Prospectmatch Advisers That Get Ahead

You have a slow month and you feel bad.  Your manager indicates that if you did this or that, you would have done better. These reactions are misplaced because they assume that you can control your results.  You cannot.  You can only control your activities.  I know this is upsetting because Americans are taught to believe we can control everything sans the weather.  So we believe that if we have a bad month (i.e. slow sales), we must have screwed up.  Not so realize financial advisers that succeed.

You cannot make a client buy, you cannot make interest rates go down, you cannot make your clients’ mutual funds go up 20%. You cannot control your results.

You cannot control client procrastination, you cannot control terrorism, you cannot control the market diving by 800 points or the fact that a rich prospect’s brother-in-law is in the business and has his account. You cannot control your results know the financial advisers that succeed.

You can however control your activities and when you let that sink in, you will have fewer disappointments and you will have more energy. When things don’t go well, there’s nothing you can do about that.  The only thing you can do is control your activities.  Successful financial advisors know the secret formula: activity generates results.  So the secret is, be and stay BUSY.

You can make 25 contacts a day, you can study for the CFP® credential, you can join a study group, you can read a book on portfolio construction, you can have lunch with a million dollar producer, you can set your minimum account at $250,000 but you cannot control your results this week or this month.

However, in the long run, there are activities that generate extraordinary results and make successful financial advisers.  Unfortunately, most producers will never wait for the payoff and will have changed their activities seeking an instant payoff, believing that they can control their results.  When the results they want are not immediately forthcoming, they change their activities again, never realizing the payoff from the previous activities.  The top producers have much more patience.  They select a set of activities and keep doing them, not giving up, until they strike the gold. Have you been like the gold prospector who gave up 10 feet before he hit the vein of gold?

I’m reminded of Peter Lynch the great fund manager who had a simple outlook.  He knew that in the long run, stock prices follow earnings.  He invested in companies with growing earnings. Did he make money every year?  Of course not.  Yet he did not have any notion that he could control his fund’s results.  All he could do was to research companies, do a through job, find companies with growing earnings and stick to all he could control—his activities.  All he could do is sit with the knowledge that the right activities eventually bring extraordinary results.  He of course, had extraordinary long run results managing Magellan Fund; he had the best track record of any fund manager, ever.

Next time you have some ridiculous notion that you could have done something to avoid a bad week or bad month, let it go, unless that something was doing the activities you had planned to do and didn’t.  Just get in gear because in the long run, your activities are what you can control and the universe rewards appropriate activities and delivers success to financial advisers that are most active.

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ProspectMatch Will Your Retired Clients Run Out of Money?

There are many different strategies for withdrawing income from investments.  If clients own interest or dividend bearing securities and can live off that income alone, then odds are their financial security is secure (this article assumes they have made provisions for other possibilities such as rising health care costs, long-tern care and other hazards that can deplete principal).   However, most retirees will not find this adequate, especially in years when the market may be down and as inflation takes it bite out of purchasing power.

The question then becomes how much principal can they afford to draw off and still provide for inflation, and not deplete resources before death.  Most insurance agents give their clients bad advice on this issue telling them to get conservative and protect money from fluctuation.  This advice will help to bankrupt them faster.  How can you tell?

The Trinity Study

Enter the Trinity Study.  This study was conducted by three professors, at Trinity University, a few years ago to study what withdrawal rates were least likely to deplete an investor’s funds, and how the composition of the portfolio, stocks versus bonds, impacted the withdrawal rate. The study looked at the impact of withdrawal rates that varied from 3 – 12 percent, on 5 different portfolios ranging from 100 percent stock to 100 percent bonds, over all rolling withdrawal periods of 15, 20, 25 and 30 years.  One of the important characteristics of this study is that it used real historical market data not average rates of return for those time periods.  It also took the effect of inflation into account and adjusted the withdrawal rates upward each year accordingly.

