[INTRODUCTION]
Brad Johnson: There is nothing more important in sales than confidence and being sure to present yourself in a way where the prospect across the table is going to feel pretty good about giving you $500,000, $1 million, $5 million of their life savings. This first story has been one of the biggest frustrations that I’ve heard over and over in the space. So, advisor number one, they call me. They’re successful. In fact, they’ve got some experience. They’re starting to become a victim of their own success. They look at their calendar, they say, “Brad, there’s just not any more of me to go around.” So, we talk about hiring a new advisor. About three, four months later, here’s oftentimes the call that I get, “Brad, I’m not even sure why I do this anymore.
I hired this advisor. I was so excited about him. I spent a week kind of giving him the download. They haven’t closed one client. In fact, he’s burning all of the leads I give him.” Here’s the mistake this advisor makes. The problem is, don’t do that. Let’s get into the tale of advisor two. Same problems, successful advisor starting to grow his firm to where he’s starting to tap that glass ceiling. And so, he calls me, but here’s the first difference. We lay out the Triad advisor model. What this model allows you to do is grow the confidence of the new advisor so that they can become a seasoned advisor that is following your same process to deliver the results that your clients are looking for.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see in many firms, and it’s one of the simplest solutions, so can’t wait to share it with you. Here we go.
[EPISODE]
Brad Johnson: Today, I want to share with you a tale of two advisors or two advisory firms, and this is something I’ve seen play out over the last 20-plus years being in the trenches, working with hundreds of advisors and advisory firms all across the nation. This first story really has been one of the biggest frustrations that I’ve heard over and over in this space, and there’s a big lesson to learn from it. Let me tell you the story of advisor number one. So, advisor number one, they call me. They’re successful. In fact, they’ve got some experience, and they’re starting to become a victim of their own success.
They look at their calendar, and they say, “Brad, there’s just not any more of me to go around. I’m trying to grow my practice, but when I look at the calendar, I don’t even know if it’s worth it. In fact, last year I brought on this level of assets, I think I’m just kind of good. I can’t do any more. I’m just going to kind of lifestyle it out from here.” So, I ask him, “Well, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve?” “Well, I go into the office, and there’s just not enough of me to go around. In fact, oftentimes I’m taking work home on the weekends, and there’s just no more that I can add while I still take care of my existing clients. And I don’t really like the fact, though, when I go on vacation, like the revenue stops, but I’m really just not sure what to do about it.”
So, we talk about hiring a new advisor. But here’s the mistake this advisor makes. They hire them and immediately throw them right into the fire of appointments. And now, one calendar with no more room to give, they’ve just added twice the opportunity. Now they have two advisor calendars, and so now the pressure of this calendar, they can start to relieve some of that with the second advisor’s calendar. And I’m going to fast-forward. About three, four months later, here’s oftentimes the call that I get: “Brad, I’m not even sure why I do this anymore. You know, I hired this advisor. I was so excited about him. I spent a week kind of giving him the download, and now I’m looking over here.
I fed him 30… Ah, actually no, 40 appointments, and they haven’t closed one client out of those 40 leads I gave him. In fact, I’m looking at the bank account, and I’ve spent over $30,000 in marketing spend just to generate those appointments. This guy can’t close. In fact, he’s burning all of the leads I give him. That’s why I don’t hire anybody. It’s just not worth it.” This is the thing as a founder that’s hard, especially as you go from a great advisor into a great business owner. Sometimes you have to step back and say, “What’s broken, and whose fault is it?” And in this first story, this tale of advisor number one, I have to tell you, most times, if you set the emotions aside and you just objectively look at the facts, the problem is not with the advisor that was hired. The problem is with the track that wasn’t there when it comes to hiring and training and coaching great salespeople inside of your firm.
In advisor story number one, there’s a big mistake. In fact, it’s the simplest solution of anything that I share here today. Make sure you stick around until the end of the video to grab it on how to properly make sure the right appointments get on the right advisor calendars and why if you mess this up, it can be the most expensive mistake you make in your business. Make sure you check that out. I’m going to cover it here in a second. The key thing in business is, when possible, avoid the lessons the hard way. Avoid wasting your marketing dollars and learn from the lessons of others. So, now I want to share with you the tale of advisor two, and a different way, a better way, a proven way I’ve seen work over and over when it comes to scaling a sales team of great advisors.
