Brad Johnson: If you’re the only one who can close business in your firm, you’re not a CEO, you’re a salesperson. Welcome back to Do Business. Do Life. I’m Brad Johnson, and today we’re talking about one of the biggest ceilings I see advisors hit. It’s the moment where you realize you don’t actually own a business. You’re actually employed by a business you happen to own. Most advisors think growth is about getting more appointments and closing more deals, but the real constraint is that you’re still selling like a producer, not building like a business owner. And until you make the shift from selling products to selling a process, from my experience, you’ll stay stuck.
Today, we’re going to break down why most advisors don’t actually know what it is they’re selling and what to do about it, why the best salespeople are actually masterful at transferring belief, and how to build a sales process that works without you in the room. So, if you want to build a business where your revenue doesn’t go on vacation, when you do, this one’s for you. Okay. Let’s dive in.
[EPISODE]
Brad Johnson: Okay. To point number one, what is it are you actually selling as an advisor? And this is one of the biggest habits that is so hard to untrain because when you look at how most of us came into the industry, myself included, it was a very product-centric approach. You were trained to sell something that a company created, so you were a product distribution platform, whether it was annuities, whether it was asset management, whether it was whatever your flavor, life insurance. And the hard truth is most advisors don’t know what it is they sell. So, if you think about how that can be a massive disconnect in how to not only serve and take prospects and turn them into clients, but let alone how do you, the founding advisors, start to not be the only one delivering your solution, it takes changing the approach.
And here’s what happens if you don’t. Right now, the world is changing, and that’s happening whether you want it to or not. In fact, I just heard this analogy with AI. There’s a tidal wave coming, and you have one of two choices. Option number one: think about the tidal wave. You can be standing on the beach. You can see it coming. There’s a tidal wave coming, and you can run away. And guess what happens if you do? You hope you don’t get consumed by it as it hits the shore and consumes everything in its path. Or option number two, you can grab the surfboard, you can paddle out, and you can ride it as it comes in. I know which option I’m taking, and I’m in Kansas. I don’t even know how to surf.
So, with that, if you think about what AI will do to those that offer product, very quickly you are inviting yourself to the comparison game. I heard it said a long time ago, “Don’t get Google slapped in your business.” Well, today that’s evolved. Don’t get AI slapped in your business because you see if it’s product A versus product B, think about how you buy a car. Here’s the product I want. What’s the best price? It’s the race to the bottom. It’s the comparison game. It’s the commoditized game because guess what? Any product that matters, there are hundreds of advisors out there that distribute it. And so, now you have to become a salesperson that is an objection handler, that’s swashbuckling, that literally is tap dancing your way through every appointment.
I can tell you, being in this business almost 20 years, that is no fun. And the advisors that I’ve seen that struggle with that, they don’t enjoy it, and they’re not building a business that can be bigger than them. So, what’s the alternative? Products can be shopped. A proprietary process cannot. Think about the two different forms of the conversation. Product A, here’s why you should get it. Well, why should I get it? Who else offers it? X, Y, Z, go down that rabbit hole. Hey, what if I listen to what you need and we build a custom plan to solve for it? How does that sound? I know which one sounds better to me if I’m sitting across the table.
It’s hard to object to a personalized plan built for you. I don’t care if that’s going and working with the trainer at the gym. I don’t care if that’s building your dream home. When you feel heard and not sold, that is the difference. That is how you start to get out of the game that most advisors are playing. It also allows you to focus on the problems you’re solving versus the solution you’re pitching, and it just feels better. You get to serve, you get to listen, you get to build on your client’s behalf. So, step number one is to make that shift in the approach. And I’ll leave you with this analogy. We use it a lot on the show, but we do because it helps people get it. You can be a hamburger stand, or you can be McDonald’s.
Think about if you’re selling product, if you’re taking the hamburger stand approach. We have the best lettuce, we have the best sesame seed bun, beef, ketchup, whatever. Lay out the ingredients. How’s that for a marketing strategy? Try to differentiate the ingredients. That’s like selling a product. Over here, a process, packaged, unique, proprietary. We have the Big Mac. Easily to describe and transfer belief. We’ll get to that in a second. But now the packaging allows you to differentiate. It allows you to make your product one of one. The only place in town you can get it, step through our doors. We want to serve you. So, very simple analogy, but hopefully that helps explain which game you want to be playing as an advisor.
