Industry sign banking new jersey presentation online
hello this is don anders and welcome to marketing for financial advisors i'm joined by george velar and patrick schartz both from leading response and if you're not familiar with leading response they are one of the if not the biggest i'm sure they'll let us know uh mail houses and and marketing companies for financial advisors in that sector we've worked with them since they were rme uh and probably about a decade now we we've used them for when we do mailers and everything else so a lot of questions have been coming up around mailers now in this cove environment are they working is it worth it more people are at home does that make sense and so i wanted to bring in both george and patrick to kind of talk about it give us some numbers some statistics whether or not it makes sense to do to do mailers so first off thank you both for for joining me i really appreciate it thank you for having us like always we're glad to share the information with any of your team perfect perfect well yeah so just one so let's start off uh with you george i know um we know each other from we became friends back when you're at rme and uh you're the founder of rme and so tell me kind of how you got into that business the business of um you know mailers and and that tell me about you know kind of uh founding army and then and then how it became leading response and where you are today sure well i'm a direct marketer by trade i went to school for marketing graduated thought i was going to go to new york and work at agency and do tv commercials and radio conversions and all the glittery stuff and i was fortunate enough that my path in tampa florida ended up at a conference where somebody approached me and said uh have you ever done direct marketing i said what is it so well direct mail but very sophisticated packaging and ideas what do you mean so i went to the company and i learned a lot what they were doing they were targeting uh doing marketing for auto dealers all over the country and you know auto dealers are very good marketers they spend a lot of money in direct mail because the list that you can get for people that own certain cars it's it's incredible so i got involved so i do some direct mail for hundreds of auto dealerships around the country out of clearwater florida and they were doing these tent sales that we would invite consumers to go to a tent cell to buy cars and i was doing you know millions of pieces of mail very creative looks and designs and i went to a couple of the events because they were held in florida sometimes and i found out that the dealerships were taking cars and driving them 20 you know 30 minutes to a stadium or a bank or a mall parking lot or a credit union parking lot and they were selling a lot of cars and i thought well that's weird why don't we just do the marketing for the dealership and i said george you don't understand people have anxiety coming to the dealership so we removed that anxiety by moving the cars to a neutral site and that philosophy actually changed my life don when i met the financial services world my first client was america express financial advisor in 1995 and i spoke at a conference a chamber of commerce they wanted a marketing guy to speak and i spoke and there was all these industries there and this guy approached me and he said george i'm a financial advisor what that is i go no he said well i'm a glorified insurance agent they call us financial advisors now and i said okay so well what you said up there on stage about the automotive kind of kind of resonated with me he said i'm a financial advisor i teach people how to invest their money but obviously they have to give me their money so it's uh i think there's a lot of anxiety there do you have any ideas for me as a financial advisor we can do something similar and and i thought okay well let me think about it i got back to him don i said what about a hotel what about a restaurant what about somewhere that's neutral not your office do the same thing the auto dealers are doing but do something and we did a hotel a library and a restaurant the hotel because that two three people call in the library one and the restaurant 330 and that day in 1995 my life changed i became really involved with the concept and i started understanding that people needed help financially but they had too much anxiety going to their office so i did one restaurant two restaurants i did hotels libraries and i just started fading and i did all restaurants i've done since then a million seminar campaigns using my expertise in direct marketing which has become very sophisticated i'll explain that in a minute and uh you know a million seminars later do using direct mail and and some facebook we have a lot of data that we can share with people that don't understand how direct mail works especially when it comes to inviting people to events or to a uh whether it be online or live or educational by the way yeah i think i've discussed this before on the on the podcast a lot of times people will say well why don't i just build a conference center in my office or a conference room in my office and just have everybody come there and i say because people are scared to come to a financial advisor's office they don't know if you're going to start pulling out applications they don't know if you're going to handcuff them you know lock the door until they sign something what they want is they want to feel like they're on evil play even play uh playing ground with you and the way to do that is through restaurants the way to do that the way to bring somebody's the reason you go on dates and you go to a restaurant is to bring down that temperature right to bring down that anxiety and so i think personally i i completely agree and and one of the a piece of advice that i've always given people is don't build a super expensive 100 000 conference center in your uh in your office unless it's for like existing clients that might be okay but not people who not for brand new leads it just doesn't really work that way it's a real easy tip that conference that you want to build is what you want to do listen my company is thrived for 25 years doing the following do what clients want to do and do it their way and if they come keep doing it when they don't come stop and we it's a very simple uh philosophy that we follow but when people ask us why do you when are seminars gonna be over i don't know so far they're showing up in droves even at tobit and patrick at the end of this conversation has a lot of proof good so tell me about the transition