The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Success

This long-range calendar breaks your major activities into manageable chunks you can fit into each month.

By Janet Arrowood

What do successful financial advisors do that sets them above so many of their peers? After all, most advisors go through similar training programs, work with a similar variety of products, and offer essentially similar services. Their secret? A month-by-month plan that ensures they keep in close contact with all their clients and prospects, pay particular attention to their top clients and perform the tasks that enables them to manage their practices efficiently.

You manage your daily and weekly contacts with your clients and prospects using a contact management system: a palm pilot, contact cards, a daytimer, or perhaps some specialized client management software. But to really manage your business you need a long-range calendar that breaks your major activities into manageable chunks you can fit into a given month.

These activities are as varied as your practice, but here are some of the highlights:

• Annual insurance and financial client reviews including: Face-to-face contact with your “A” list (top 20 percent) and “B” list (middle 30-40 percent) clients; by telephone with your “C” list clients and all your prospects
• Quarterly meetings or calls to your top clients—your “A” list clients
  Prospecting
• Tax-planning and IRA meetings
• Retirement planning meetings
• Long-term care insurance planning meetings
• Getting your continuing education (CE) and NASD-required firm element credits.
• Joining and renewing memberships in professional and business organizations.
• Building and implementing a networking and marketing plan—seminars, mailings, open houses, etc.
• The list looks daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve divided the key activities of a top advisor into monthly events. Then, to make the list even easier to implement, we broke down the monthly activities into weekly ones, so you have about one major task each week (and lots of client meetings and contacts).

So click here to download the Financial Advisor’s 12-Month Guide to Success.