So, on to point number two. Sales is actually a transfer of belief. And when you start to make this shift, it actually changes everything because really, sales has become a bad word. Who wants to be sold? Nobody’s like, “Hey, honey, let’s go get sold today.” But who wants to understand, “Here’s something we need, and I can deliver it to you.” That’s a completely different approach, both for you as the advisor and the prospect or client sitting across the table. And so, when you start to make that shift, the sales is actually a transfer of belief. Let’s go back to point number one. Do you want to believe in somebody else’s product that you didn’t even really have a say so? You didn’t build it. You didn’t create it.
Or do you want to have a belief in why it is you exist as a firm, what it is you deliver to your clients, and why that matters, why it’s specific to you, and even how it came to be? Then you can get into the branding, the messaging. As we say here at Triad, it’s always day one. Why do we exist in the first place? And you’re able to go deep. And the biggest thing we start to see, it changes the conversation when you’re sitting across the table. I was having a conversation with one of our members, a guy named Tyler, the other day, and it was actually in this very room. We run a sales lab, and what this is sales transfer belief. Not pitching things. And what it is is we actually broke down what it is you do. Why does it matter? How it is you serve your clients? How it is you lead them in their financial lives?
And don’t get me wrong, Tyler’s been running an incredible firm for a long time, but it just clicked for him. And he said, “I was getting down in the weeds. I was focusing on spreadsheets, and graphs, and bars.” And when you transfer belief, guess what? That is not what’s going to do it. That’s where you look across the table, your prospect’s eyes glaze over, they start to go to another place. They’re there, but they’re not there. And if you’re an advisor, you know when that happens. You felt it before. It sucks the soul out of your body. And he said, “That’s when I realized I was overcomplicating this.” And when he starts to zoom out and say, “Why is it you’re here? What is it that brought you in? And what is it that you’re concerned about? Or what things are not in order that are kind of keeping you from believing you can go do the things you want to do in retirement?
That’s a conversation, that’s a human-to-human connection, and that is what the very best financial advisors in America do. And then when it gets to financial engineering and building out a financial plan, they’re like, “Absolutely.” We’ve got a team. We’re passionate. We take a very thorough approach. Opening the car hood and explaining how the engine works, that is not what gets people to believe in your process and say, “Yes, I want that.” And so, also as an advisor, we’re talking a little bit about how you transfer that belief across the table, but it all starts right here. How do you transfer the belief to yourself? Because I can tell you if you are bored with what you’re saying, if you don’t believe, they don’t believe.
And so, as you start to go back, and this is a lot of the work we do at Triad, why do you exist? What is it that differentiates you? That’s what we extract from our members when we onboard them, because oftentimes they’ve forgotten. They kind of got sucked into the game that a lot of advisors play, which is just pitching the next product. And what that’s allowed them to do is have fun again and connect with the humans across the table, the reason they got into the business in the first place. So, that’s the approach you want to take. On the other side, if you stick on the product side, now you’re defending, you’re justifying, you’re getting back into that commoditized game we talked about in the last step.
So, simple concept. And one last thought, if you haven’t done the work to truly do the deep thought, and why you do exist and how you message that, that’s the work we do here. But if you’ve done it, and now the next step is how do you transfer it to the team, one of the biggest things we found and a big breakthrough for Triad last year, this is not a one-time conversation. As I heard from a mentor one time, “When you’re tired of saying something, you’re 50% of the way there as a leader in your business and in your firm.” And so, now you must start putting in the reps. We call it sales lab here at Triad because it’s a lab. It’s a workshop. We’re actually doing the reps. You don’t just watch a golf swing on YouTube and then go out and shoot par the next day.
You got to go to the range. You got to put in the reps to adjust the habits, to change the conversation, to adapt the language. And so, that’s one of the things we see. We have a lot of our member firms, a lot of our founders. They bring in their new advisors. They workshop it. They role-play it, real-life scenarios. We have case studies. And so, that’s just an idea. If you’re sitting there in your firm and you’re like, “Okay. Well, we kind of have some of the messaging down, but now, how do I bring it into reality?” Training, training, training. And that’s how you do it. You do the reps, you hold people accountable, and that is the step in taking a process that relies on product and selling and evolving that to a sales process that is a transfer of belief in how you serve your clients and why it matters to them.
