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Retirement Planning > Retirement Investing

Market Your Strengths

By Randy L. Scritchfield

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Do you consider yourself a specialist or a jack-of-all-trades? After achieving Top of the Table for the last 10 years, which is the highest honor possible within the Million Dollar Round Table, I’ve learned the importance of being a specialist.

Find your niche

Think about one of those classic brochures financial advisors give to prospects, the ones in which advisors list all their skills, creating a bulleted list of up to 20 unrelated services they can offer their client, with a final line indicating “and more!”

Can an advisor really be an expert in 20+ services?

The truth is that attempting to do this is one of the biggest mistakes an agent can make. You cannot be everything to everyone. If your marketing materials don’t turn some people off, then they won’t turn the right people on. It is tempting to market yourself as someone who is able to provide every service to every person who needs financial planning, but in reality, as time goes on, your business should grow and develop so that you get really good at a few things. If you are not getting very good at something, you might be staying mediocre at everything.

A client is very rarely looking for every service available. Instead, most people will come to your office seeking guidance on something specific, such as retirement planning. Consider this: Will the client looking for an expert to help them plan for their retirement choose to go to the advisor who has 20 “specialties,” or the one who only does retirement planning? Which person would you choose?

Pick your approach

Once you move away from marketing an overwhelming number of services to an overwhelming number of people, you can choose which marketing approach works best for you and your business. For instance, some advisors may have a wide range of products, which they market to a targeted audience. For others, it might make more sense to have a limited number of products and market them to a larger group of people.  

Choosing one of these approaches will not only greatly increase your chance of being successful, it will also bring simplicity to your life and reduce your stress. The more defined your marketing method, the easier it will be to identify your key audience. And, with a more targeted approach, you’ll need less time to explain your services to each new prospect.

For more information about MDRT and how to tap into their valuable resources, visit joinMDRT.org. 

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