The authors reached these five general conclusions:
1.    Younger retirees who anticipate longer retirement payout periods should plan on lower withdrawal rates.
2.    Bonds increase the success rate for lower to midlevel withdrawal rates, but most retirees would benefit from a stock allocation of at least 50 percent.
3.    Retirees who desire inflation-adjusted withdraws must accept a substantially reduced withdrawal rate from the initial portfolio.
4.    Stock-dominated portfolios using a 3 percent or 4 percent withdrawal rate may create rich heirs at the expense of the retiree’s current consumption.
5.    For 15-year or less payout periods, a withdrawal rate of 8 to 9 percent from a stock-dominated portfolio appears to be sustainable.

See for yourself
Below are the links to the 4 tables of data created by the study.  Note that the best portfolio performance, in terms of how long they lasted during retirement, was from the portfolios with 50%-75% stock positions.  That’s not to say stocks are better than bonds or annuities.  It is to say that telling clients to get into fixed annuities or safe investments would have bankrupted them faster based on 70 years of actual results.  Therefore, before giving financial advice, have the financial facts.  This will keep you from getting sued and also doing what’s right by your clients.

•    Table 1 illustrates the success rate of various portfolios for different time periods measured against the full time span of the Ibbotson data used, 1926 – 1995.
•    Table 2 illustrates the success rate of various portfolios for the time period after WW II, from 1946 – 1995.  As expected, market returns were better during that period and thus success rates improved significantly.
•    Table 3 illustrates the success rate of various portfolios for different time periods, adjusting for inflation/deflation during the period.  As you might expect, this one provides the gloomiest results.
•    Table 4 illustrates the variations in the amount of money you might have left at the end of each time period.

Remember, that the success rates of the above tables only show what portion of time a given withdrawal rate avoided depleting the portfolio.  In fact, each different time period produced a different result, and the range is enormous.  This table best illustrates the risks of using a static assumption for ROR.

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ProspectMatch Located In Concord,Ca Just Released “Practice and Time Management for Financial Advisors”

Advisors Learn Tactics of Streamlining and Efficiency with “Practice and Time Management for Financial Advisors”

Concord, CA. ProspectMatch. has released “Practice and Time Management for Financial Advisors”, a self study course that teaches advisors how to change their activities to produce far greater revenue.  “Advisors waste incredible amounts of time.  They work harder and just stay in place and they don’t know why.  Major culprits

·         not having a target market and dealing with too many different types of people

·         offering too many products or services

·         being distracted by their firm’s latest promotion

·         not knowing how to hire and screen good assistants or use virtual assistants

·         not distinguishing between their activities which produce high revenue and those that don’t,” says Bob Richards, VP of Marketing.

What makes this program different is that time management training typically focuses on how time is used and personal time use habits but the biggest time waster is when the business is organized incorrectly and the business strategy is poorly formed. This program focuses on the fundamental reasons that so much time is required to generate revenue and how the business can be restructured to make revenue generation efficient.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:

Bob Richards at 866-452-8354 x 203

http://www.prospect-match.net

ProspectMatch Financial Insight

Financial Professional Prospects & Financial Planning Prospects

http://www.prospectmatch10.com/

ProspectMatch-Online Insurance Leads Video

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ProspectMatch Says Don't Educate Your Prospects

Don't Educate Your Prospects says ProspectMatch

Many advisors and insurance agents feel it’s important to educate their prospects. There’s an idea that if you educate your prospects, they can make good financial decisions. We at ProspectMatch disagree.

I have 18 years of education, 20 years of experience and various credentials. My prospects will never know a fraction of what I know, no matter how many hours I spend educating them. It’s my job to know what choices they should make and tell them so. I come from the securities industry. In that industry, the professional is responsible for the client taking the correct action. If my client wants to buy stock options and that’s not suitable for them, I will be held liable if I allow them to make that investment. Therefore, it becomes my judgment to know what they should do.

Our research at ProspectMatch indicates that, as explained above, it is the professional's responsibility, because of his experience and knowledge, to recommend choices for the investor/insurance buyer, not to give them a menu of options and a ton of information. More importantly, we know that in your sales communication, you will have far more procrastination if you let the client make the choices.