i know a lot of people are familiar with rme now it's leading response like tell me about that that kind of transition over to leading response well thank you for letting me clarify because a lot of confusion in the marketplace we built the brand for 25 years on the rme it first was response mail express and then we evolved the response marketing excellence still rme then rme360 and then guess what don like anything else when things get very successful companies big companies look at you and say listen what are you all doing down there in tampa and private equity firms started coming to us and say we like to invest in your company we like to find ways to uh give you more resources to reach the financial industry and then they did some research and they said george how much money do you think has been transferred from the consumer's hands 55 years older to the advisors with your program i said oh my god billions and i did a little bit of metrics show them a little bit of numbers and they were like wait a minute we went in so i sold the company with some partners twice and we said okay we're gonna build our me up let's buy some companies that are relevant that we can grow the resource so we bought a competitor locally in tampa florida by the name of resource for solutions they came on board 15 sales people they were doing the same thing we were doing dinner seminars and educational events and then we went out about two digital companies in dallas that do thousands of leads using facebook and google for attorneys and we said well we buy them let's combine our resources we transfer the intelligence to to rb and let's call it something unique and it's let's call it leading response so we didn't go out of business there was no problems we just became a bigger company with four companies that do lead generation under the roof leading response one word just a big merger but so the same products in quality everything else yeah digital direct mail and again we have both sides for the last by six seven years and we we response is the name that stayed along and all the three names and the reason for that is that's how we base our recommendations on did it work did it get responsive or not and we're very very frank and open about that with people and patrick i know that you're um you're the head of uh the director of advisor development so you your whole job is working financial advisors correct that is that's exactly what i do and and my role really is to onboard advisors and to help them get started in the right way right and to follow the best practices one thing that i see and i look at campaigns i have access to all of the campaigns that we do pre-covered we were run between 1500 to 2000 campaigns per month and i have access to all of those and i love to get in there and dissect all that information and find out what works and what doesn't work and advisors my job is to really help them with the best practices and get them off on the right foot once we get them going in the right direction because there's a lot of times a lot of bad habits out there that need to be broken they've always had you know coming to us they've had uh maybe not such great events right in the past when they've been somewhere else they've done them on their own whatever they've done and we want to make sure that we get them going in the right direction doing the right things there are so many components to a campaign from one advisor to the next that are so different it's not a one size fits all it's not a cookie cutter approach and you have to look at it that way and if you do you can have great success campaign in and campaign out so and what are what would you say are the biggest things neither of you can answer this what would you say the biggest things um that can impact a mailer campaign is it the title is it how uh is it how the actual envelope looks or the or the invitation i mean what what do you see as the big biggest kind of maybe even one two three biggest things that once they change this then then it just drops off significantly george go ahead first yeah i i can i used to say i think and 25 years later after a million campaigns i'd go i know and here's the biggest tip i could give you there's around 12 variables that if you mess with them it's not going to work and literally they're they're when we talk about these uh we do these makeovers we we said what do you mean seminars didn't work for you or what do you mean you don't believe in seminars tell me why and then we go through the variables and we say if you miss half of those or eight of those 12 we can make your campaign fail completely and we track all those variables the moving parts because we're not a male house it's like calling you guys an annuity shop you're not a nudie shop your financial advisor professional advice that you give to people we own two male houses and we own equipment but in our building in tampa people come to visit us go hey where's the mail house go not here our mentality is different in tampa at our headquarters we we're an agency who thinks and uses data to evolve and what we found this we have all these variables that we constantly monitor and when we put them all in place they work incredibly now patrick will give you the the next concept which is the challenge is getting advice to follow the 12 variables and we give them ample proof but they want to cut corners and patrick isn't that your biggest challenge it is i think the campaign killers that i see the most timing is number one and we've done a really good job over the last few years sort of getting everybody in the boat on that one it is tough but it's evolving still to this day now we really need because of covid not because of anything that we've done but because the code and the slowdowns in the postal service you really need to mail things 30 days in advance in most cases so that you can expect 15 to 18 days in homes that's when it starts but it still takes up to 10 days before all the mail is completely in homes you want to be aware of things like that we still get advisors for whatever reasons i know there's challenges but we still get advisors that come to us two three weeks ahead of the first event date and say hey i'm ready to get a campaign going we can do it and we can be pretty successful even in a short time frame nine times out of ten but it's that one time that can be a campaign killer and it's the one that i'm not sure anybody really wants to risk their marketing budget on so that's crucial right the other ones are still times of the day 12 o'clock lunches don't work as well doesn't mean they're