Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Matt Halloran
Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and this week, Steve and I are thrilled to be talking with Matt Halloran. Matt is the CEO of Top Advisor Marketing, and he’s the voice of the Top Advisor Marketing Podcast. He is also a repeat visitor here on our podcast.
Matt always has great insights, but we really wanted to talk to him very specifically about a really interesting idea called micro-influencing. Matt will walk us through a clear blueprint to drive more referrals by focusing on how to attract, intrigue, engage, and influence the people with whom you want to work, and he focuses quite specifically on how you can use podcasting as well as some other vehicles to make that happen. It turns out, that’s not nearly as scary or difficult as you might think when you have experts like Matt and his team to guide you through the process and do the heavy lifting.
I was particularly interested to hear what Matt had to share about how to use LinkedIn to its fullest potential, to nurture relationships and to drive growth. With that, let’s get straight to the conversation with Matt.
Steve Wershing:
Matt Halloran, thanks for joining us, and welcome back to the Becoming Referable Podcast. How are you?
Julie Littlechild:
You are a two-time guest-
Steve Wershing:
That’s right.
Julie Littlechild:
… on the podcast.
Steve Wershing:
We can’t get enough of you.
Matt Halloran:
Well, Stephen has been on mine twice now. We got to have you back, Julie, so that we’re all two-timers.
Steve Wershing:
Because it’s all about parity. Yeah, right. Exactly.
Julie Littlechild:
We’re all two-timers, all right.
Steve Wershing:
Matt, technically you’re the CEO of Top Advisor Marketing, and so what’s new at Top Advisor? There was one project that you’re working on that we really want to talk with you about, that caused us to want to have you back on the show today. But what’s going on in general?
Matt Halloran:
Well, what’s going on generally is Kirk and I really took a big step back and we were like, “Facebook’s not working.” All right. We started there, as kind of a brutal premise. When I wrote the Social Media Handbook for Financial Advisors, well, probably almost half of the book was on Facebook because of the power of it. Then when Zuckerberg got yanked to Congress, basically what happened is he didn’t help us as consumers, but he just screwed businesses. So the psychographics and demographics, and it’s now all pay to play, and it is expensive for financial services professionals to truly utilize Facebook accordingly, right, to really generate business. Plus, they have a three-phase process now that you have to go through, and if you don’t follow those three phases, their algorithm kicks you.
So we’re like, “Man, this just isn’t working. We have advisors who are kicking great podcasts out and all this great thought leadership.” We’re like, “What do we do? How do we take Top Advisor from zero to over a million-dollar company?” Well, guess what? We use podcasting and we use freaking LinkedIn. That was it. That’s really this whole new thing that we’re offering.
Julie Littlechild:
You took what had worked for you, which… and I love these kinds of stories because it worked. You can really speak to what you did. LinkedIn, podcasting, they really drove most of that growth for you?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. When I was still doing what Stephen does now or when I was coaching, 90% of my business came from LinkedIn. So Kirk and I were like, “Well, we’re going to keep doing that. I’m approaching 10,000 connections. I’d say 80% of them are financial advisors. I’m very, very active on there. I do a lot of writing and a lot of blogging, and now we’re putting up these podcasts and it just drives so much attention. It keeps us really top of mind.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Yeah. How much time do you put in or did you put in, say, to grow the business via social media? I know when a lot of people hear it, it’s like, “Well, how much work do I have to put in to make it happen?”
Matt Halloran:
Sure. A lot.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Fair enough.
Matt Halloran:
That’s one of the reasons why this offering is so much fun is because I had to do it all myself, and we now do it for the advisor, right? One of the greatest gifts I ever gave myself was a marketing assistant. She has her master’s degree in digital marketing. She’s wicked smart. She’s got my voice down perfectly. She’s a 32-hour-a-week employee. She does Kirk and I. She focuses on our social media and all of our external marketing efforts. But we’ve gotten that down to about four to six hours per advisor per week, so you outsource that to us.
We don’t have the most scalable business, but luckily our systems and infrastructures are in place and we have a really good pipeline to hire, which allows us to keep really high-quality people to do your social media. Did that answer that?
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely, because I think… look, it’s a lot of things. It works but there is some effort, and we can’t get away from that.
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. We’re talking-
Steve Wershing:
You’re putting in four to six hours per advisor per week. Once they’ve delegated it to you, then what does that leave in terms of the demand on their calendar?
