Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
There’s no clearer way to say it. Leave these garbage phrases out of your marketing.
- “Peace of mind”
Have you heard some of the horribly alarmist things that some advisors say? It’s rarely pacifying:
- It’s more likely you’ll become disabled than die, although both are financially ruinous situations.
- Don’t spoil your kids or they’ll ruin your family’s fortune.
- You might run out of money unless you use my hackneyed Monte Carlo simulation.
- The Fed is ruining the country permanently.
- Don’t let cybercriminals steal your life savings.
Look, you’re not yoga instructors.
Can we establish here that most of you are in the business of increasing anxiety on purpose to create a demand for your services? While it may be true that what you do has a tranquilizing effect, it’s usually aimed at extinguishing the fires that you set in the first place.
- “We sit on the same side of the table as our clients”
Oh, please.
AUM advisors are famous for using this phrase, but it’s ludicrous. You’re not on the same side of the table as the client – you’re not even at the same table.
It’s not your money. It’s theirs. There is no way you can sit at the same table.
In fact, you are not sitting at any table. You are the chef cooking the filet mignon and they are eating it. You’re not sitting next to them sipping the Dom Pérignon, okay, because it’s not your job to sit there and lounge around.
You should be sweating your butt off in a hot, greasy kitchen to make sure their 1% AUM brie with crab platter comes out just right.
I don’t even know why this phrase became popular.
- “I treat my clients like my mother”
None of you are charging your mothers the full 1%, so don’t even pretend you are. And it’s not even like she’s a real client, because she’s never going to question anything you do.
When you say something like this, you’re drawing a parallel between the person you’re talking to, and your…mother.
You got that, right?
You would never say, “You know, Betty, you’ve done a great job accumulating funds using your company’s Roth 401(k) plan. You’re just like my 75-year-old mother! She does that, too!”
So why would you suggest any type of similarity?
Do you think people like being compared to your family members?
Heck, do you think people even like their own family members? Half the people don’t. Stay away from these family analogies.
If you’re going to use family analogies, say you treat your clients like your mother-in-law. At least people will respect the fact that you will admit to occasionally dodging phone calls when the questions get too annoying, usually around the holidays.
- “It’s a win-win”
I find this phase deceptive. An advisor-client relationship is never a win-win because in any given relationship, one person always gets more out of it than the other person. And naturally as human beings, we always want the winner to be us, not the other person.
It’s like my seventh-grade science teacher said when we were picking partners for the geology project. Choose your partner wisely, he told us, because the dumber person always gets more out of it.
Why should anyone care whether you, as the advisor, wins? It’s self-serving to throw that in. Your feelings count? Last I checked, the client is the only one whose feelings matter because they are the ones paying 1.5% or 5% annuity load or other charges.
Aren’t you advisors saying on your websites how the client comes first? Shouldn’t they be the only ones who win? Most of you get paid the $10,000 a year for throwing the portfolio into a TAMP and eMoney and going to golf.
That’s enough of a win, okay?
Most of the time this is just thrown in to make the person hearing it think you’re altruistic. But if you really think about this phrase, it’s quite insidious.
- “We make sure our clients achieve their financial goals”
Well, not really.
Your clients achieve their financial goals based upon how good a job they do making money and then resisting the urge to throw it away on the Hermes alligator bag.
You guide them and monitor their progress – but I wouldn’t put that in the same sentence as the word “achieving” because they’re the ones doing the hard work to make a buck in the first place, not you. Half of you are more of an impediment to the client achieving their goals than if they never worked with an advisor. Are you throwing the money into the latest Wall Street gimmick like direct indexing so you can make another layer of fees?
Whoops did I say that? LoL.
- “We have integrity”
This is like saying, “Hire me because I brush my teeth in the morning.”
Or even better, that’s like going on a first date and saying to the person, “I’ve never robbed a bank and gunned down 50 people. I’d be a great spouse.”
Integrity should be a given. When proclaiming that you possess a baseline level of ethics is seen as something that is supposed to set you apart, it’s a clear sign that we have got to work on setting the bar much higher.
Sara’s upshot
If you want some no-nonsense marketing advice, here’s how I can help.
I have an e-book and a membership where you can learn some creative, non-sleazy social media tactics.
I’m a consultant who helps people infuse creativity in their marketing. If you’re interested, please contact me.
If you are a flat fee advisor, advice-only planner, or just a believer in transparency, join our next Transparent Advisor Movement meetup.
Thanks for hanging with me today. I’ll see you next month.
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: To learn more about this and other topics, check out our podcasts.
Read more articles by Sara Grillo
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