bad it just means that you're gonna get about half the response that you would get for a traditional dinner it's okay to put them on there and test nothing's wrong with that just make sure that you're doing the right things with the dinners as well and then the lunch becomes a bonus if you're hinging everything on lunches it's going to fail you and when it does it's going to be it's going to be a hard conversation i would rather have the hard conversation up front with you before you've spent the money than on the back end with you after you spent the money and been disappointed with those results and we talked about that a lot and i'm going to share some information with you towards the end of this called on where we're going to talk about um campaigns that are gold star campaigns versus campaigns that are underperformers and why they're under performance but there are a multitude of reasons and i will share with you too one thing that we do and we've been doing it here now for about six years i created it with george was the red flag review and i initially created that program so that we could help advisors internally those that that had troubles with with what they were doing with us but what i found is a lot of folks will refer advisors to us when they're doing it themselves or doing them somewhere else and say please talk to this person and run a red flag review on what they're doing and we do them and it's a great way to really open up a conversation with us where we can identify in most cases it's about three or four things that they need to adjust and those few adjustments will impact their campaigns dramatically and get their numbers back up where they are so we have timing times of the day are there any other pillars that that kind of stand out to you oh packaging listen many you if people visit our facility they're amazed out of the 1200 campaigns there's 1100 that are different looks and different there's a lot of there's a lot of misinformation out there about cookie cutters and envelopes the printing equipment today has become a very sophisticated imaging process where you can do a lot of things with color fonts images size cuts folds everything is interactive in your hands that's why i always tell the hallmark story they spend thousands and thousands of hours designing the cards the envelopes on purpose it's not by accident and there's like four or five greeting cards you go to target or or a big pharmacy store there's three rows of greeting cards now why because people are consuming them because it's a it's a touch it's a touchy feel thing we designed invitations to events and by the way we do a lot of non-dinner as we'll talk about later uh it's not the only reason people are going to non-dinner events as well but the invitation still is tactile so we spend a lot of time like hallmark designing colors envelopes images font sizes layouts for example you put the dinner information or the educational information on the right side on the border it doesn't work it has to be at the bottom we've learned headlines we use three headlines now in
tead of one headline uh we don't put times on the invitation literally 12 variables that if you goof up and you don't consult with us you're going to make mistakes we know there's six seconds to get the invite the people's attention in the mailbox and if we don't do well in those six seconds i don't care how good of a practice how good of a name you have it's not going to work so we can guide you and show you how direct mail works today it's changed it's evolved things change based on your location too so location you're in texas versus new york are you going to have so i remember one time we had a client who i think they're kind of yours too they use us for the digital they use you guys for the um for the direct mail and what they said was well in new jersey we have a bunch of pescatarians and vegetarians so if you put a big bloody steak on the on the invite we get less of an invite but if you go on texas it better be a rare steak or else you're going to be in trouble do you guys see that kind of difference traffic patterns we see you know steak restaurants by far dominating remember in this country in a lot of countries steak dinner is a treat it's a laboratory thing hey we're going out for steak very important that's why the steak houses they also help us a lot here's how they build their locations at the ideal venue a geography where there's money i tell people listen even if you don't believe me listen to me follow the steakhouse's root they don't build restaurants just anywhere ruth craig perry's they're very specific about where the locations are being placed nationwide and it's all based on money and traffic patterns well if you look at if you ever look at opening a franchise a franchise the whole thing is based on demographics so for instance if you look at like a wind stop or something like that they actually want a very middle class um you know they don't they don't want to be in the very high neighborhood they want to be very middle class but if you look at roost chris you have to have a certain amount of high net worth clients for them to even accept you to be able to accept the steak house so yeah you're absolutely right they've already done the research they already know that's why they're there and don that really boils down to going back to the vegetarian or the pescatarian and all of that information georgia that goes down to personalization and that's something that is so crucial and we it's something we want to talk about we're the only ones in the industry that personalizes everything the way that we do if you look at invitations that i design because i will when i onboard an advisor i usually do all the design work on them up front and i will personalize it with that recipient's name no less than four times throughout that invitation on the front end script on the back end script on the tickets and then somewhere in the body and we do that for a reason because if you look at the the classic share a coke campaign is one that i always go back to you might be familiar with it it came out in 2011 in australia it came out in 2014 in the u.s and it increased uh the u.s coke consumption by uh two percent when it when they launched it and that is it went from 1.7 billion um 1.7 billion servings per day to 1.9 billion servings per day overnight because they started putting people's names on the cans and they started having them post those on social media nothing is sweeter to a person than hearing their name or seeing their name in print and when they see it they