Episode Transcription 

Speaker 1  00:08

This is the Ultimate Advisor Podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful and scalable practice. Each week we’ll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing, and your business operations, helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets, and to create the advising practice that you’ve dreamed of. You’ll be joined by our hosts Bryan Sweet, who is moving fast towards a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to improve their operations and company culture, and Draye Redfern who can help you systematize and automate your practices marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let’s jump in to another amazing episode of the Ultimate Advisor Podcast.

Brittany Anderson  01:07

Welcome back to your Ultimate Advisor Podcast, Brittany Anderson here again with Bryan Sweet and Draye Redfern. And we are continuing on this conversation following our challenge that we hosted where we helped advisors to become pipeline pros to really drill into how they can close even more business. Now one of the topics that came up, of course, is how you can translate some of your selling into the virtual world, and how really, there’s so many different sales techniques that absolutely transfer between in person and virtual meetings. And there are some things that need to be kept in mind, however, to help you differentiate. So the first thing to point out is the virtual world is not going away. I know some people are very optimistic thinking, you know what, once this whole pandemic thing is under wraps, or if and when things came down, everybody is going to be back to being in person and the world will be back to quote unquote, normal. Now, there is no normal, there are new normals every single day. And I think that if you want to look at what blessings or opportunities the pandemic have actually provided to us, is it’s expanded our capabilities. So if you’ve had or had your business geared to really help people in your immediate demographic, you know, in the town you live in, in the city that you’re in, all of a sudden, people are becoming comfortable with technology that have never done that before. I mean, you’ve got every single age range that now knows, and is comfortable with using technology. And there was this forcing function of the pandemic that kind of said, Hey, if you want to stay in contact with loved ones, with professionals with every aspect of your life, you kind of have to navigate it. So that’s what’s so important about this topic and understanding how you can make an impact virtually in the same capacity that you would if you were in person. I mean, we know very successful people out there that have said point blank now that I know that I can literally achieve the same goals, if not even more, without having to leave my home or having to get on a plane or having to disrupt my life, I’m going to do that. And I guarantee you that a lot of people, clients and future clients alike are having that same mentality. So that’s why it’s so important that even if you are somebody who doesn’t particularly love the virtual world, who may be a little zoomed out, because that is a real thing that’s happened, it’s still important to embrace it and to understand that it’s not going away. So not having to go somewhere. It saves time. Time is one thing that if you ask people, you know, what is one thing you wish you could have more of? It’s not really always money. I mean, people might think that on the surface, but when you really get to the core of what they’re after, everybody wishes they could have more time. You could have more time in your day, you could have more time in your lifespan, you could have more time with people that you love and care about, you can have more time to grow your business. Time, time, time, time, time. So what does the virtual world do? It creates that opportunity for buying back time. So Bryan, I would love for you to talk a little bit about how, you know we’ve really embraced this. We’ve been actually using the virtual world for years and years and years, for over a decade really. But for you to talk a little bit about how the opportunities with zoom or other similar technologies have really opened up opportunities for the business.

