Sales & Marketing

17 Nov Educated clients are better clients.

Posted at 13:43h in All Posts, Articles, Business Coaching, Business Management, Client Service, General, Insurance, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

Educating clients is part of the adviser’s role and most will have a well prepared and polished process to do so, but it can become tiresome (and time consuming!)running through this process with each and every client. In this article first published in RiskInfo magazine,...

28 Apr What can you do about bad press?

Posted at 00:51h in Advice, All Posts, Articles, Business Management, General, Juice Console, Sales & Marketing by Angela Barclay

I’ve recently just published my first two articles on LinkedIn. I’ve been writing this blog for a number of years now, and LinkedIn has opened up their platform for people to publish articles directly, and I’ve held back until now. In part, because we share our articles on LinkedIn anyway, so our target market get drawn to our own site, also in part because our articles are always for a very targeted group of readers who make up a very small percentage of LinkedIn members, and also due to some material I’ve read about SEO rankings.

So why have I broken my silence on LinkedIn publishing?

27 Apr My experience with someone impersonating me on Twitter

Posted at 12:32h in Advice, All Posts, General, Sales & Marketing by Angela Barclay

I’ve recently discovered that someone had set up a dodgy Twitter account, impersonating me. They’ve been removed, and it was a relatively simple process, and I thought I’d share the experience in case it happens to you.

01 Dec Client Engagement – an Artform?

Posted at 07:36h in All Posts, Business Management, Sales & Marketing by Angela Barclay

Client engagement is an artform that we are particularly passionate about here at Elixir. It’s one thing to have the ability to deliver outstanding, technically brilliant advice that is always in the best interest of your clients, but if you can’t sell it to your clients, or you’re not winning enough of them to provide advice to, you’re doing nothing to enhance peoples wealth, or indeed to build a business. In our own experience, the successful adviser is one who not only has the ability to communicate well and ask the right questions of their prospects (and clients), but who also uses a robust process to deliver their proposition to each potential new client.

15 Jul Make your videos stand out from the crowd

Posted at 11:49h in All Posts, General, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

What makes a good video great? Talking heads can get very boring very fast, but it doesn't take much to make them stand out from the crowd. When I presented to the AdviserEdge conference in Melbourne on using video in your business, I did it by...

19 Jun Why you should not post out all your Fee Disclosure Statements on July 1 (and what to do instead)

Posted at 14:14h in All Posts, Business Management, Client Service, Fees & Commissions, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

Most Australian advisers are currently absorbed in altering their business practices to comply with the new FoFA Legislation, and a particularly large issue is deciding on when and how to deliver their Fee Disclosure Statements (we now have a three-letter F word … the FDS!). We have heard of a number of advisers who are planning to post out all of their FDS's on the 1st of July, indeed some licensees are even suggesting this is a good option. It may have been suggested in the ASIC regulatory guide, but we think this is a dangerous strategy, and there are far better options that are still compliant with both the wording and the intent of the legislation.

06 Jun Do you have your pricing right?

Posted at 14:32h in All Posts, Business Management, Fees & Commissions, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

We are often asked by advisers to take a look at their pricing model and let them know if they “have it right”. This begs the question, “is there such a thing as the right pricing model?” The answer is “yes”, although what is the “right” model will vary for every firm. So here is a list of questions to ask yourself when considering whether or not you have got your pricing right:

27 Nov What would your clients say?

Posted at 08:33h in All Posts, Business Management, General, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

If we asked a random selection of your clients RIGHT NOW, what they thought of your business, what would they say? Do you know what your clients value about you and the services you provide? Whether you are completely overhauling your business to change your charging method, or you routinely contemplate your business and make improvements for continual evolution of your services, it is important to truly understand what works and what doesn’t in your current model.

04 Oct “Ten rules for a trust-based relationship”

Posted at 11:25h in All Posts, General, Sales & Marketing by Sue Viskovic

Trust is a word that is frequently associated with financial advice, and unfortunately it’s often for the absence of it. When a consumer decides that they will seek advice, the most important factor to them when choosing their adviser, by a margin of more than two to one, is trust. And yet when we consider the reality of trust – away from the rhetoric and the assumptions that are bandied around freely by all who have an opinion on the advice profession, it can be a difficult position to establish, and to maintain.