connect with it that's a great way to personalize just like pescetarians and vegetarians right and knowing who your market is you can do other things as well instead of that bloody state um you can put on pictures of the restaurant which we do very creative putting on local pictures of the restaurant or the scene of the night the skyline of the local area things that people are connected to visually they love that in addition to their name and those types of things they don't cost us any more they don't cost the advisor anymore to put those on there and do it the right way and your numbers go up incrementally when you do things like that i love it you guys have tested and you guys see that as well so let's talk about locations for for a second you know we mentioned dinner seminars our dinner seminar is still in your opinion the gold standard of where to do a seminar well 36 states that are open florida included i always give you examples and tips okay if you're a financial advisor and you don't believe in dinner so you think it's i don't understand i want you to go on a tuesday and thursday drive in your neighborhood go to the local restaurants look at the parking lot and then walk into the restaurant like we do and go when people spend their own money it's full forget about the seminar they're there at seven o'clock to 8 30 sold out some are more separated than others and so people are pent up they want to go out so we're going to follow what the response tells us in 36 states right now where the restaurants are open they are eager to serve so they're making all kinds of deals or making all kinds of seating arrangements the seminars will work no no questions we have we track every single campaign we will tell you what the numbers are in certain locations fleming's is a good example there are corporate partner bars a million dollar agreement with them nationwide they give us feedback onto the traffic that they're getting every single fleming's location is sold out at night on their own the seminar rooms are filled with financial advisors and pharmaceutical companies and even though they're smaller it's still 15 25 people per you do three nights i think the dinners work better because the people tell us they want to meet that way and they don't they don't mind their reciprocity now i said it earlier we are experimenting a lot with webinars we've experimented a lot with uh with uh other locations that are not restaurants but the consumers if you ask me the consumers are telling us they prefer the restaurant because it's safe safety in numbers they know where it is they've been there before they would spend their own money going there and they're not going to be locked into a room now yeah i'll give you so i'll give you something that's really hot right now direct mail targeting an invitation to people in your area and saying come to this webinar and we'll deliver the food the hottest thing we got going right now one after another one please reserve your space to this webinar and that's a courtesy from ruth chris decals capital girl you name it we are going to deliver between an hour an hour and a half before the webinar knock on your door and deliver dinner for two unbelievable results not gonna lie to you i'm surprised but you know during covet ev everybody's being creative and innovative so guess what an advisor in virginia beach gave us that idea we tried it now we have 50 advisors doing it so things pick up really quickly and we base our recommendations on response they're responding to this whether we like it or not there's some movie theaters that close down they were working for a while some hotels have a real nice restaurant it works really well uh and some of the colleges and all that are you know are proposed listen as long as it's an event or a play or some kind of museum opening it works but direct mail right now the data don is so rich and here's why we're buying things through amazon and netflix we are volunteering a tremendous amount of personal data that list companies never had before so i tell people listen we're in the business because that side of it is getting better and better and more sophisticated we can specifically target people with investment producing assets better than any other media in the country tv radio facebook google better why because the media data companies are gathering information they're buying information paying money to buy from netflix facebook that's where you have these big problems right now you know people are doubting facebook hey is my information yeah your information is being shared why because that's what all data companies do so direct mail has taken a a huge step forward because of all these internet transactions that people are going through right now you're always going to pay for something you know if you you're using something you're either going to pay with your money you're going to pay through time through commercials or something like that we're gonna pay for your information one of those three things so there's no there's no uh free app or something you're using one of those three things will happen and if you're not they're not running ads to you and they're not um they're not and you're not paying for it they're selling your information that's the way it comes out so um so that's good so so right now dinner seminars uh still the gold standard if you can do it um but then there's other good options too which is good and people contact you and see what's working in their area another question i have that that kind of you know people were kind of scared about and i think it happened to some people is what happens if they do a mailer and in the middle of the mail going out things shut down they go back to you know phase one or now the restaurant can't be open you know do you guys have uh uh you know some of a response i'm sure you're getting that right so do you guys have a response to the people who say that patrick so it's happened unfortunately and there's a couple of things that we do what we recommend is we offer a webinar pivot on the invitation it doesn't cost you anything to do it and should something happen we'll call all your people and pivot them to the webinar due to that unfortunately some don't take advantage of it and are fearful that uh the webinar will overshadow the event or i'm not really sure what the mindset is it doesn't cost anything to put that on there it's just an insurance policy is all it is it's not there we're not going to actually do the webinar unless we have to right and we put that information on there but it we will ask you if you