Bryan Sweet  04:48

Yeah, it’s been almost hard to imagine but if you try to think of what’s the you know, the golden lining and COVID it might be zoom, and it forced us to take action that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise have done. And it proved to be very, very successful. And I’ll just give you an example is our market place prior to COVID was a 60 mile radius of the town that we’re in. And we did all of our marketing. From that standpoint, obviously, we get referrals from clients that live in different states, but we weren’t actively marketing that. And after a period of using zoom, and realizing we could get the results and accomplish everything we wanted, virtually, now our market places nationally. So it opens up a tremendous amount of additional opportunity for our ideal client to find us, instead of just 60 miles only. And that’s been, you know, life changing, I do have a very close friend of mine, I’m in a study group with him. And his business model would not be one that I wanted, but he would literally travel around the United States seeing clients, and he’d take one of his associate advisors with him. And he was on airplanes in New York and Chicago. And he’s got some, you know, crazy big clients. And all of a sudden, COVID hit, and he was shut down. So he never tried virtual, but now he had to, and he is having the time of his life, because he gets to be home with his four kids in the family and have dinner. And all of his clients are happy. And all of his clients are doing business. And we just were on a phone call a couple of days ago, and he said, we’re going to probably have our best year and new AUM. And I haven’t been on an airplane. So, I think a lot of it’s just the mindset and what you do with it. And I think one of the things you just need to do is think through how do you want to do your business in the future, when COVID is behind us? Do you want to kind of go back to the old way of doing it? Or would you like to do more via zoom. And one of the things to help develop our national presence is we’re trying to create a virtual office tour, so that the people that can never physically get into the office, get the same experience that a client comes in, because I will tell you that one of the differentiators and kind of our secret weapon or secret sauce is the first experience you have at Sweet Financial, I don’t know how people would top it. And it’s really been amazing, the results that it sets the stage for, you know, when the people come in for the actual discovery meeting, 9 times out of 10, I have very little work to do, because the tour actually did all the work for us. So, we had a film crew come in, we’re developing this physical, or this video version of our tour that we can send to prospects in advance. And we’re looking at all sorts of unique ways of being able to deliver that. So I think that’ll be a really interesting thing. But I do think there’s a couple things, you know, you want to always keep in mind. And I’ve always been an advocate for a clean desk, a clean mind, and you got clear thinking. And I think one of the things for a client or a prospect to have a good virtual experience is to make sure you understand what your background is, when you’re on camera. Now there are these virtual backgrounds that you can use, I’m not necessarily a big fan of them, because if you move at all your head disappears. And you know, weird things like that. So I never use one, I just make sure that what the client or prospect sees are things that I think would be very positive in their mind. So I don’t have stacks of papers and stuff, all cluttery and cups tipped over and all sorts of things. So just be mindful of that. The other thing is just little things like making sure you don’t have any distractions, so or squirrel out looking at other things. I got big picture windows, right by my camera. It’s very easy at car drives buyer, something happens I could be looking over there and people are going, Aren’t you supposed to be having a meeting with me. So turn off the pings and dings and all the things from cell phones and especially if you got multiple programs open, which I usually do on my computer, just make sure they don’t have any noise associated with them. You want it to be all about them. And I love a virtual meeting so much better than a phone call. And we’ve had to train clients that maybe were a little shy at first about zoom meetings, and not sure I think how to do them, I think they were a little nervous that they felt technologically challenged. And, you know, if you know me, I’m probably the world’s worst technology challenged individual. So if I can do it, they can do it. But the nice thing about the virtual presence is you can read the client, you can have their facial expressions, you can see what’s happening in their background, and what’s going on, you know, if they’re talking to you, and all sudden they’re cooking dinner or multitasking, that might tell you, you kind of lost them. And maybe you need to change the phrasing of the questions to get them back on track or to pull them back into the conversation. Really hard to do that if you can’t see them. So for those clients that maybe you were always doing phone calls, maybe step that up and do zooms if a client doesn’t personally want to come into your office. And, you know, if you aren’t familiar, you want to have people back in the office, then that’s a fine thing to do. But I just think between zoom and in person meetings, if you could do all of them that way, the results would be immensely helpful and, and the phone calls just stick for catching up on things or following up on on quick items. So one other quick thing and drays probably much better to chat on this. But I think you want to be a little bit careful on making sure you don’t need like to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars, but you need good mics, you need good cameras. And if you’re going to be on zoom a lot, one of the suggestions and Draye will probably allude to it here in a second is maybe have backup cameras and backup microphone. So if all of a sudden one fails, literally in a couple of seconds, you can pick something else and be back on instead of having to pick up the phone and call the client say sorry, my technology failed, I’ll have to call you another time. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Draye. Because Draye actually did an amazing breakout on this during the challenge. And I actually learned all sorts of new things on how to get better virtual presentations.

Brittany Anderson  12:43

Hey, Brittany here, stopping and pausing for a moment to talk about something that we’ve had so many of you inquire about and that is our Ultimate Advisor Mastermind. Now I’m going to start by saying if you are not a growth minded individual, if you are not somebody who is focused on taking your business to the next level, if you’re not focused on engaging your team, and helping them to help you in turn, level up the business, the service model, how you provide that wow experience to clients. If those things are not your focus, just fast forward right now, because the Ultimate Advisor Mastermind would not then be for you. However, if you are looking to take your business to the next level, if you want to experience exponential growth and feel supported along the way, if you want to start working smarter and not harder, if you want to help your team members to work within the God given talents that they were provided, and use those skill sets in a way they haven’t yet to help support you and your business to help them realize their biggest goals, their biggest dreams. If you want creative approaches to marketing, I know that can be an intimidating word. But we’re not talking here about the fancy Facebook stuff or you know the latest and greatest but rather looking at how you can market what you do, how you can express how you’re different and how you can truly differentiate yourself in a crowded market space. If those are problems you’re looking to solve, then you absolutely want to go check out ultimateadvisormastermind.com to learn more about how we can help you on your path and journey to growth.

