We received so much positive feedback about the webinars we conducted October 10 and October 17 that we are continuing the series and scheduling speakers in advance.

We'll try to put together the industry's leading speakers for these webinars every Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern Time. 

Advisor Products is privileged to be able to sponsor and organize these free webinars.

Here are the dates, speakers, and topics lined up so far for November.

To be sure you receive an email invitation to these free live webinars, please check off "notify me about free webinars."

Bob Veres and Spenser Segal provided advisors with great ideas last Friday about communicating with clients through the recent market turbulence, as our second “crisis communication” webinar played to a growing audience. My presentation, quite honestly, was not great, but I learned a valuable lesson that will make future webinars better.

With the global financial crisis grinding on, about 200 financial advisors attended the webinar, the second in our series about crisis communication with clients. Ending another week of wild market swings, the 4 p.m., Friday session delivered well-timed messages.

Spenser Segal began the webinar with advice about how advisors can apply “the four Rs” to guide crucial conversations with nervous clients. The “Four Rs” concept has been espoused by Doug Lennick, managing partners of The Lennick Aberman Group and co-author of Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance And Leadership Success. By adopting a deliberate four-stage process— recognizing, reflecting, reframing, and then responding—advisors communicate more effectively with an emotional client, Segal said. Segal is CEO of ActiFi and a contributor to AdvisorBlogCentral.

Bob Veres, editor Inside Information, a practice management newsletter for advisors with1,500 subscribers , spoke about the emotional angst many advisors are feeling as a result of the crisis. Regulatory agencies that have limitless resources and are responsible for monitoring financial markets failed understand the risk of credit default swaps, underestimated the impact of the failure of Lehman Bros., misjudged the cost of bailing out AIG, and stood by passively as Wall Street brokerages leveraged their capital to unprecedented levels, Veres said. “If those people, with greater access to information than any of us, were taken totally by surprise by the meltdown,” Veres said, “why should you expect more of yourself?” Veres reviewed letters written to clients by some of his subscribers, giving attendees concrete tips for crisis communication.

I began my presentation by using the webinar polling tool. I wanted to provide instant analysis about how advisors have been holding up in the crisis. Unfortunately, it wasn’t instant enough. Though many attendees generously praised my effort in a post-webinar evaluation, I was embarrassed about my performance when I watched a replay of the session. I failed to realize that attendees would be bored while waiting for the poll results to be displayed. I apologize to those in attendance and will not make that mistake again.

Happily, the poll results were indeed revealing, however. In a post Sunday, I highlighted the findings, which provides hard data about how the global financial crisis has affected advisors.

I am arranging another webinar at 4 p.m. EDT, Friday, October 24, and shortly will let you know who the speakers will be for that the session.

Email me at agluck@advisorproducts.com to receive an invitation to this and future webinars.

View the webinar (it starts playing after it's 10% downloaded) by clicking here: View the October 17 webinar with Bob Veres and Spenser Segal (Edited to exclude my polling fiasco.)

Download Bob Veres's slides: Veres_CrisisWebinarSlides.pdf (1.29 mb)

Download Spenser Segal's slides: SpenserSegalSlides.pdf (546.20 kb)

Independent advisors have experienced only minimal defections of clients, and the vast majority of advisors believe the recession will be over by the end of 2009, according to a survey of independent advisors conducted after markets closed last Friday to cap off another tumultuous week.

The survey was conducted by Advisor Products during a free webinar series we are sponsoring to assist advisors with client communciations during the financial crisis. More than 200 advsors attended the webinar and 82% of attendees answered all of the question in the survey. If you’d like to attend  the “Crisis Communications” webinar series, please email me at agluck@advisorproducts.com. The sessions include no product pitches.Below are the questions and results of the survey.

Attendees are not experiening a panic by clients. Sixty-eight percent of the advisors who participated in our survey say that less than 25% of their clients have called them worried. Only 8% of the advisors polled said that between 50% and 75% of their clients called them worried about the events of recent weeks, and just 1% said that more than 75% of their client base had called them worried.  

