisis
• Investment Tax Management: Turn Clients’ Biggest Expense Into An Opportunity
• Preparing For The Worst: Managing Your Clients In A Bear Market 
• Conducting 401k Vendor Searches For Small Plan Sponsors
• Client Retention And Growth In Tough Times
• Asset Protection Planning
• Rational Expectations In Uncertain Markets

Advisor Products has implemented a unified threat management system to detect and prevent malicious activities on all of its web servers.

Adoption of the Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) by Advisor Products had been requested by a large financial institution seeking to use AdvisorVault, a secure system that allows financial advisors to share documents with clients and allied professionals and that is integrated with several portfolio management software applications.

Hackers and malicious activities by rogue employees of tech vendors and advisory firms pose a growing risk, as more advisors are utilizing Web-based applications to communicate personal financial information to clients and improve efficiency.

Advisory firms are not only under pressure from cybercrime and insider abuse, but also face increasing compliance demands, as state and federal regulators tighten rules protecting client privacy and on establishing effective and measurable security.

The intrusion detection and prevention system implemented by Advisor Products adds a new layer to the company’s already elaborate security systems. The IDPS service monitors all Advisor Products servers 24/7 to identify malicious activity, log information about suspicious activity, attempt to block these activities, and automatically report them to technicians and engineers on the Advisor Products team. Some of the features include:

• Enterprise Grade Firewall. A sophisticated enterprise-grade firewall managed by certified security experts.
• Best In Class Intrusion Prevention. The system is carefully maintained and managed by a world leader in vulnerability and intrusion protection research and used by many of the world’s largest enterprise.
• Best Practices Management. Change management, incident management and all aspects of the service are monitored for compliance with times-tested management practices.
• 7×24 Incident Response. The service provider’s engineers monitor and respond to critical security events 7×24, 365 days per year and report critical issues to the Advisor Products tech team immediately.

The bug fix to AdvisorVault that I mentioned in my blog entry on June 29  was made a couple of weeks ago, and I just realized I forgot to write an update about that.

Advisors who use AdvisorVault can now share a single file with an accountant or estate planning lawyer.

While you all along have been able to share a client entire vault or a single folder, the bug had prevented advisors from sharing a single file with an outside professional.  

For financial advisors, being able to share client documents securely with attorneys, accountants, consultants, and other allied professionals is an important feature in AdvisorVault.

It’s one of those rare examples where a seemingly small technology feature  provides a big benefit.

Advisors say that collaboration with other professoinals is a natural way of creating a referral network of professionals.

In the course of sharing information about a client in AdvisorVault, allied professionals wind up communicating more efficiently and more frequently. And since secure file-sharing  in AdvisorVault is easy, the feedback I’ve gotten from advisors is that it’s getting used a lot.

Quarterly portfolio reporting can be stressful enough for financial advisors — dealing with delivery of the reports electronically or in the mail is a major hassle — but the task is even more difficult when you must write a market commentary to accompany your quarterly client reports.

Next time you need a quarterly market update to send with your portfolio reports to clients, take a free trial of Quarterly Market Summary from Advisor Products.

Quarterly Portfolio Reporting
Quarterly portfolio reporting is a major hassle for RIAs. Printing, collating, and stuffing is time-consuming, and everything must be absolutely perfect.

When quarterly portfolio reporting is further complicated by having to research and write a quarterly commentary, the project becomes downright stressful.

Making matters worse, the trailing 10-year total return on the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index shows an annualized 1.6% loss! Long-term investors have been slammed!

Getting help with writing about what’s happening in the markets makes quarterly portfolio reporting easier.

Quarterly Market Update
There is no substitute for your own words in explaining portfolio performance to your clients. So Quarterly Market Summary enables you to personalize your message to your clients.

Most of the content you need to write to accompany your performance reports is comprised of facts about the economy and markets. Quarterly Market Summary provides you with that text. You simply personalize it.

Outsource To Financial Writers
Why reinvent the wheel? Is it smart to spend your time or assign staff to compile statistics summarizing performance of stocks, bonds, industries, interest rates, foreign markets, GDP, inflation, employment, currencies, and other key data? Are you professional writers? Will you proofread everything?

Quarterly Market Summary is written by a seasoned financial journalist. A financial editor with 30 years of experience re-works it. It’s then proofread by yet another financial writer and sent for review to several financial advisors.

Quarterly Market Summary is delivered in a Microsoft Word document so that you can rewrite and repurpose it easily.

Quarterly Market Summary Free Trial
To take advantage of our no risk, free trial offer, register with Advisor Products. Registration also gives you access to replays of our educational webinars and our MarketingSmart e-newsletter for advisors.

If you are already registered with Advisor Products, log in here for your free trial of Quarterly Market Summary.

To see a sample and get more information about Quarterly Market Summary, visit our site.

A fix is on the way for a bug in AdvisorVault that will enable advisors to share a single file with an allied professional.

AdvisorVault was developed principally to enable financial advisors to securely store files they want to share with clients, but it also enables advisors to collaborate with professionals outside your firm–CPAs, attorneys, geriatric care managers, personal coaches, business consultants and other professionals with which clients work.