Draye Redfern  14:43

I love this stuff, Bryan. Because like in our business, we’re entirely virtual and we got the team here in the office. But we’ve got clients in I don’t know 20 something states and we’ve met only a handful of them. It’s just that not reality of our business. Everything is via zoom, very few even phone calls. And so zoom, I don’t think it’s going to go away and makes the world smaller. Because now I can connect to someone in New York or someone in New Delhi doesn’t matter. It’s like it’s instant. And we can see them, they can see us. And there’s a lot to go along with that. To quickly elaborate on it like you wouldn’t, unless you’re nuts, you wouldn’t drive your car to a meeting without having like a spare tire there of having like AAA on hand or something like that. Because if something happens, you’d want to backup, like you don’t want to change your flat tire in the middle of the road, then realize you don’t have a flat, you have to change it out. So it’s the same sort of thing in virtual meetings, is you know, if you are doing a meeting and things are going more virtual, even, you know, more than it was previously, maybe it’s, instead of 5% of your practice is zoom and 95% is in person usually goes to 80/20, where 20% zoom, you still that’s a that’s a 4x increase than where I was. And things happen. I am in the technology and marketing space. But by Gosh, things happen when you don’t want them to. So, Bryan exactly right. I’ve got two cameras, I’ve got two, technically three mics that I can immediately rotate through if things happen. And it’s happened before, like, in fact, literally, I think two times or three times ago, we were sitting down to the podcast, my mic was having all sorts of wonky issues, and it was really pitchy crazy. It was I have no idea what’s going on with it. So literally in less than 30 seconds, I had the same exact microphone spun up with like amazing audio quality like this, without having to stress about it or worry about it or whatever else. Backup cameras, the same sort of thing. I’ve got three monitors, if I’ve had the monitor go down before in a presentation, I could immediately rotate it to another monitor, things like this, you don’t need to spend an arm and a leg. A great mic, like the ones that we’re using are 100 bucks, maybe 150 bucks, a great camera with 10, ADP or 4k could be 150, 200 bucks. So we’re not talking massive monetary investments. But it really makes you look good when things happen. I don’t know what happened, my camera just died. Hold on, bear with me one second, we swapped to the new one. Okay, we’re back. That’s how fast it could be. And so you don’t want to waste someone’s time, especially if you got someone with high AUM. Or they’re a great, you know, prospects for your business fiddling with stupid zoom tech stuff, boom, move on to the next thing because you got backups and redundancies, a lot less expensive than driving or flying all over the world. And it can mean the difference in the actual relationship. The next part of it, I think I would say, especially like thriving in a virtual world is to control your environment. So we all have headsets on right now so that if we get a Bing or a ding, or whatever it is notification from our computers, you’re not going to hear it if there’s feedback, you’re not going to hear it either, because we will hear it in our headsets. And there’s little things that you can do like wireless earbuds that you can throw in, we’ve been playing with these a lot really in the last month. So no one even knows that you’ve got a headset on it like sits flat against your face. But that way you could hear them, they can hear you through the mic, but there’s not the dings and rings and vibrations, and Oh, got another email coming in. And then your eyes shift away on the screen. Because they heard the ding come in and they watch your eyes go away because they know exactly what’s happening. It mitigates a lot of that so that they can feel as though you’re talking directly to them. And you’re way more focused on them. And those things go a long, long way. The other reason and Bryan alluded to this, too, that I like zoom, more than phone calls or check ins or any of those sorts of stuff is because you can read the person’s body language. So if you’re just listening to the podcast, you can probably tell that like, I’m high energy, I’m probably talking with my hands, which I am. I’m like a very animated, which I am. But if you’re seeing someone on camera, there’s a different dynamic that that creates, you can see that I’m happy, you can see that my energy is high. And those are things that helped to elevate the mood with the client or the prospect that you’re with. But it’s also fun, because you can do something called matching and mirror and we talked a little bit about this in our challenge a few weeks ago. some really cool strategies that you can use, called neuro linguistic programming and LP. So if someone comes to the zoo, meaning their natural nature is like the demeanor that they have is I’m really excited for this meaning and you know what, just tell it to me straight and then he’s like, that’s, that’s the tone. Then you can say, I’m excited for this meeting too. We’re going to have a lot of fun. I got the plan all laid out for us. You can match and mirror their tone and energy and their body language. And a lot of times they’re not going to think anything’s that’s necessarily, you know, weird is going on because they’re just going to walk out of that meeting be like that, that Draye guy, he, he gets me. And that’s the general idea, obviously, I was being a little bit like over the top with the accent and whatever else. But you get the idea, you get to see someone’s body language, you get to see if they’re slouching or if their arms are crossed, you get to see and read them. But what’s really cool about it, is you can do things called matching and mirroring. So what I just gave you as an example of that matching the tonality, and then you can mirror them with what they do. And the easiest example of this is, if you go to dinner, and let’s just say you’re at a group of friends, you’re single, you see someone sitting in another table that’s attractive to you, male or female doesn’t matter, you can start to basically as they pick up their water glass or their wine glass, you could start to do the same thing you’re mirroring what they’re doing. And it’s completely subconscious thing for them. And then you’re modeling them and mirroring them and all of the things that they’re doing, and then pretty soon you take the lead, and so you reach for your water glass, and then weirdly, they’re going to do the same. And it doesn’t take that long, this doesn’t take hours, you can have this done in a couple minutes, if you don’t actually know what you’re doing. It’s a completely subconscious thing, because you’re basically operating on the same like wavelength pattern, they’re being matched and mirrored. And you could do that same sort of things, in your meetings with your tonality with your energy, and not in like a sleazy kind of way that we’re just doing this to try and get a sale, we’re doing it because we genuinely want to connect with our prospects and our clients on a deeper level. And so we meet them where they’re at. And so someone comes into a meeting. And they’re like, Hello, Draye, I’m really excited to talk with you today. And I can’t wait to learn more about what this is going to be, if I met them with my normal energy, which is, boom, I’m super excited to can’t wait to jump into this, this is going to be a great time, I’ve got some things laid out that we’re going to cover, here’s what I want to do, they’re going to be like, Who the hell is this animal, I don’t want to be like, I can’t get it like this is not going to work. So instead, if they started out as Hello, Draye, really excited for this meeting, and I went, Hi, they’re really excited to, it’s going to be a great time, I’ve got these few things were laid out, we’re going to go over, then all of a sudden, I’m meeting them where they’re at, albeit, I’m going to do it a slightly higher energy level and frequency level, because that’s my jam. That’s my baseline. But at the end of that people, and they say this to say this to me, they say this other people on the team, because we are all like we all do this, that I just feel like I connect with you. And that is one of the best things that someone can say, for you and about you. And it’s not that difficult. But it goes a long, long way. And so if we don’t go back to the way that things are, or even if you go back to how they were previously, but less of them, which a lot of our mastermind members had said, like, I ain’t going back to our business was that’s for certain, then you got to use things like this to optimize the productivity of your meetings, the efficiency of your meetings, but also control the environment and control how that person feels when they’re there with you. So there’s a couple things there. Bryan, I know you can probably elaborate on some of these things, too. But I think that it’s really worthwhile in this virtual world to control the aspects that you can, and really be more conscious with how you handle those interactions.