Matt Halloran:
Two hours a month, so that’s the kicker, right? That was the other thing. This was really one of the main reasons why I stopped coaching, was because I found that my advisors didn’t want me to tell them what to do. They wanted me to do it for them. So Kirk and I were like, “Look, we’re not ever going to create another product where I’m going to make you do more work than I do.”
Now what we’ve done is with two hours a month, two and a half max if you have major compliance, which some BDs have big compliance. That gives you two podcasts a month plus all of the LinkedIn connection stuff that we’re going to talk about, plus nurture sequences that are based off of your specific niche and also a follow-up system. For two and a half hours a month, that’s not too shabby.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Now, before we get too far to the mechanics of it, you talk about developing advisors into micro-influencers. So I’m picturing members of the Lollipop Guild with keyboards and microphones. Tell us a little about what a micro-influencer is.
Matt Halloran:
We’ve just found that people get really nervous about being called an influencer. When they think of an influencer, they think of Elon Musk or they think of Tiger Woods or all of these humongous names. The other problem is when you’re a true influencer, you’re going global or nationally. Most of our advisors don’t want to go national. They want to be regional, so that’s where the micro came from. We just looked at it and said, “Okay, we’re going to be micro-influencers,” so within a specific geographic area that you’re already successful in, we’re just going to hyper-focus on that. That’s really what a micro-influencer is.
Steve Wershing:
Tell us a little bit about how you do that, because LinkedIn, podcasting, when you release it, it’s released to the world. Tell us how you just really focus on your geographic area, for example.
Matt Halloran:
Through our discovery process, we’re going to find out all of the specific psychographics, demographics, and locations that you want, and then we put it into our system. We basically created a system that works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s like a bolt-on system, and that will allow us to get really granular, not as granular as Facebook used to allow us to get. I used to be able to find out how much you spend on credit cards per month on Facebook.
Steve Wershing:
Wow.
Matt Halloran:
I could-
Julie Littlechild:
That’s scary.
Matt Halloran:
It is, except as a marketer, it was brilliant because I wasn’t putting stuff in front of you, Julie, that you didn’t want to see. I was targeting exactly what you wanted because you told me that’s what you wanted. Then they just cut our legs out. Now there’s a little bit more effort that needs to go with it. We’ve got a four to six message kind of nurture sequence. After I identify Steven Wershing as the person I want to attract, I’m going to go ahead and send him a connection request with a very personalized message, which is very important. I don’t know if you guys get those. I get those all the time on LinkedIn.
Steve Wershing:
Oh, sure.
Matt Halloran:
Hey, I don’t think you know me, but…
Julie Littlechild:
No, I don’t.
Steve Wershing:
Exactly.
Matt Halloran:
No, I don’t, and you’re a schmuck and I’m not going to set up for a free 15-minute consultation. It’s like you want to marry me before we even date. I hate that. Social media, still you need to follow social rules and Kirk and I know how to follow those social rules, and we’ve done it quite successfully ourselves.
Julie Littlechild:
You’ve got this program to help advisors become micro-influencers. I want to talk about some of these mechanics as you said, Steve. But can you give us just that quick overview? What’s involved in that program? How do you get advisors from here to there?
Matt Halloran:
Okay. The first thing that we have to do is we have to build your actual presence, okay? That takes us about 30 days, to be brutally honest, where we brand your podcast. We come up with a professional intro and outro, scripts, and music. We coach you on how to get behind the mic, because just because you talk for a living does not mean you’re a good podcaster. Then what we do is we maximize your social media profile, so that would be LinkedIn specifically to make sure the keywords are there especially the geographic keywords. A lot of people miss that. Then we also build that nurture sequence. That happens within the first 30 days.
After that, what we do, in the next 30 days, is we start recording podcasts. You should have about four to six in the can before you ever release. That will get you much more recognized on iTunes. That’s the new iTunes hack. Then we use that podcast to hyper-target those people you’re trying to connect with on LinkedIn.
After we go through that, we’ll say, “Okay… For an advisor, let’s say they’re looking for CEOs who work with these companies who we know probably have this executive comp package, because we can be that specific because they’ve been there for a certain amount of time. You can do that.
Steve Wershing:
Sure.