That brings us to number three. How do I transfer this process so it works when I’m not in the room? This is one of the biggest frustrations to most founders as they try to make that shift from financial advisor into business owner, into CEO. How do I extract it from here to deploy it to the team? One of the things we talk about a lot is most financial services firms only have one cash register, and if you look at any business model that does any amount of revenue in America that has a cash register, guess what? They have more than one. When it gets busy, open up the second cash register, the third cash register.
In our business, if you typically are booked out more than a week and a half, two weeks, people on the line to the cash register, they leave. They go somewhere else. So, obviously, if you look at the efficiencies, now we have to transfer that across multiple advisors, multiple whether it’s sales advisors, that’s what we call them here, back to transfer belief, because they’re the first one, when someone walks through the door, that’s transferring the belief of here’s where you are, and here’s how we can get you where you want to go in retirement.
So, let’s break this down. If your business is built on your personality, you don’t own a business. You’re a salesperson. And that’s okay. That’s where many advisors, that’s where we meet them. That’s where they begin. And the cool thing is much of that knowledge you have acquired now, we must deploy it to the team. So, to do that, in order to scale, you must have a transferable sales process. And how you start to go about that, it must be duplicatable. It must be trainable. And then in turn, it’s scalable. And once it’s scalable, it’s sellable. And the nice thing about sellable, you always want to have that option. Doesn’t mean you have to.
And so, now if you have the option to sell, no, things are going great. Let’s keep things rolling. Or actually, you know what, it’s time to maybe take a few chips off the table or eventually all of them. But you always want to have the option, and that’s why it’s so key to make the shift from salesperson, financial advisor, solo game to business owner, CEO, multiplayer game because you can’t sell a business that depends on you, or as I said, as we kick this video off, you can’t sell a business whose revenue goes on vacation when you do.
So, here’s the first question to ask yourself. Could another advisor on my team follow my process and get the same results? And oftentimes what I’ve seen, I’ve seen this many times. It’s more common I see it working this way than the way we’re coaching to, which is you will have multiple advisors all under the same roof, all with the different sales process, all built on their own individual personality. That would be like a McDonald’s that was selling Big Macs in one line, Whoppers in another line, and burritos in the third. Doesn’t make sense. Not scalable, not a transferable process. How do the operations work in a business like that? Well, that is why a lot of operations are broken in financial services because everybody’s doing something different.
McDonald’s doesn’t rely on one charismatic burger maker. And your financial services practice shouldn’t rely on one charismatic salesperson either. And you want to go deep here. We did a full episode, Episode 130, Why Most Financial Advisors Burn Out (And What to Do About It). Look that one up, whether you’re listening to YouTube or watching on YouTube or listening on an audio player. And that one will expand on exactly how to break apart the sales process so that you, as an advisor, can scale. And once again, once you start to understand the blueprint to do that, now the next step is to train to it. And that is the biggest key. That’s why we built this training room here, right behind me.
That is why consistently with Triad members, we are putting in the reps monthly, where we are running a sales lab, kind of like a bootcamp, because it does take reps. Because the biggest thing, once you have belief, the next step is you must create confidence with the people that are manning your cash registers, so that they can say,” Hey, here’s how we can help.” And once you start to put in the reps, just like we talked about on the golf course, you don’t have to think about the swing. Now, you can just be in the conversation, you can serve, and you can follow a process that delivers the promised results.
So, in closing, if you’re an advisor out there who truly wants to build a business where the entire weight is not always on your shoulders, where the next deal does not depend on you, where revenue does not go on vacation when you do, number one, you must figure out what you’re selling. Number two, you must figure out how to transfer that belief. And that belief starts here with you, before you can transfer it to others. And number three, how can I create a process where that happens, whether or not I’m in the room, and can be transferred to others? And I can tell you, we have case study after case study of firms where the weight was on the shoulders of the founder.
And as you do the reps, as you go through the process, as you start to train, train, train, it’s very possible. And if that’s you, hit us up. That’s why Triad exists. That is our belief. We help advisors just like you go from here to where they want to be. So, thanks for listening in. If you’re not subscribed, here’s my humble ask. Subscribe, hit the little bell so that every time a new episode drops, we can bring it right to you, so we can serve you and help you build the business you deserve to build. Catch you on the next episode.
