'The Sketch Guy' Wants to Help You Attract New Clients

As “The Sketch Guy” for 10 years, Carl Richards created 500 New York Times columns of crisp essays and quirky doodle-like drawings explaining complex financial concepts. 

Now a select 10 of those can land daily in the inboxes of financial advisors’ prospects.

From Snappy Kraken and Richards’ firm, Behavior Gap, the money-lesson gems aim to create opportunities to attract leads and start conversations.

“We aren’t trying to sell anything. … [The advisor] is saying, ‘If you like this [content], we’d love to work with you,’” Richards tells ThinkAdvisor in a recent interview.

The Financial Clarity Email Course, delivered on 10 consecutive days, launched Jan. 12 and is available to Snappy Kraken clients as an add-on campaign. The series focuses on emotions, goals and practical strategies related to money, and the segments can be tailored to an advisor’s perspective and voice via artificial intelligence.

“We’re not prescribing. We’re just dropping little bits of diagnoses over a short period of time,” says Richards, describing some topics of what internally is called Behavior Gap: Audience Builder Series. 

Richards, who also hosts Behavior Gap Radio, a private podcast, was a financial advisor for many years, starting out at Fidelity, then moving to Prudential and on to Merrill Lynch. He had his own shop, Prasada Capital Management, which he sold to Buckingham Asset Management in 2012.

Richards then developed as an author and coaching resource for financial advisors, beginning with the 2012 book, “The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money.” Two of his most recent offerings for advisors are “Volume One: Life + Money” and “Volume Two: Meaningful Conversations.”

In the interview with Richards, who was speaking by phone from his base in Park City, Utah, he discusses changing the way that people think about money and providing ways to arrange a meeting with an advisor.

Here are highlights of our conversation: 

THINKADVISOR: Why did Snappy Kraken and you decide to produce an email course for prospective clients?

CARL RICHARDS: This has been done in a bunch of other industries, but nobody in ours is doing it. It’s been incredibly successful in other [fields] as a way to add value to people’s lives at scale.

We call it a course, but you can think of it as a book delivered in 10 chapters or a mini-workshop.

What’s the objective?

To change the way people are thinking about money a little — to tweak how they view their relationship with money.

That’s [a mission] I built my entire business around.

If [advisors] can deliver valuable, relevant content to [a prospect’s] inbox, that helps them think about their money a little differently.

And it makes it really easy for them to say, “I’d like to meet with you.”

What’s the marketing psychology behind the course?

There’s always window-shopping that needs to go on [to choose a financial advisor]. The easiest way to do that is to wrap something up in a way that can be delivered to their inbox.

At the bottom of the mails, there are opt-in prompts that encourage the prospective clients to reach out to the advisor.

What’s a quick and easy way for financial advisors to make use of this program?

They can take their existing list of prospects who said they want to hear from them and ask them to sign up for the 10-week course.

How does the advisor then try to obtain business from them?

An 11th email is a call-to-action for the prospect to schedule an introductory call or to go to the advisor’s website.