want to put the webinar pivot on there in the event that your state does shut down or your restaurant shuts down due to employees getting copic and if you say yes great we do it you don't have to use our platform you can use anybody's platform your own if you've got one right you can just do a zoom call however you want to do it or you can use ours as well if you decline that then at that point unfortunately it's on you we've done everything we can we want to be good partners and we want to help and that's why we offer that but if you decline it there's not a lot we can do it's out of our hands at that point and then we just hope and pray that uh that the restaurant doesn't get shut down but if it's me and i'm doing it and i know what i know there's absolutely no way i wouldn't put that on there i would go on every one of you and the occurrence of that don in our world because we tracked everything i mean literally we track every single movement the occurrence is very low it happened to us at the very beginning and i'll give you an example to give you kind of an insurance blanket out of 300 jobs 20 we couldn't catch it we called some ups had it pulled that because a lot of people think mail slow they call it snail mail that's kind of the noise we hear out there listen there's no such thing as snail mail the delivery systems of today's post post office along with drop shipping which we do i'll give you an example if i'm mailing to michigan from tampa or wisconsin we have two mail shops that we own let's say it's going from tampa to wisconsin we don't put it in the tampa airport post office like metal houses do we ship directly from tampa to wisconsin i mean to uh wherever whatever city i mentioned and we then we enter the mail if you drop it in the local post office don a lot of people don't know this the mail will travel to four or five cities before it goes to the city of origin we have valve pack if you you know valpec is a little envelope with all the coupons all right visit for you their headquarters sap we hired one of the top people almost 20 years ago and they came over and said where are you dropping your mail for all these invitations he said well on the type of post office like everybody does he said no wait a minute we don't do that we drop ship because we don't trust the postal delivery stops like an airline if you go four stops you're gonna lose your luggage so mail has become very efficient because most big companies use drop shipping and enter the mail directly by truck into that post and then they handle it and like i said that's another variable that matters a lot but we track everything so we kind of understand where the moving parts are like we said before okay very good um now let's talk a second about uh direct response mail so so not to a seminar to an event do you have campaigns or topics that are working to go from a mailer directly to an appointment yeah so so coven before covet pre-covet we developed the program almost 12 years ago concierge and what it is is we took the same demographics and said what if we tested inviting people that want more privacy that will not go to a seminar we mentioned it on there if you're a person who wants more privacy and confidentiality with your affairs we understand you're probably not going to set an event we're inviting you to meet with us one on one at the office for one hour session no cost you could ask any questions you have bring your bucket list bring all your financial problems it's just an hour visit if we like each other we get along and we understand each other we'll make an appointment at a later date to maybe give you some suggestions oh by the way we're going to offer you some kind of dinners on us if you come and spend the hour with us and we do a review session afterwards we want you to go to dinner celebrate the fact that you took some action and we give gift cards again an idea that came 12 years ago from an advisor in sarasota and it took off so 20 of our businesses one-on-one appointments called concierge it works really well i still do the same thing we did with the dinner events give them a dinner out let them go on dinner by themselves and first don they were meeting at the restaurant privately with these couples and then people said george there's too many i can't go to 12 15 dinners a month so we started doing gift cards at the office and it worked just as well and now we're offering the virtual meetings with a gift card no seminar no event and it's working as long as the advice understands that it takes a little longer because people do a virtual meeting another virtual meeting and the transfer of money is a little bit more delayed than when you meet in person so we do have that i always tell people if you're listening to this your first virtual meeting is not an actual appointment it's a pre-appointment so and what people most people don't realize they think that they're just going into a virtual meeting there's a lot more that goes into them having to get in the car and drive to your office and sit down they actually feel like it's going to be almost like a procedure at that point if they're just logging onto a virtual meeting they're just seeing what's going on so so you have to treat that first meeting as a as just a pre like hey how can i help i'm here to be your friend how can i help and then from there you know you have to uncover enough issues to drive them to that next meeting right so then you have to say well we might want to take a look at your risk analysis you're pretty close to retirement it sounds like you're pretty you know and then we might want to take a look at this and blah blah blah and then so from there you can drive them to your first appointment so for for us you just have to have to be careful because a lot of people think that they're going to get right into um you know i talked to one guy who at the very beginning of covet he had like 40 appointments and he didn't quote none of them even showed up in the second meeting and i said well tell me what you're doing on the first meeting and he said um he said well yeah i just do a process it's about