Sixty-four pecent of the advisors polled believe the recession will not last beyond 2009, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that only 16% of advisors believe the recession will be shallow, while 46% believe the recession will be over by the end of 2009 but will be deep, and 28% believe the recession will be deep and continue into 2010. Despite the spate of troubling economic news about the shape of America’s financial institutions, just 2% of the advisors polled said they believe the recession would turn into a recession that will last at least three years.

Many advisors have been shaken by the market’s terrible turbulence, with 29% saying they feel guilty for not protecting their clients. 

Most of the advisors attending last Friday’s webinar are seasoned veterans, with 59% saying they have been in the profession more than 10 years.  

By a wide majority, advisors believe the financial crsiis is a marketing opportunity and plan to expand their marketing effort. Just 14% said they did not think the turmoil creates a marketing opportunity, while 86% said they view the economic crisis as an opportunity.

In my view, with Merrill Lynch and other big brokerage firms in disarray, it’s hard to understand how any indpendent advisor would not recognize the crisis as a great chance to gain clients. The myth that large firms were in a better position to offer investors advice has been shattered. Independent advisory firms that tell their story to investors now—via a website, newsletter, brochure, blog, wbeinars, and all other means—can take advantage of the ravaged financial condition and staff morale of the giant firms. Independent advisory firms should consider stepping up marketing by telling prospects about your independence, ability to be objective, and the absence of conflicts of interest arising from being linked to a corporate parent that manufactures products as well as the benefit clients derived from the fact that you are not affiliated with a research desk and investment banking department. My next column in Financial Advisor, which comes out in early November, will contain specifics about all this.  

The financial crisis is not a business crisis for indpendent advisors—at least not so far—with only 3% of advisors saying they were alarmed by a loss of clients recently. We’ll keep gauging  this periodically, but it does seem as though the worst is over. If the whipsaw markets of the last three weeks did not cause clients to fire their advisors, it’s difficult to imagine what will.

My guess is that brokers are not experiencing the same client loyalty that independent advisors enjoy and are much more susceptible to losing clients. That’s why advisors need to create marketing materials to respond to the opportunity and clearly articulate their value proposition versus brokers.  

Lending creedence to the notion that independent advisors are enjoying strong client loyalty, almost all advisors say their clients have been understanding and have not blamed them for losses recently suffered.

If you missed the webinar this past Friday, I'm sorry. As one advisor said, it was a great way to end a terrible week.  

About 125 advisors attended and many have sent gratifying messages of appreciation (see below), motivating me to put together another one to help advisors in this difficult time.

90% of respondents to a post-webinar survey rated the program a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5, and all but one requested that we organize another webinar for Friday, October 17. Email me at agluck@advisorproducts.com if you'd like to be sent an invitation.

These webinars include no product pitches. We’re doing this as a service to independent advisors because we have the privilege of being in a position to do so.

Try not to let events of the moment make you miss the valuable strategic management ideas we are determined to bring at upcoming sessions.

Links to handouts from the session:

Andrew Gluck Handouts Crisis Communication With Clients And Prospects.pdf (283.45 kb)

Bruce Schneider Handouts BruceSchneider_Communication Skills for Financial Professionals.pdf (119.60 kb)

Duncan MacPherson of Pareto Systems Handouts Duncan_MacPherson_Client_Talking_Points.pdf (25.54 kb)

A few of the comments from attendees of Friday’s webinar:
"Very helpful in this most difficult time in my career. I called many of my clients over the weekend and used a lot of the tools that were discussed. You have been an extremely big help."

“The practical down to earth ‘what to do’ advice was just what we need to hear. We had already implemented some of the suggestions, but it was so important to have that validated.The new insights and tactics were "priceless,” a fantastic way to end a horrible week. You are meeting a huge need. We appreciate every minute of that meeting. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

“I commend you and your co-presenters; well-chosen trio, vital information, useful redundancy/overlap, and good (plain) slides. Very valuable.

“Thanks! Very, VERY HELPFUL!”

“I commend you on putting together this program.”