So, let’s get into the tale of advisor two. And trust me, this one’s a lot more fun one. It has a happy ending. As we dive in, same problems. Successful advisor, starting to grow his firm to a point to where he’s starting to tap that glass ceiling of success, where success actually becomes the problem. There’s no more of you to go around. And so, he calls me. But here’s the first difference. He says, “Hey, I see this problem. It’s not going to get any better. I want to start to think about what a solution would look like.” So, we hop on a coaching call with our coaching team, and we lay out the Triad advisor model. In fact, if you missed the episode where we dive deep, it’s right here. It breaks down sales, service, planning.
Really, there are three advisory roles in every firm, whether you know it or not. So, we start to lay out, “Well, it looks like you’re actually wearing two or three of these hats at the same time as a founder. Let’s start to break this out so we can divide and conquer and specialize.” Step two, we say there’s going to be a training track. To be a great advisor in sales in this business, you’re dealing with lots of different personalities, lots of different curveballs, questions, complexities. The biggest thing is you have to have confidence when you’re sitting there discussing someone’s life savings, their entire life’s work, their nest egg, to where they know they’re in good hands if they hand that over to you and your safekeeping.
And then number three, we’ve got to, once that new advisor is ready to step into sales, or as we say here at Triad a lot, you’re running cash register one, they’re going to be opening up cash register number two. So, once we’re ready to start putting people into their line, we want to do it in a strategic way, not a haphazard way, in a mathematical way, where you’re most likely to put the highest possible returns into the line where they’re most likely to convert the right ones to clients. So, we walk through all this. Same phone call three months later. Here’s what that one sounds like. “Brad, man, why did I not do this five years ago, 10 years ago. This is amazing. We’ve got the new advisor over here. He’s thriving. It’s exciting. He’s coming to my office, ‘Hey, just closed a $2 million case. Thank you so much. I saw the track.’ It works. This stuff actually works.”
At the same time, that young talent that has a growth track and is starting to get the confidence of getting some wins under their belt, the founder can finally let the shoulders down and have a little relief that they’re not carrying it all themselves. The weight of the business, the weight of the cash flow, the weight of the revenue is not theirs to carry alone, and they start to see a track to scale. They start to see a track of building something bigger than themselves that is duplicatable, that’s trainable, that’s repeatable, and someday sellable if they want to take a few chips off the table.
So, here are the lessons that we want to get into from advisor number one and advisor number two, and the difference. And I think if you’ve made it this far, you probably want to be more like advisor number two. So, let’s get into the learnings and what that looks like.
Brad Johnson: Hey, Brad here. If you’re listening to this episode and you’re thinking to yourself, “I wish I had a framework, a training that would help me get from great financial advisor to great business owner,” that means a financial advisor with multiple members on the team with a process, a sales process that works whether or not you’re in the room. Well, here’s an opportunity. As a listener, as a viewer of this show, we run something called a Sales Lab at Triad. And what that is is some of our best, brightest advisors showing you exactly how they made that leap. Here’s the process. Here’s the framework. Here are the points we hit in a first, a second to dial that in, not only for you, the founder, but for the other advisors on your team to be able to translate this, like I said, whether or not you’re in the room.
So, if that’s you, there’s a link below in the description on YouTube or out on your favorite podcast player. Scroll down. It will say Sales Lab. Click a link to apply to see if the next one’s an opportunity for you and your team. And with that, back to the episode.
Brad Johnson: Okay, so let’s break down the difference between these two stories. The first one. In the first story, the founder and the new advisor were both wearing three hats, whether they knew it or not. Three different roles with no differentiation, no specialization, and no ability to pass the stuff that didn’t work or the role that wasn’t serving the salesperson to the next one in line. Okay, lesson number two: immediately into appointments. So, if you remember story number one, “Oh shoot, we need help. Let’s hire somebody. As soon as they get there, quick training, boom, appointments on the calendar.” Big mistake. We’re going to talk about why today. And lesson number three: freestyling your lead flow. You never, ever want to do this, and we’re going to unpack why. There’s a strategic way, when done right, that makes all the difference in the world.