wo hours we sit down and we go over we ask them every single question and they have to send us all this information i said do this next time you do it just say how can i help and shut up until they're done talking just say how can i help and then they'll talk and then at the very end say okay here's what we can solve we'll solve it on the next appointment what's a good time for you that's all you have to do and he went from being you know barely you know didn't write anything for four months to now on the stage at one of the biggest fmos because he's writing so much business so if you're having that issue that's a that's a great point george make sure that you're not doing it so so those are working um now what's the type of response now but do you have to buy them a uh the the gift card for the dinner seminar well no but patrick will tell you more about it we go by data so we present to the advisor the two options if you don't do this is what can happen you know patrick said something very important earlier knowing what doesn't work is one of our best consulting uh sessions that we have we'll tell you everything that's not working which is the majority of things that advice them want to do because they want to do it right but patrick can answer that because i have to tell you we we have the recommendations both sides if you don't do this this could happen if you do this will happen you choose and then we you know use a lot more like the report that pat's going to share at the end we're going to show you six successful ones and four that failed you choose go ahead patrick so yeah it's um it i can't wait to show the reports and i can't wait to give you that information because it is it is so important to everything that we do it's like george said it's it's the things that that we know that don't work are more powerful than the things that do and that's the stuff that i love sharing with advisors and share with them regularly because that's the stuff that gets them to go oh wait he's not just telling me that he's giving me data and it's the data that's so important in the message right i can tell you anything uh people people can tell you whatever you want to hear they can lie to you about anything but the data doesn't lie and that's the important part that people miss um you can go to a big group and get you know if somebody recommends you to do the appointment program and you get in front of 40 people like your advisor did that you were speaking about don and none of them could have any money and he couldn't close anything maybe he didn't have all the information we give you all that information about what's working it doesn't do us any good to get you in front of 40 prospects if those prospects aren't qualified right whether that's in a seminar an appointment uh campaign whatever it is we want to make sure that we're putting you in front of rooms or rooms or campaigns filled with highly qualified prospects they're short-sighted don they go hey you know i'll give you good example hey i've given away 50 gift cards so far okay it cost me all this money okay do you track your results yeah okay from experience i'm gonna tell you that you probably thought that 10 people only came for the gift card yeah who cares what did you make well i wrote two million dollars listen the disney world analogy if you go to disney world there's hundreds of hotels that'll give you free tickets 385 worth of tickets to go to a timeshare tour with disney properties let's say 80 percent of the people just get the tickets sit the time should go up nope nope nope and they walk out they've done the metrics that the 20 who bought it represents millions of dollars advisors get caught up on the dinner cost on the gift card class we've done the math on it is unbelievable that people that stick to it long term when they look at it okay show me all the gift cards what'd you spend what did you make eight to one ten to one financial advisors are sensitive they act like they're not but they're sensitive and and i get it because i am one and i am i'm sensitive about stuff and and but that's so and i have this conversation with people all the time and they'll say well i don't want to do a dinner seminar because i can't stand sitting in the room and seeing that happy people are just there to eat your it's difficult why do you but my whole point why do you care when you run a tv ad 80 90 of those people are either going to click away or they're going to look at facebook during the tv ad when you do a mailer probably 90 percent 80 people are going to throw it in the trash what we're looking for is that 10 to 20 percent of people when you do a facebook ad most of the people 95 of them are going to scroll right by it because they don't want to see it a google has the same thing every single advertisement you're going to have those types of numbers period now the problem is is when you when you're giving when you're feeding somebody a steak dinner they're sitting there and cutting into a 90 steak and you you know that they're just there for that it's a little bit more painful than you know you're not either watching them yeah there's no it bothers me but you said you i love what you just said every industry experiences traffic that doesn't buy more so the other hey ten thousand people with the car max website only ten people bought so what best buy everybody but listen the numbers prevail at the end we wouldn't even be recommending if we didn't see the metrics in the back end with fmls and broke with you they study this with us because they have a hard time convincing the advisor to spend the money or they think it's a waste but in reality it's just reciprocity that works in every industry yeah just just my my recommendation if you're listening to this gross you know yeah grow some thick skin i've been there i've i've watched people you know just eat our steaks and and neglected and you know and and even complain about it right complaining about the presentation complain about the free meal complain about everything else but guess what we have made millions tens of millions of dollars doing dinner seminars because it works and and you know so so you just have to kind of get over that it's best practice best practice um so that's great all right so i know you guys want to share you called the gold star report okay um now for those of you who are listening if you want to go check out our um the video on either you can go to youtube advisors platform i'll link it down in the in the show notes or if you want to go to facebook just search advisor's platform or we're also going to put it on our private marketing for financial advisors group all of those if you want to watch this we're going to have patrick he's going to share our screen and kind of walk you through a gold star report now this gold star report is specifically for houston correct patrick that's correct and so you might be in wisconsin and say well what does houston have to do with me well what i and as you all know if you're listeners to the podcast i ask everyone what can you give to our