You can enable an allied professional to have permission to view and upload a client's entire vault or just a single folder in a client's vault. You can also enable an allied professional to access his or her own vault and only see what you post in that vault. These collaboration features are working fine.

However, we have discovered a bug in the app that is preventing advisors from sharing a single file in a vault. We expect that bug to be fixed in the next upgrade release at the end of July.

We've been releasing upgrades and bug fixes monthly and just last week issued the latest release. That last release cleaned up a problem with moving an advisor's clients.

Now, if an advisor leaves your firm or if you want to switch the advisor for a client, it works smoothly.

We also fixed sporadic problems with creating a folder structure for firms using our online reporting solution for Advent Axys and Schwab PortfolioCenter.

While these are minor bugs, we know they are annoying and we apologize for the inconvenience.

The collaboration feature in AdvisortVault is important and we want to give you the ability to share just a single file with an attorney or accountant as badly as you do.

Collaborating with outside professionals is a key way for advisors to get referrals. We're seeing AdvisorVault users share folders and vaults with more and more outside professionals.

What we're hearing from advisors is that the collaboration feature widens their referral network.

A couple of advisory firms using AdvisorVault have actively encouraged their clients to enable file-sharing with their accountants and estate planning attorneys.

Clients logged into AdvisorVault have a link that lets them "Create a Professional." When a client clicks on that link, it prompts him to provide the name and email address of an allied professional who they want to grant access to their vault.

When clients fill in that professional's contact information, it sends their advisor a request to enable that outside professional's access to the client's vault.

What we're seeing is that advisors find those other professionals good referral sources.

Moreover, by just doing your routine work–sharing a spreadsheet with realized investment gains and losses–with an accountant, for example, advisors are building their referral network while improving their client service and abiding by security and privacy rules.

Yes, we have some bugs in AdvisorVault. But we're fixing them and advisors are getting important benefits by using the vault to securely share files with clients and allied professionals.

“Please cancel my subscription immediately,” said the email message. “I am requesting a one-month refund due to the very poor service that I received. In fact, I sent emails and phone messages with no response and a one week delayed response to a phone call message that I sent.”

Advisor Products is not perfect. We can always do better. But this was over the top! What did we do?

Even though it was 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, I had to get to the bottom of this right away.

I checked our CRM and could find no notes about her calls this past week or anything about her company.

I called her right away and left a voicemail message.

“Whatever we did, I'm sorry,” I said on the voicemail. “I can’t find any record about this project we’re doing for you. So please call me back and let me know what happened.”

She called back thirty-minutes later.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “You don’t host my website. It’s a competitor of yours but I called you back because you sounded upset about my complaint.”

I thanked her for calling back and couldn’t resist:

“You can see the difference between us and our competitors," I said. "On a Friday night at 8 p.m., you have the owner of the company calling you back to respond to you.”

Advisor Products service is good. We're not perfect, but we return your calls promptly–almost always the same day that you call us.

We're the No. 1 choice for financial advisor websites and secure client communications that is integrated with your CRM, portfolio management and financial planning software.

To improve security, Advisor Products today killed passwords advisors use to access our content management system.

The next time your firm logs in, you'll be required to create a new password.

The new password requires a combination upper and lower case letters, numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters. Such passwords are harder to remember, but they’re also harder to hack.

This change was not made in response to any incident. It is one of numerous new policies we have implemented company-wide.

When you log in, please read the new password requirements carefully. They’re just a few lines but you need to read them to understand what to do.

Here’s a post I wrote about creating strong passwords and another post about the password app I use. Chrome users may also want to consider LastPass.

Please call our help desk if you have any problems at (888) 274-5755.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Advisors are poor marketers in general, and one of the silliest things they do is fear targeting a niche. What are you thinking?

If I went into the website business in 1996 by making websites for any schnook, I would not have been able to compete with Intuit, Google, WordPress, and other giant technology companies aiming for a mass clientele. By specializing in advisors, I’m able to add content and technology tools that my niche group needs and values. I can provide solutions that the giants cannot afford to create because serving my niche is too much work for them.

To me, the case for specializing is so easy to see, and I just can’t understand why advisors have so much trouble with it. Yet over the years, advisors’ fear of niches has come up again and again.

Once, and I promise this is true, I was working with an advisor on the phone, reviewing marketing copy I had written that would move him into a niche. He yelled at me. “I don’t want to be different! I just want to sound like everyone else!”

Another time, I was on a conference call with a very high-powered firm whose chief investment officer told me in front of the firm’s executive leadership that he didn’t want to describe his process in detail to me. “You know a lot about the investment business and that’s why we hired you!” he barked. ”We do what everyone else does. Just write about that.”

Just this past Friday, at a webinar entitled, Successful Marketing For Advisors, John Anderson, of SEI this past Friday did an excellent job of telling advisors how to market their practices.