Okay, now let’s get to story number two and takeaways there. What we want is specialization when it comes to the advisor roles, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and the three roles, and how when you differentiate the Triad advisor model, how it accelerates growth and scale. Okay, lesson number two. Having a track to run on for your new talent that is defined, that is dialed in, that is structured, that is documented, and that works. And lesson number three. We’re going to talk about and unpack a stairstep approach to lead flow that I’ve seen work over and over in firms that have scaled from 10 million of assets gathered a year, north of 400 million to 500 million of assets organically a year, and why it works once you put it in place. Okay, so lesson number one I want to get into is: what is the proper structure to scale a sales team?
Because without the proper foundation, everything breaks. And one of the biggest things I see happening over and over is the founder has a structure that is broken, that does not allow them to scale. And what they do, instead of first-principles thinking and starting with a structure and dissecting it, they actually just take their problems and pass them on down the line to the next advisor. So, we never actually solve the problem. We just recreate the problem with the next advisor in line. And so, what we don’t want is the domino effect of an improper structure being passed to the next advisor. That breaks scale, and I’ve seen that happen over and over.
So, as a reminder, Triad Advisor Model. Selling. Service. Planning. Three different roles specifically designed to scale. And as a reminder, we did a full episode breakdown on each of these roles, skill set, how it works, and how the dance is done. But a brief review. Selling. Think of this like the cash register at the Chick-fil-A. We want a line of potential customers in front of the selling advisor. Planning advisor. That is like as soon as we punch in the order at the cash register, who makes the product in the back? In Chick-fil-A, it’s a spicy chicken sandwich. In your business, it is a proper financial plan that serves the prospect across the table from you. And lastly, service, and this is the one that often gets in the way of scale.
What happens when that prospect at Chick-fil-A needs a free refill? Or maybe they left some trash on the table. Do we want the person at the cash register stepping away from the cash register to go clean tables and do free refills from clients that have already paid? No, that would be a broken model. We don’t want that in financial services either, which is why at Chick-fil-A, they actually have somebody that does that full-time so that they continue to have salespeople make sales at the cash register while everybody else is taken care of that’s already an existing customer. So, we can build the same thing in a financial services firm, and here’s the cool thing.
This service role can be the gateway to all other roles in your firm when it comes to the advisory practice, and it takes the pressure off of having to hire that charismatic salesperson that just gets it. And this is what unlocks the potential for scale. Okay, so we just hit a quick review of the Triad Advisor Model structure. For those of you that missed it, go back, watch the full episode where we break everything down. But now that we’ve got a proper structure, now we start to think about how do we start to hire the right people for the right role versus just promising everyone, “Hey, if you come to my firm, you can have a $500 million book of business.” Because we don’t know yet whether or not the skill set here equates to the skill set here.
And so, now we want a job description, hiring for a service advisor, not a sales advisor. We want to do a post. We want to do interviews. We want to be thoughtful about this, which is why you need to hire in advance. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes we see over and over. It’s the advisor and founder waiting too late to hire to where they’re already under the gun, they’re stressed out, and they’re hiring six months or a year too late, so now they have to throw somebody into the role. We want to look into the future vision of the firm. Where are we going? Start to hire in advance, and ahead, so we have a training track so the team is ready and able for the new work that they’re going to be required to do.
As we look at this, now we want to hire for service and grow into sales. If you go back to lesson number one from advisor number one, it was throw everybody in sales, and we hope it works. And by the way, they can’t close. Well, there wasn’t a training track in place. So, as we get away from lesson one, which is proper structure, now we want to talk about what is the proper training track, coaching track, to allow great salespeople to be grown, hired, trained inside of the firm, where you can do it over and over.
Okay, let’s get to lesson number two. All right. So, as we start to think about this, the key thing in business is start with the end in mind. Where do we want to go, right? So, we’ve got sales, service, planning. But here’s what’s the beautiful thing about the planning role. If we think about this one over here on the left, this is the founder. This is cash register number one that’s currently open, where the goal is to open cash register number two, right? So, right now, cash register two is empty. And we have selling, founder, service, the advisor we talked about that was just hired. So, here’s how I want you to think about this. We’ve got cash register number one, typically the founder here. I want you to think about that advisor, their first chair, their chair number one.
