How Advisors Can Write More, Better and Faster

Today, a good part of sales is writing.

Sure, you talk. You meet. You conduct seminars. And you write, write, write. Or should. Emails. Occasional letters. Proposals. Perhaps articles for publication or to post on your website.

But mostly emails and notes on client meetings.

Mostly, you can do this the old-fashioned way, one email at a time.

I want to help you speed it up. After all, you are worth $1,000 an hour meeting with and talking to clients and prospects. You are worth a lot less typing meeting notes and emails. So let’s speed that up.

These are the tools that I use. I have posted some short videos and links at my site. All free, of course.

Old Favorites

Two of my favorites, which I use daily, are Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and Copytalk. Dragon is a voice recognition program. It gets installed on your PC or Mac. Copytalk is a mobile dictation service. You call them on your phone or use their app. Your dictation is transcribed by real people as opposed to a program like Dragon. (Don’t even think about using a feature like Siri. Guaranteed compliance heartburn.)

I use Copytalk primarily for documenting phone calls and meetings. During a call or meeting, I am taking notes. They are often cryptic and therefore mean little 24 hours later. As soon as possible, I call Copytalk and dictate what happened on a call. A single dictation might include notes, an email to a client or prospect and/or instructions to team members. My assistant, Lisa, proofs each email and then sends it on its way.

I am a 60 word per minute typist. I can dictate at 120–160 words per minute. So why on earth would I type notes into a CRM? Normally, I am done with my documentation in 2–3 minutes. That’s a single-spaced page, a lot of info about what happened in that call or meeting. Whatever my deficiencies, inadequate documentation of my calls and meetings is not among them.

Why not use Dragon for meeting notes? Once you buy the program, it’s free.

The reason is probably just personal. When I dictate and see an error, I have to correct it. I cannot see my errors in Copytalk dictation, so I don’t stop. For actions such as documenting meetings, Copytalk is much faster than Dragon. At least for me.

When you buy Dragon, I strongly recommend the Premium Edition. It has one feature not available on the Home Edition. With Premium you can have the program read back what you dictated. Follow along in the written text as it reads to you. Even if I have typed a document, I often run it through Dragon when I proof it. That’s how I catch all (O.K., most) of the mistakes the spellchecker in Word misses.

With Dragon, I can crack through a stuffed inbox two or three times faster than typing.

If you decide to use Dragon, I have two suggestions for you: First, make certain you go through enough of the tutorials so you know how to correct voice recognition errors. Dragon learns as you correct mistakes. Over time, accuracy will improve.

Second, buy a microphone other than the one that ships with the program. That might push your voice recognition accuracy from 96% to 99%. Think about this for a moment. If you are dictating at 160 wpm, a 4% error rate means six or seven errors to correct. For each, you have to stop dictating and fix the problem. Your typing speed is way down, maybe 40 wpm.

I have put a link to the microphone I use on my advisor productivity page.