you know our listeners and so what patrick's agreed to do is that if you're interested in running an event with them uh if you contact patrick and and we'll link his email down below uh or patrick what's your email address do you mind giving it out now yeah it's patrick s as in patrick's leadingresponse.com okay and i'll also put in the show notes or wherever you're watching this what patrick has agreed to do is run a gold star report specifically for your area so if you're in wisconsin if you're in los angeles if you're in orlando he'll run a report that's applicable to you and show you what is and is not working which i personally think is is an amazing offer because at that point you know you can kind of see whether or not it makes sense you can judge it for yourself you know patrick might might say you know what nothing's working in this one particular area right now yeah yeah yeah so yeah you're you're not going to do do any better move to orlando or tampa so um so show us if you could can you share your screen with us i will okay perfect we'll try to keep this as audio friendly as possible as well we can see your screen can you see it you see the gold star yeah we got okay okay so this is and i gotta tell you it's a really simple report but i'm so fortunate to have access to all of the data right going on with our company so i can share this information with people not only share the good information but also share the not so good information right the campaigns that didn't perform well and then explain why they didn't perform well it gives me a chance to at least talk to an advisor and say let me show you why it didn't in this case what i did was created the gold star seminar report for events because i had a lot of folks calling me going hey what's going on in my area since coming out of coville well the whole country sort of started to get their toe back into the water coming out of covet around june of last year right that's when things started to open up a little bit so that's when i started to run these reports was looking back from june 2020 up until present time and that's what i'm looking for so i offer an analysis up front of what's going on in this case it's pretty quick it's pretty easy the idea here behind these is just to see what's going on in the market in this case what i found was that and you're going to see this in just a minute is there is not a ton of activity in houston but the activity that's going on is really really good as long as you follow the best practices and i even put best practices in here so these are really the simple best practices kind of the down and dirty this is what it takes to get good results if you just follow these and these alone you should do pretty well okay um there's no guarantee for success but these will certainly help you come out of the gate it's not working if there's a guarantee there's no there's no marketing in the world that's guaranteed you got it so i increased this here so you can see these now what these will show you are it's going to show you the date it'll show you the time it's going to show you the venue it's going to show you the quantity that mailed right here and then it's also going to show you the response rate now in this case oh it's 37 basis points people are like man that's not that great it actually is because this particular advisor targeted half a million enough in assets i think it's good either either way basic points is not bad it's it's not bad it's phenomenal in term it's right on on par with pre-covet averages for that asset starting point that's one thing that gets lost in conversation with uh advisors that is when they see a campaign and they say well i got um i i only got a 20 basis points response rate yes but you also targeted a million plus in assets that's what happens the higher up on the scale you go the less likely people are going to respond because most of those folks already have an advisor that they're happy with and also the more expensive and the more expensive their uh attention is so remember if that's right you're targeting someone's a higher net worth you're going to pay more period because their attention is worth more money and it's harder to get so let me check so so you take the 17 15 6 and 4 reservations multiply those numbers times five hundred thousand and we tell the advisor you're sitting in front of 78 million dollars in those three nights that's the kind of image that we want them to create to go that's how much money is in front of you you got to do something with it and our portal prospect connect shows that to you ahead of time how much you're getting in front of on the low end of the of the spectrum not the high end so you actually see that in prospect connect um but it's so important to talk about those results don because um targeting a hundred thousand up in assets typically gets you a one to one and a half percent response rate on average that's pre-coveted numbers and that's what we're seeing here if you target 250 and up in assets you're going to get about half that about about 60 basis points up to a one percent somewhere in there on average is what you get and then if you go higher up to 500 000 up you're looking at 30 to 40 basis points so that's where it really shakes in so what we're seeing here are a post covered world with pre-coveted numbers and i love that because here you've got again another another campaign one percent this is gold star you've got another campaign 1.08 percent another 1.99 so 99 basis points 98 basis points 1.17 here's another one 500 000 up almost uh almost a half a percent that's uh that's that's that's well that's above the average right 1.01 another one 55 basis points so those are great that tells me that in this snapshot in time things are looking really good in houston so keep that in mind because now we're going to look at the underperforming campaigns and there aren't many fortunately but there are three that are on here that showed up and what made them underperform well number one we're looking at the star cinema grill i looked this up not good right it's it's a bit of a struggle um here we did just a standard webinar and then in this one we did uh houston baptist university uh the webinar outperformed that one in this case so there's some challenges there and it's not that webinars are inherently all bad or that universities are all bad they're not it's just or even the star cinema grill it's just that they lack consistency that advisors need in their marketing the one thing that's consistent over and over again is a fleming steakhouse right or a ruth's