Bryan Sweet  23:36

Well, you just made me think of one thing that you have done for us that has been remarkably helpful. And in zoom meetings, we have a I don’t know it’s a web address or whatever. It’s just zoombryan.com we have zoombrittany.com and it all came from your zoomdraye.com. And it’s a great thing to have because you can create like an on-the-spot meeting and talking to somebody on the phone, say hey, let’s hop on, zoombryan.com and then we can go through this. And then you can share your screen. And that can be a resource where you don’t have to connect a link and send a link, and I don’t know if there’s any more you want to say about that. But just that little piece of advice has been amazingly helpful.

Draye Redfern  24:22

It’s one of those things just goes back to controlling your environment. Let’s hop into my zoom meeting room, which is zoom.us/j/895-949-3210. My goodness, that is an awful experience. So controlling every aspect of it where you know what, hey, I’d love to chat on phone. I’d also like I can show you this on zoom, zoomdraye, zoombryan.com, whatever it is. It makes it significantly easier like curating. It’s almost like you’re a museum curator, like you’re crying to craft an amazing experience across the board. Like the videos that Bryan said that they’re deploying The entire experience the mic backups, the web URLs, all of those things, so we’re not going back anytime soon to how business was. But it’s definitely worth considering as we as you continue to grow your practice in this even in more digital age. Brittany, anything you want to round out there for us as we send this one off?