“Thank you! This was very helpful and I really appreciate the effort and your good intentions.”

“Nice work! Very good job on putting this one together.”

“Geat webinar. We're new to your company and your capabilities have been a blessing in this difficult market, making it much easier to “touch” clients--and the response has been favorable. The webinar was like a cherry on the cake."

When the stock market plunged last week—bottoming with a loss of 40% from the all-time high reached October 9, 2007—we began a free service to help financial advisors manage client communications: a daily market update that you can copy, paste, and email to your clients.

The daily updates contain a summary of thoughtful stories covering the day’s events. These short takes on the financial tumult are intended to be used as a daily reminder to clients that you are in touch with them and on top of the situation.

An advisor who does not stay in touch with clients through this volatile time is much easier to fire than one who is in touch. Research has repeatedly shown that professionals who are liked by clients are less likely to be fired. Staying in touch—even in this seemingly small way—shows  that you care and that all you need to do sometimes to reassure fearful clients terrorized by the plunging values in their accounts and seizing-up of the banking system.

The stock market today recovered about half of last week’s losses, and the crisis thankfully seems to be eased. But we will continue to provide the daily updates at least through the end October and longer if the wild swings continue. Advisor Products provides the daily updates for free to independent financial advisory firms because your support over the past 12 years enables us to do so.View today’s “Crisis Update.”

Quick, who is your ideal client? If you can’t answer this question within 30 seconds, you’ve got some explaining to do—particularly in this time of turmoil.

I talk with many independent financial advisors and I’d say that more than 75 percent of them can’t tell you exactly who their ideal clients are. There’s some deep-seated fear that if they declare a niche of 35-65 year-old scientists who work in the New York metro area, a Gates or Wozniak will be lost.

With the financial system wracked by turmoil, independent advisors have an opportunity to reshape their businesses. Yes, some clients may leave your firm. But as has happened during previous times of turmoil, independent advisors will come out way ahead.

We have witnessed the destruction of the giant Wall Street firms and people’s confidence in them. As much as the public distrusts Washington politicians, the public trusts Wall Street even less. Your marketing effort must communicate how you’re different from Wall Street salespeople. (I’ll be talking about how to separate your firm from Wall Street at our webinar this Friday at 4 p.m. ET.

Instead of dwelling on the market’s collapse, start planning how you’re going to come out of this mess on top. Stay focused on behaving like the firm you’ve always wanted to create. Decide who the ideal clients are that you are going to want to work with most. That’s the first step in preparing for the next phase of this financial crisis—rebuilding and recovering. Doing it now in the throes of the crisis may seem like a lot to ask, but only by envisioning the future you want to create will you be able to actually take steps in that direction.

Declaring your ideal clients is important because it provides a roadmap for your marketing, client-acquisition, and client-retention efforts. And you are going to be fielding questions from many scared investors in the months ahead who no longer want to work with a broker affiliated with a once-swaggering financial giant, but you need to decide which of these people are the best-fit for the advisory firm you are trying to build. While asking you to think about anything other than the crisis may be difficult, there is no shortage of good reasons to declare your ideal clients now:

• It’s differentiates you instantly from the giants. Bank of America and Citigroup are firms for the masses. By specializing, you create exclusivity. Your firm is a boutique that excels in handling certain types of clients, and you cannot afford to spread yourself too thin because your service is so personalized.
• You’ll establish yourself as an expert. When you elucidate who you work with, you attract more of that type of client, thus cementing your expertise for a certain type of person’s needs. Consider how you select a physician when you have a specific health ailment— you want the doctor who specializes, right? A GP is fine for routine care. But when you have a problem to be addressed, you want a specialist. People with money issues want a specialist, too.
• You can charge more, work less, and maintain a smaller client roster. Serving a very select group of clients frees you to dedicate yourself and your time to their unique needs. It’s a lot simpler, cost-effective, and time-efficient for an independent advisory firm to provide outstanding service to a smaller number of clients with similar needs than to compete with Bank of America.
• You get more bang for your marketing buck. It’s expensive to advertise to the masses—especially in an industry as commoditized as financial services. It’s expensive to try to create marketing materials when you’re trying to be all things to all people. A tighter focus makes your advertising and marketing goals clearer and more achievable.
• You establish relationships with a strategic network. Once you’ve identified the ancillary services that your clients most often require, you can establish or further cement relationships with your strategic alliances. Seek out CPAs, estate attorneys, and insurance brokers who’ll be knowledgeable about the services your ideal client frequently requires. Suddenly, you have a team and a referral network.
• You do what you’re best at and enjoy most. Most independent financial advisors genuinely care about their clients and want to help them, and part of the helping-people equation is chemistry. You’re much more likely to feel chemistry with the clients that you really believe you can help. Paring down your client base to the subset of ideal clients that you most want to help allows you to offload clients who aren’t as good a fit for your firm.