This advisor, chair number two. Now, one of the things with AI transcription tools, oftentimes what I hear from advisors is, “Hey, good news, I don’t need a service advisor in my appointments anymore.” And you might not. The transcription might be able to capture the conversation, feed that to the recap notes, everything that’s required to help a client. But here’s something you’re missing if you skip this step: the advisor, number two, learning how to run a proper first visit, how to run a proper second. What sort of questions should I be asking? When this sort of personality kind of the extrovert that tries to run the appointment versus this sort of personality, the introvert you have to pull all the information out of, how do I deal with different types of personalities?
So, one of the toughest things with sales it’s kind of like a golf swing. You don’t just hit the driving range one day and then start hitting it 300 yards down the middle of the fairway. It takes reps. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of variables that have to be refined. And from what we’ve found from experience, and this is going back 20 years, there must be a three to six-month mentorship, almost an apprenticeship, that happens here to where the seasoned vet… By the way, if that’s you, founders, you didn’t just come out of the gates closing. Most of you had the school of hard knocks. You learned the hard way. You knocked on a lot of doors. You made phone calls. You swung and missed a lot until eventually you figured it out. That’s happened over and over to many of the advisors I’ve talked with over the years.
Well, how about we create a model that doesn’t require that for the next advisor in line for you, where they can actually see proper first visits run, modeled, and learned through you? There’s also a second benefit to this structure. So, leading the visit, leading the appointments, shadowing the appointments. Selling relationship, so transfer of belief. Service, capturing the information and coordinating air traffic control to planning. So, if you look at the conversation flow, service advisor’s there. Now, they can be the equivalent of the cash register that is feeding the orders back to who’s building your products, your financial plans. So, there’s an incredible flow that can take a ton of work off the selling advisor’s plate, but the second piece of that is they’re learning, they’re growing, they’re seeing proper sales conversations modeled in real life.
Then the flow can come back here. Plan goes to service. They review it. Now final sign-off goes to the seasoned sales advisor. So, you’ve got a two-way communication when it comes to data, when it comes to serving the prospect across the table from you. So, we talked about three to six months. What happens next, you might be asking. Well, what we’re doing is we’re trying. Remember the end goal. We’re trying to figure out, does this advisor, do they have the chops? Are they able to step into that second salesperson in your role, that second advisor that’s now you have not one cash register, but you have two? So, another big mistake we see oftentimes. Well, hey, three to six months shadowing, let’s just go ahead and throw them here. Don’t do that.
Now what we do, we trade seats. So, we often call this riding shotgun at Triad, so that second chair is riding shotgun with the lead advisor. Well, now, as we trade chairs, reversing it, so now, second chair is driving the appointment, but here’s what we don’t want to do. Another common mistake. This advisor leaves the room. Don’t do that. Sales is a learned skill. Many of us have taken 10, 20 years to refine what works and what doesn’t, the hard way. So, now think about it this way. You’re throwing them in the deep end for the first time. The lifeguard still needs to be on duty. Don’t leave the pool. So, now they get in the deep end. They start to struggle. You can throw them a life preserver.
So, if the new advisor in training for sales gets a question they’ve never heard before, maybe it’s one of those random acronyms, some rare retirement account that doesn’t come up that often. Now, lead advisor can step in, “Hey, I believe what he’s trying to say is this is what you’re looking for. Did I get that right?” And what I’ve seen is, once again, if you leave the room, what you’re putting on the line for that new advisor in training is their confidence. And there is nothing more important in sales than confidence and being sure to present yourself in a way where the prospect across the table is going to feel pretty good about giving you $500,000, $1 million, $5 million of their life savings. They better be confident in what you’re bringing to the table.
And what this model allows you to do is grow the confidence of the new advisor so that they can become a seasoned advisor that is following your same process to deliver the results that your clients are looking for. So, one bonus tip before we get off of lesson number two: the proper training track for the new talent in your firm. First off, sometimes you will find the service advisor is completely happy. They like riding shotgun. They like just serving your clients, and they won’t ever want to leave this role. Well, guess what? That’s good because you need service advisors as you scale your firm. Sometimes you will find that they’re kind of analytical. Maybe they like spreadsheets. Maybe they’re not super excited about talking to people all day long.
