Welcome to the Strategic Alliance Advisor. I’m excited to have the opportunity to bring you this blog and share weekly insights on how to successfully form strategic alliances with other professionals. Over the coming weeks and months, I look forward to helping you grow your practice by outlining for you proven methods that I have developed in my own practice for forming these highly profitable relationships. Before we can get into the how-to’s of forming strategic alliances with CPAs, attorneys or any other professionals, I think it’s important that we first look at why strategic alliances are so vital to your success.
As an advisor today, there is no shortage of gimmicky “marketing programs” and ways you can spend thousands of dollars very quickly trying to market your services. Throughout the month of February, we’re going to look at some of the most popular ways advisors are marketing their practices today. What I hope to point out and make clear is that most of them are in some way, shape or form flawed, and in many cases very costly to you as the advisor. I’ve been there, so I know. For the past 10 years, I’ve tried all kinds of different marketing strategies to promote my practice, and I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, all with the hopes of finding the high net-worth clients I needed to grow my practice. A lot of what I’m going to share with you in the coming weeks and months is from my own personal experience. However, I’ll also be sharing multiple stories and insights from other advisors that I have coached in building their own strategic relationships in hopes that you’ll learn from their experiences as well.
I thought we’d kick off this blog by tackling one of the biggest marketing challenges that is front and center for many annuity producers today–direct mail seminars.
We’ve all been there. At some point in your not too distant past, direct mail seminars were it. Like me, I’m sure your business thrived off of the large numbers of retirees flocking to free dinner seminars in search of answers from a trusted advisor. I can remember one of the first direct mail seminars I hosted. I mailed 5,000 invitations and had 112 people show up. Not a bad turnout. In following up after the event, I moved close to a million dollars in new assets and earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 in commissions. I was hooked. As painful as it was to write that check to the direct mail company, it sure beat cold calling and all the other less successful approaches I had tried.
The Direct Mail Bandwagon