SMART ADVISOR MARKETING

As I wrote that, it sounded like something from Star Trek. But it’s not.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Large corporations have spent billions of dollars collecting information on consumers. They can tell you what their ideal client looks like and where to find them. So when they do their marketing, it is very targeted. Can you do the same?

We are excited to announce the launch of a new service that will do all of that for you!

Here’s how it works: You already have clients that you think are ideal. They have the assets and attitudes that match your organization. You could comb through the client files and see data about their assets, liabilities and families but that doesn’t give you much of a ‘profile’ of who you are looking for.

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The easiest sales we ever closed were the clients who had problems that we could solve.

Check out these headlines from the last few weeks:

“U.S. stocks are off to the worst start to the year on record, according to key market measures”

“2007 may be a record year for capital gains distributions from mutual funds”

“The Fed is signaling that it will be lowering interest rates”

What do all these have in common? Your target audience has many reasons to be concerned about their investments. This month your ideal prospects are opening their year-end retirement account statements in shock. One of our friends said that after last fall he doesn’t have a 401k, but instead a 201k, the account has fallen so far. This month your ideal prospects are getting the 1099s for mutual fund capital gains while the value of those funds continue to fall. This month your ideal prospects are searching for a safe harbor and they find falling interest rates on savings accounts. They need you now more than ever.

The opportunity can be captured easily. Right now you need to start communicating with your target audience and telling them that you can offer them solutions to these challenges. Tax deferred accounts, annuities, and managed accounts are solutions that you can offer them.

Let’s call this your “Financial Rescue” campaign.

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If you’re like most of us, you probably generated a lot of qualified prospects in 2007 that didn’t become clients. Maybe they were folks who sent RSVP’s for a seminar but didn’t attend or didn’t book an appointment afterwards. Whatever the source, and whatever the reason the qualified prospect slipped away, the bottom line is the same: if you didn’t make the conversion from prospect to client, it was a missed opportunity to cultivate new relationships and grow your business.

It was also a missed opportunity to obtain any referrals that prospect might have sent your way had the relationship developed. The primary thing to keep in mind is that when you let a prospect slip away, you aren’t just losing one potential client – the loss can be exponential as you are sacrificing that prospect’s future referrals, and referrals from those referrals, etc. Each qualified prospect that gets away represents lost business that isn’t easily measurable, but you can be sure the losses add up significantly.

Here’s a proven idea for converting more of those good prospects into great clients.

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There was an interesting study reported last week about how a group of employees would relate to a potential new boss. They were given a resume for one person that was pretty generic. Then they were given another resume for the same person but it was written including words like ‘caring’ and ‘nurturing’. In communication circles this is called ‘coloring’.

Coloring is an important part of your marketing communication. There are a variety of concepts that you can communicate better by adding to your copy. Most of us already have wording to describe ourselves as knowledgeable and experienced. Many of us talk about how we focus on a particular market or service for that market niche. But we can take this to a higher level.

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Bill Gross, founder and chief investment officer of PIMCO, had a great article in Fortune last month. He described the ’sub-prime’ financial mess this way:

“The tangled web of sub-primes has claimed more than its share of victims in the last months; homeowners by the hundreds of thousands, to be sure, but also those who created, packaged, insured, distributed, and ultimately bought what should have been labeled “junk mortgages” but which by a masterstroke of marketing genius received more respectable imprimatur.

“Skim milk masquerades as cream,” warned Gilbert and Sullivan over a century ago, and sure enough, today’s subprimes, packaged into financial conduits with monikers like SIIV’s and CDO’s, pretended to be AAA - cubes of butter.”

Subprime Crisis Hits Money Funds

LOS ANGELES: Money market funds were invented 37 years ago to offer investors better returns than bank savings accounts while providing a high degree of safety. Most of the $2.5 trillion sitting in these funds is invested in assets like U.S. Treasury bills, certificates of deposit and short-term commercial debt.

Unlike bank accounts, money market funds are not insured by the federal government. They almost never fail.

Unbeknown to most investors, some of the largest money market funds today are putting part of their cash into one of the riskiest debt investments in the world: collateralized debt obligations backed by subprime mortgage loans.

Collateralized debt obligations are packages of bonds and loans, and almost half of all CDOs sold in the United States in 2006 contained subprime debt, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

[Via International Herald News]