Well, sometimes that means they grow into a planning advisor. So, the cool thing with this model, it allows you to assess the talent before you figure out exactly where they’re going to grow into in your firm, and I’ve seen this happen many different ways over the years. Sometimes they stay in the role, sometimes they go to planning, sometimes they go to sales. And the benefit of that is you get to assess the skill set in a very trainable model before you make that decision. And one last bonus tip. Highly recommend when you look at your structured appointment. I did another episode on this, which is the ideal calendar for advisors. We’ll put that right up here if you haven’t had a chance to check it out. But on that episode, we talk about a Swiss cheese calendar, which is having appointments all over the place with no structure.
Well, this smashes the appointments into the middle of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but most importantly, it teaches you how to structure it with breaks between appointments. Have you ever felt where you’re running from appointment to appointment to appointment, getting further behind the longer the day goes on? Oftentimes, the symptom of that is no breaks between appointments. So, if you run hour appointments, you might want a 50-minute appointment with a 10-minute break. Hour and a half, it might be an hour 15, with a 10- or 15-minute buffer. But here’s what that allows when you’re coaching and training new team members: an after-action review. There is never going to be a time where it is more fresh in your mind or their mind than right after the appointment.
So, a quick little five-minute check-in, after-action review, just like the military. “Hey, is there anything I said there that you didn’t understand? Is there anything I said there that you did understand and you want to understand why?” Or we unpack it. We use a simple model at Triad after every experience we do. We call it KISS: keep, improve, start, stop. So, you can follow that if you want really quickly, a little 5, 10-minute after-action review after every appointment, where you give that new advisor-in-training an opportunity to understand why you said what you said, why you didn’t say what you didn’t, or any questions or language they didn’t understand while they were in there, so the learning can happen on demand. This will accelerate the growth, I can promise you that if you bake that in right after every appointment where they can get that information right where it’s fresh.
Okay, lesson number three today: the stairstep lead flow process, and this one is a game changer. And as I mentioned earlier, this is one of the biggest mistakes I see in many firms, and it’s one of the simplest solutions, so can’t wait to share it with you. Here we go. We’ve got a first-chair advisor. And one quick aside: this is going to require a firm minimum. So, if you don’t currently have one, you’re going to want to create one. And that’s what’s going to unlock the potential of not only hiring new advisors but scaling the lead flow to fill not one cash register, two cash registers, but as many cash registers as you see fit in your firm. And the other thing I want to share, because I often see a mindset block get in the way of founders. “Well, I just want to help people.” I get it.
You’re in a service-based business. You’re a good human. You want to serve others. Here’s one thing to think about, though. If you’re going to build a CFP standard plan, a financial plan, it’s kind of the equivalent of building somebody their dream home. Well, could you build somebody their dream home if they showed up and dropped off three 2x4s? There is no work of building you could do with that amount of raw material. So, that’s also when you’re building a proper financial plan. There’s a certain amount of raw material that’s required, and you can message that in a very kind way. “Hey, for this process that we build custom for our clients, it’s going to require at least $500,000 of investable assets to make that happen. And if you’re not there, that’s okay. Here are a couple tips to get on track, so someday when you do, we can help.”
So, we’ve got the first chair, which is typically the founder. And let’s just say the firm minimum is 500K. So, in order to set an appointment, you’re going to need at least $500,000. Well, what’d we just talk about? A training track that allows this chair to clear up their calendar and take on more appointments. But here’s the mistake I often see. There is no stair step. Basically, wherever the lead flow comes from, it just goes on the open calendar, ad hoc. “Hey, does this person have a Tuesday at 10:00 open? Cool. Put it with them.” Here’s the issue with that. Who do we want our larger clientele, the ones that are more complicated, the ones that probably take more confidence? It’s weird. Put an extra comma in an account and all of a sudden people freak out.
Well, we don’t want our firm built on something that’s going to not allow us to work with higher net worth. So, what we want to do, when that second advisor is ready to step into cash register number two, we want to create this stairstep approach. So, let’s just say your firm minimum is 500,000. What we just did is we elevated chair number one. Their new minimum is 1 million. So, any appointment lead flow that is not a million or more does not go to chair number one. Now, with the firm minimum of 500K, this chair number two, the newbie, the one that’s just settling in, that’s trying to develop that confidence, they are going to see any appointments between 500,000 and a million dollars.