We recently found ourselves in a peculiar position. It happened when we launched dynamic online performance reporting for PortfolioCenter and a new online vault. Ironically, offering more features at lower prices than our competitors inspired skepticism. While advisors were thrilled to hear that we can save them money—especially since financial crisis has pummeled asset prices and, thus, advisory fees—their enthusiasm is tempered by suspicion.

Charging low prices raised a question in the minds of some advisors: If their firm for years had been paying twice as much for online reporting, why is Advisor Products charging so much less?

The answer is simple: Because we can! We can charge less because we have built a strong business. We’ve made mistakes and fixed them. We’ve hired the right people and fired lazy workers with bad attitudes. We’ve used our deep understanding of the advisory business to focus on what’s important to you.

Other advisor website development firms have focused on providing a way for advisors to share performance reports with clients. And, to their credit, they have answered a need in the market. Many advisors have wanted to display performance reports on the Web, and we admittedly lagged in providing this feature. But we were busy improving other parts of our business.

None of our competitors provides personal finance content or our level of design and customization. Moreover, none of our competitors offers the wide array of marketing products beyond websites that we do, including logo development, stationery, copywriting, client newsletters, brochures, and email newsletters. And no other vendor offers a personal client portal platform that interfaces with more than a dozen professional applications, including financial planning, account aggregation, form-filling, and CRM systems.

We have focused on developing processes and technology to improve our scalability and service. And guess what? We figured it out. We developed the processes and systems to provide excellent service across our entire array of marketing products and to develop new software applications fast while keeping our costs low. It’s been a tough couple of years, but we’ve done it. Our business is now more scalable and our service is much better.

One important change we made was in the people we who speak with advisors. Instead of graphic designers and web developers speaking with advisors about how they wanted their websites to look, we now have project managers as the single point of contact for every website we create. And if you purchase a logo, marketing copy, stationery, or a brochure, the project manager stays with you through the entire process. Providing a single contact—one person who knows design, HTML, and branding and who also has strong customer service skills—has increased customer satisfaction dramatically.

Another important shift we made was in working with Project Manager Professionals to outsource development. Rather than keeping development in-house, we now outsource most large development projects and we plan them in great detail. For instance, the planning document for creating our new vault system, which probably has more features than any other online vault offered to advisors—ran about 100 pages in length. Before a single line of code was written, we had a specification for the user interface so we knew how every major feature would be accessed by users. In addition, the world is now our labor pool. Instead of employing a few developers, we can find developers from all of the U.S. and worldwide who have skills in specific areas. As a result, we now develop applications literally five times faster than we did three years ago we’re doing it at a  fraction of the cost. That’s why we’ve been able to deploy the client portal platform and a dozen interfaces in the past year, along with the vault and dynamic performance reporting.

We also have documented our core processes for building sites and embedded our processes in our CRM system, a proprietary application that we have built ourselves. We can now handle many projects at once without calls from clients going unanswered or tasks falling through the cracks.

After 13 years in business, we are more determined than ever and more able to become the dominant provider of marketing and client communication services to independent advisors. It has not been easy, but I am happy to report that we are there. And, hopefully, you now understand how we can do what we do at such low prices compared to our competitors.