Sure enough, during the Q&A period, an advisor chatted in a question raising her fear that marketing to a small niche like divorcees might scare away other potential prospects. Such fear is totally misplaced.

Having marketing copy on your website that emphasizes your niche will gain you clients in the long run, assuming you are good at working with that niche. Here are some reasons why.

Commoditization Of Investment Advice. The Web is relentlessly commoditizing investment advice. Online brokers are better at serving the mass affluent. Segmenting the investor market to differentiate your services can be a source of competitive advantage. Specialized advice will command a premium price and make your clients more loyal.

The Web Favors Niche Marketers. If the keywords used in marketing copy on your website are terms like “financial planning” or fee-only financial advisors,” you stand little chance of gaining high rankings in search engines. However, if your marketing copy contains keywords like “financial advisors serving Indian hotel owners” or “estate planning for shopping center developers,” you have a far better chance of gaining favorable natural search results. If you want to learn more about this topic, see this recent webinar on Search Engine Optimization conducted by Advisor Products.

Professional Satisfaction. Serving a niche enables you to help people in more meaningful ways. If you are an expert in understanding the wealth management needs of layers, doctors, owners of bakeries, car dealers or other small business, or some other market segment, you will find yourself going far deeper into their financial lives and advising them on business issues as well as personal finance. Your advice becomes more meaningful because it is so targeted. The professional satisfaction you’ll gain can make your job more satisfying.

If you need some help thinking about a niche, start by considering whether the answer is obvious.

Three weeks ago, I was speaking with an advisor I’ve known for many years. When I asked him to tell me about his firm, he never mentioned that he had a niche. In an elevator speech that sounded a lot like many other wealth management firms, he told me he uses DFA Funds and provides financial planning.

He is from India, and I felt I was treading on delicate ground, but I asked him if he targeted Indian immigrants. That’s when he told me that 60% of his clients are doctors of Indian descent.

This advisor is not marketing to Indian doctors currently and did not realize that he can probably get a lot more Indian doctors as clients by sharing the specialized knowledge he has gained by working with this niche.

Many Indian doctors are first-generation Americans or emigrated here from India. They have common experiences and financial issues. For instance, they almost all had little money during their residency and are tempted to spend crazily when they start making money. Many of them have parents and siblings still living in India that they need to assist financially. Many accumulate great wealth and fear raising spoiled kids. The expertise of this advisor in dealing with financial issues of Indian doctors is valuable.

To me, creating marketing materials for this niche is a no brainer. Yet this advisor and others like, I suspect, don’t realize they already have a niche and can capitalize on it with just a bit of strategic marketing and planning.

To figure out your possible niches, download the market segmentation worksheet we have made available on A4A. In segmenting your clients, you may find some obvious commonalities among them. Are a few of your clients:

• working for the same local company?
• working in the same industry?
• of the same ethnic group?
• in the same profession?
• in the same socio-economic group?

Some advisory firms feel they must work face-to-face with a local designer to build their website instead of working over the phone with an Advisor Products project manager. They feel that their branding is too important to be managed by Advisor Products.

I don't agree. Our designers do a great job. But who am I to argue?

So we price our services so you can use a local graphic designer and still use Advisor Products for hosting. Hosting is where we add the most value.

When we host your site, you get our content management system, BackOffice. That’s built specifically for advisory firms and has oodles of features just for advisors. Compliance review workflow, website archiving, pre-formatted pages created specifically for advisors that you can easily add to your site, a secure client vault system, and integration with 16 apps used in advisor practices that convert data in your internal systems into client communications. Plus, we provide 10 or 15 wealth management articles monthly to aupdate your site and now we’ve started offering videos on personal finance topics.

Candidly, many advisors don’t value publishing wealth management content on their website. But your clients are getting bombarded with financial information from so many sources. Why forfeit the opportunity to be their trusted source of financial ideas?

Providing clients with authoritative educational information on a broad range of personal finance topics—even if you don’t agree with every word in every article we write—promotes meaningful conversation with clients. Moreover, with technology enabling you to select every article and video that appears on your website or e-newsletter, you control the content that your firm distributes. You can even customize the content for each individual cleint's personal interests!

Because we host sites for 1,300 advisory firms, Advisor Products can offer all these features at an afforable price. Local designers just cannot compete with us in providing these specialized services and we now get a lot of referrals from designers and agencies hired by advisory firms.

This is why Advisor Products doesn’t force you to work with our graphic designers. We’re happy to work with your design firm if you believe that will get you the best website.

You get a huge discount on a custom website by having your own artist design the graphical interface of your website.

We send your graphic designer everything needed to work with us—specifications of the size of graphics, what types of files to send and all other details they need to understand how to work with us. A project manager from Advisor Products coordinates deadlines for your team, the artist, and our technicians to construct your site on budget and on time.

Please don’t take any of this to mean that the design services offered by Advisor Products are anything less than great. The value we provide in design is fantastic. In fact, your local designer will probably charge you a lot more than what we charge for graphic design.

However, giving advisors the freedom to hire their own artist demonstrates Advisor Products’ commitment to serve your best interest and help you succeed.