And this is where your directors of marketing, those that are setting appointments, scheduling appointments for you, they need to be really clear on the structure because what this allows us to do is put the biggest opportunities on the most seasoned advisor, the most confident advisor, the advisor that probably has founder behind their name, so there’s a little psychology involved that’s going to help them with higher net worth. And the new advisor can cut their teeth on the smaller, less complex cases. It just makes sense when you think about it.
Okay, so where we take it from here? We’ve got cash register one and cash register two. So, we put the line of $1 million prospects in cash register one, right? We just established a new minimum: at least a million or more. And then cash register number two, they get the 500k to 1 million. And so, if you think about that, I’m scheduling appointments. I put all of the 1 million-plus here. They go to my first chair or my top salesperson. Cash register number two goes here. Now, how does this build-out continue? Let’s go back to lesson number one and two. How do we structure this back to… We don’t want just two stairsteps. We want multiple stairsteps as we go. In fact, fun fact, I’ve seen seven to eight stairstep pods built where the founders were able to just sit down with those that have between 3 to 5 million or more.
So, the cool thing is this same concept can continue to scale as you add more and more salespeople to the team. So, these cash registers equate to selling in that Triad advisor model that I walked through before. Service. That is the assembly line, first chair, second chair that we covered to where service advisors can be the next salesperson in training. And then over here, planning. But the cool thing with planning, it’s not a one-to-one. So, selling and service is often one-to-one. Actually, I’ve seen some books of business where the sales advisor might have a billion-dollar block. They might require two or even three service advisors on that team to take care of all of the families they serve.
However, over here, we can have one planner that serves multiple advisor pods. So, the cash registers up here that equate to selling. I’ve seen those scale to three, four, potentially five advisor pods that one great planner can serve when everything is automated and specialized. So, if you think back to the Chick-fil-A analogy, we’ve got the cash registers. Those are the selling advisors. Now, we efficiently and intentionally put the right prospects in the right line, so million-plus in this example of our most seasoned, the newer one, 500K to a million. Now, that represents two selling opportunities, two different sales roles. Now we have one experienced planner that is making the spicy chicken sandwiches in the back, AKA the financial plan.
So, you have a process that feeds that raw data to them, so they’re then building those on your behalf. Those are being passed back to the sales advisor. Oftentimes, with this flow of information, service advisor riding second chair is feeding the planning team back. They’re reviewing the plan, then giving that to the sales advisor to present in the meeting, oftentimes tag-team, first chair, second chair. That then arms the service advisor with all of the training in that three to six-month track that we talked about, where they’re now in sales conversations. They’re absorbing the language. They’re understanding how the plans are built. You really think about it, they’re seeing an example of sales right in front of them.
They’re doing the service role. They’re interacting heavily with the planning, so they’re getting a well-rounded background that now prepares them to step into a sales advisor in the future. So, it is a model that works. It is a model that scales. The other thing is it feels right. As a founder, you now have professionals that are stepping into those appointments. Don’t ever forget this. Any advisor that’s not you is a representation of your firm. How they carry themself, how well they’re trained, reflects your company, your business that you built. So, you want to feel really good that they’re stepping into those appointments when they’re ready to, and they’re equipped with the skills they need to serve, hopefully, eventual prospects that turn into clients for you.
One final offer. We teach this every month at Triad. It is called our Sales Lab. This is something that over the last six years of iterations, we’ve refined. We have a classroom style. In fact, we’re recording this directly from our classroom. And the cool thing is, to do something like this, you can’t just talk about it. It’s not teaching something on a whiteboard. You actually have to do it. You have to have the conversations. You have to do the role plays where you actually understand the language in a first, a second. We’ve got that all scripted. We’ve got that all built. Now it’s just a matter of plugging in, doing the reps, doing the work to ingrain it up here, so you can deliver it when that prospect’s sitting across the table from you.
So, take this as my invite. If you’re interested, we have it pinned below for you to check out and see if a future Triad Sales Lab might make sense for you. So, thanks for tuning in. As always, if there’s anything I missed, please leave a comment, or if there’s something you loved below, say, “This really made the difference for me. It clicked when I heard Brad say that.” We’re going to change the future build of how we do things here based on that, so I know what hits home and what I need to dive into in the future. Thanks for watching. As always, we’ll catch you on the next one.
[END]