Brittany Anderson  25:22

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because I’m sitting here thinking, When was the first time that I actually had to get on zoom. And it was actually with you Draye. So it was a handful years ago. And at that point in time, I had done a couple like group type things in some other platform, but the one on one, and it was so awkward and uncomfortable, because you’re like looking at yourself, and then you’re looking at the other person, and you’re like, what are my mannerisms? And it’s one of those things where I think just like anything in life, once you start doing it, it becomes second nature. Now, if somebody asked me to jump on a zoom, or if I asked somebody to jump on a zoom, it is no different than if I was sitting in front of them. Draye talks like, Hey, you know, he talks with his hands, I am also somebody who consistently talks with their hands. And I’m going to do that whether I’m in person, I’m on a stage or I’m on zoom with you. What you see is what you get every single time. So if you have any fear around the digital space, because I know there are advisors out there, and really successful ones at that I have one in mind in particular that I mean, this gentleman has had immense success in his business and had never done a zoom meeting until the pandemic hit. My brain almost exploded when I heard that, because there’s so much opportunity to be had there. So again, if you’re fearful, if you’re uncomfortable with technology, if Mr. Bryan Sweet can embrace it into and to, so I’m going to pick on him there for a minute. Because as seriously get comfortable. And it’s the whole adage that we’ve talked about before, get comfortable being uncomfortable, that’s when massive breakthroughs occur. The other thing that I wanted to push on that we haven’t talked about yet, is when you have a zoom meeting, when you’re creating a virtual experience, you better choose how you show up. And what that means is, you know, treat it like you’re walking into a physical in person meeting, be on time, don’t delay just because you know, it’s technology, and it’s different. And you know, it’s a little bit more laps, whatever, no, treat it like you would any other meeting, give it your full attention. I mean, it is so obvious. And you have to be intentional, because I think guilty too, it becomes really obvious when people are utterly distracted, and they’re doing other things, and you’re supposed to be engaging in one on one. And you can tell an email pings up and you’re like, Oh, there goes their attention, I have to repeat what I said, because they absolutely didn’t hear me. So it’s those things that you have to choose how you show up for the person on the other end. And it’s more than just, you know, brushing your hair, or you know, making sure that you have a shirt on or whatever the case is, you know, those little things matter, but it’s really treating it like a true meeting. So before I go into the key takeaways from today, Bryan, Draye, anything else that you want to add?

Draye Redfern  28:20

Yeah, Brittany, I think that it’s just one of those things where we talked a little bit about last time, it may seem overwhelming, but just buy off one thing at a time, like, you know, eating that elephant one bite at a time, whether that’s you know, I’m going to have a backup camera, or maybe a camera at a different angle. If you’re in a conference room setting and you want to have the whiteboard or whatever, is you’re showing, in addition to you, just having a couple different options, really inexpensive, but can go a long way to elevate the way in which you are perceived in this digital environment.

Brittany Anderson  28:49

Awesome. And, you know, actually, that leads perfectly into one of the first or top takeaways is investing in your tech, like Draye said, it is not going to cost you a fortune. There are absolutely companies and people out there that will tell you, you know, to invest 1000s of dollars into your technology, you don’t have to especially when you’re first getting started a few 100 bucks here, 100 bucks there, and you’re going to be very well set to have a very professional presentation. The second point or top takeaway is to simply embrace the virtual world. As we’ve said, it’s not going anywhere. So one thing that you can do kind of under that umbrella is to take a bird’s eye view on your business to see how you can create a truly enhanced virtual experience and virtual presence. So to light like Bryan said and mentioned in his conversation here is that we’ve actually created a virtual tour of our office. Now that was one thing before, again, a little bit of a limiting belief that we had was, you know, in order for people to truly experience the difference they have to come to our office. Well we’ve realized now that’s not necessarily true. Do we have amazing people here and really cool experience and fresh baked homemade cookies? Yep, we sure do. But we can also create an experience for the people that can’t come to the office, which in turn, has expanded our footprint. So that leads me to the third key takeaway from today’s episode. And that is to look at how you could potentially expand your reach, your marketing, who you serve, and how you serve. This whole virtual presence, this conversation has opened up endless opportunities for so many advisors and so many businesses alike. If you’re capitalizing on them, that’s going to help you win. If you’re not, you may find yourself falling behind. So embracing technology, leaning into it and looking at how it can actually expand your capabilities. That’s going to do wonders for your business down the road. So that wraps up today’s episode of your Ultimate Advisor Podcast. We will see you back here next week. 

Brittany Anderson  31:02

Hey there, Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you’re hearing on our Ultimate Advisor Podcast, don’t keep us a secret. Share us with other advisors that you think would benefit from the messages that you are hearing. The easiest way to do that is to simply send them to ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. And if you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimateadvisormastermind.com. As always, we are so happy to have you here with us as part of the Ultimate Advisor community and we look forward to a continued relationship