chris a nice steakhouse just performs better again not getting you in front of rooms filled with just people but rooms that are filled with highly qualified people and there are ways to do that with your list massage your list and get the most out of it again that doesn't cost you any more hi could you go back up a little bit i noticed that i want to show down go up a little bit more yeah look at here this is this is uh we mailed all the way to the bottom i'm sorry perry's taking us right yes keep going all right there we built 11 993 pieces now watch this look at the response 31 and 2 went to the steakhouse but look at the bottom we did a webinar as part of the invitation and 27 people so this advisor 500 plus an ipa he's finding out that wait a minute some people that have that kind of money don't mind going to a webinar that's the intelligence we start building and then start creating the campaigns okay so ron bill mary the next campaign let's keep doing the hybrid webinar and dinner and you're going to cover two types of audiences the ones that don't mind going to the event are the ones that want to hide behind the computer but still you're sitting in front of 65 people doing the hybrid approach of the webinar in the grill house at the same time yeah and you need to get one kind of it's pay for it so i love it i think it's great um so so if they're interested then go to uh leadingresponse.com correct and that'll they can go through that or you know even even preferably since they have almost a concierge service through patrick patrick leadyresponse.com um you'll run the reports for them i say go get your report either way just see what's going on in your area um and and uh if it makes sense you might find i mean if i was seeing those numbers and i was in houston i think i'd be wanting to do some some mailers so and i would tell you to don and i'll share it with you as well i'll send you the other one i know i talked about it early on uh not only for the for the listeners the gold star seminar report but also the red flag review and i'll send you a copy of that so they can see that as well super powerful gives them a ton of insight into what maybe they were doing wrong and how they can correct it and get their get their ship right i think getting a custom one based on their their area and talking to you about it i mean i think that's where to go because you know orlando's going to be different than you know yeah i'll just give you the example and that way you can share it with your folks and they can go hey maybe i want to try th
t and see i'm happy to do that for them we have an office in orlando we have an office in a little beach town called new sumerian and in orlando it's you know there's still precautions and safety and everything else and these smartnets and you know it's it's like the wild wild west out there there's no percussion so it just depends every area is different so no perfect all right well thank you all so much for your time i appreciate it one thing that we always ask people at the very end is if you were gonna give one piece of advice one tip for financial advisors what would it be well i'm gonna i'll give you mine frequency like at anything in life a diet family friendship anything you do in life if you don't do it frequent enough you're never gonna benefit from the gains and you know i always tell advisors frequency will allow you to create what we call critical mass with an advisor we have a lot of them when an advisor in a particular city gets to a critical mass here's what's happening they're getting referrals people sending people to the seminar for them you're getting more and more people to attend people think the seminars decline we have an advisor here tampa that's done 575 seminars and she will tell you the response gets better and better and better because you develop a brand recognition and credibility so my my biggest suggestion is when you do marketing it starts working don't give it up so fast because if you turn the corner the returns from five to six to one you guys make a living getting people six seven percent of their money if we got you that you would kill us we make a living getting 300 to 500 return on your dollars in marketing and it's all done by frequency and repetitiveness and it sounds like we're selling more campaigns but we have the track record to show anybody what happens at the 15th and the 20th event we can actually predict how much money you're going to make patrick i would say the most important thing to take away from this is don't listen to a coach or a guru that doesn't have data to back it up i will be an independent third party for you you don't have to do business with me i'll share data with you that shows when advisors ask me hey what's working right now that's such a generic blanket statement let me share what's working with you in markets like your market and markets that are the same size as your market right and show you 20 campaigns that are working in markets like yours not just again i can show you something that's really working great in omaha nebraska but how does that benefit you in los angeles it doesn't two totally different worlds so what i want to do is show you what's working all across the board in markets yours and other markets that are like yours and give you that data as somebody who's independent i'm not taking any money from you i'm just sharing the information with you you do with it what you will but i'm happy to share it because i think it's important that everybody learns and everybody's transparent in this industry and the more we share and the smarter we get the better we get and everybody wins hey look how many gurus predicted that tampa bay wouldn't win the super bowl we had the same marketing we had the same thing in marketing don i want to get that in there we're champions listen the problem with gurus is a lot of them first off they've realized they can make good money because people make money don't mind hiring viewers and people but you know so many people are hiring people that just aren't in the trenches with them you know they don't know and one of my recommendations is if you have coaches and gurus or whatever else have somebody who knows who's who's there with you and a knows your business b knows what it's like and knows the numbers just like what you're saying so i i completely agree so well thank you all so much i appreciate your time congratulations what you're doing helping advice i like your whole network congratulations good for you i'm glad you're giving back to the industry man i appreciate it george thanks guys