Of course, you still need your prospect’s agreement for your recommendations. So rather than educate them by telling them (the usual mode of education in this country), please educate them by asking questions. They already know the answers and you can have them educate themselves.

We teach the following method of selling at ProspectMatch. Here’s what educating (and selling) by asking questions looks like:

Professional: What are your plans when your health changes?
Prospect: What do you mean?
Professional: You know that as people age their health declines. So as you age, what are your plans when your health changes?
Prospect: I never really thought about that seriously. I have good health insurance, and always assumed that was adequate preparation.
Professional: Health insurance, of course, provides for you when you have an illness that they can cure in a few days in the hospital, but what happens if your health changes such that you can’t go shopping, you can’t take care of the house, and you can’t walk up stairs?
Prospect: Well I certainly don’t want my children to have to take care of me.
Professional: So what solutions do you think are available to you?
Prospect: I’m not really sure. I know people go to nursing homes, but I could barely afford that.
Professional: What other solutions do you think are available to you?
Prospect: There’s insurance, isn’t there?
Professional: Do you think you should consider that as one of the alternatives?
Prospect: Yes, but I don’t know anything about it. I’m sure it’s expensive and I couldn’t afford it.
Professional: How much do you think it costs?
Prospect: Jeez, I have no idea, what, maybe $500 a month?
Professional: What if you could get insurance to allow you to stay in your home, have help come and assist you, and could get that for $250 a month—would that seem to be a reasonable solution?
Prospect: Is that really available?
Professional: If it were, would you want to know about it?
Prospect: Sure. I don’t want my children to have to take care of me and if I can’t take care of myself, what other choice do I have?
Professional: How would you pay for that?
Prospect: I have some investments from which I don’t take all the income.
Professional: For example?
Prospect: I have an annuity that I reinvest and I also have a mutual fund that I reinvest.
Professional: How much a month are you reinvesting?
Prospect: It’s over $1,000 a month.
Professional: So if the insurance turned out to be a good solution, you know you can pay for it?
Prospect:—Yes, if it’s about $250 a month.

Just by asking questions, this “sale” and the prospect’s education is mostly complete. Notice how much more efficient this is than “telling,” handling lots of questions and potential objections. At ProspectMatch we know that when prospects see the solutions for themselves, they cannot object to their own insights.

The payoffs to educating selling by asking questions are enormous. They increase your sales success in five ways:

1. Questions direct your prospect’s thoughts. When you speak, your prospect’s mind wanders, he thinks up objections, he questions the validity of your facts, he questions your credibility and he may even think about what to have for dinner. But when you ask a question, you get laser-focused attention. We have been continuously trained to answer questions as accurately and completely as possible, starting from the first grade. Correctly answering questions is even the basis for most television game shows. So when you ask questions, you take advantage of your prospect’s cultural training to provide their full attention and best answer.

2. Questions allow you to find out the necessary facts (ethically important for any advisor and legally important for securities licensees to comply with the “know your client” rule).

3. Emotional questions allow you to determine the “emotional facts” (your prospect’s likes/dislikes). If you don’t know how your prospect feels, you cannot make a recommendation that feels “right.”

4. Questions increase your stature and credibility in the prospect’s eyes. The fastest indicator of a person’s intelligence and caring are the questions they ask.

5. Questions allow you to maintain control of the conversation because the person asking the question controls the conversation, while the person answering has lost control.

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ProspectMatch helps financial professionals who are wasting time and earning too little

About Us

ProspectMatch helps financial professionals who are wasting time and earning too little. If you are earning less than $100,000 a year, you're either not serious, or doing the wrong things and we can show you what to do. If you are earning $100,000-$300,000 annually, you've figured some things out. But those who use our systems see their income top $500,000 annually because they spend their days doing marketing the right way, talking to motivated affluent prospects and they sell the right way.

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