Matt Halloran:
Then we’re going to have them do a podcast that says, “Hey, I work with CEOs from Verizon and here are the top 10 things that you have problems with, with your executive compensation package.” Then after I’ve initiated a dating relationship with these people, I’m going to send you that podcast and say, “Hey, Julie, I did this podcast for people just like you.” Come on, we know that people like to feel special, right? They like to feel unique and different.
Steven and I earlier were talking about Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, right?
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Sure.
Matt Halloran:
Principles of Influence. Making them feel special is still really powerful, and guess what? It works. Those are the mechanics of it, and then it’s a machine. We do 3 to 500 initiations of connection requests. About 20% of them will become connections, because we’ve done this for ourselves. Then we also know about 25 to 30% of those, if you niche correctly, those people will actually have a real conversation with you and they because true prospects.
Anybody who says that they’re going to get you leads, I hate that. We don’t give you leads. We initiate relationships, because that’s what advisors want, right, Julie? I mean, they want a relationship.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Steve Wershing:
You have somebody who’s actually reaching out to all these folks asking for those connections?
Matt Halloran:
That is correct.
Steve Wershing:
Okay. Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
It starts with podcasts. If I come to you as an advisor, and I’m thinking, “Well, I listen to podcasts. I can talk. Surely I can do this,” then how do you help me figure out what that messaging is, what to talk about? Talk me through that process.
Matt Halloran:
Through our discovery process, we’re going to ask you a whole bunch of questions like really what makes you unique and different. We talk about that a lot. It seems like that’s ad nauseum, but most advisors, they really do have something that they’re specialized in.
We use a mind-mapping tool called MindMeister. What we do with that is we’ll come up with six to 12, depending on how easy it is to work with the advisor, overarching podcast topics, and then we come up with the subpoints. We work with points, because compliance will actually approve a bulleted list of points. They do like scripts normally, but we try not to script.
Steve Wershing:
Okay. Sure. Yeah.
Matt Halloran:
That way they have something to give compliance ahead of time. I warn them up or our voice talents will warm them up. They should be comfortable. We get them laughing and excited and get their energy up before we ever hit the record button, and then we just go ahead and record. Ideal podcast length is 26 minutes, so we always shoot for under 30.
Julie Littlechild:
Okay. Are most advisors daunted by this process? Do they feel like, “I’m ready to do this,” because it sounds like it could be really powerful. But what are some of the challenges that you see with these guys?
Matt Halloran:
There are a lot. When we came up with this, and we’ve got proof. I’ll show you our books that this has worked for us. I mean, we’re just talking to people here at the SEI Conference and they’re like, “I’m never going to use social media.” Are you freaking kidding me?
Steve Wershing:
Wow.
Matt Halloran:
“I don’t do any marketing at all, but I don’t understand why I’m not growing at a two-times multiple?” Because you’re not doing any sort of marketing. Age, I’d say that’s the number one. Thing is that advisors are generally, what? They’re 50-plus, 55-plus, is the average age of an advisor now. They’re old enough where they just don’t think it’s necessary. We know that if you want to target 45 to 55-year-olds who are in their peak earning years, who are highly educated and in high levels in organizations, if you don’t podcast and if you’re not on LinkedIn, you do not exist.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. It’s like that electric guitar thing. It’s never going to catch on, it’s just a fad.
Matt Halloran:
Crazy rock and roll music, right?
Steve Wershing:
Exactly.
Julie Littlechild:
That’s right. Can you give us some examples of an advisor that you’ve maybe worked with and how you saw that progress?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. I’m so glad you asked me that, because this is the funniest thing. I was the original podcast host so I hosted every advisor’s podcast. Then we hired another voice talent and so ended up going to him.
Our system right now is the first six to nine months is a hosted podcast. That’s part of our system. We will interview the advisor, and maybe tease out all of their thought leadership and all of that stuff. But after that, they’re supposed to find guests, okay?
We’ve got this guy. He’s been with us since the beginning, I think 18 months now, or almost 24 months now. He’s a recovering CPA so he doesn’t have the greatest personality in the world or are least you would think, until he starts interviewing people. He’s interviewing these CPAs and these estate-planning attorneys. The amount of referrals that he has gotten has tripled because all of these CPAs, it’s such an easy way to introduce yourself.
One of the things I don’t think people understand is podcasting is very intimate. You guys know that. I’m in your head, right? Julie, when do you listen to podcasts?
Julie Littlechild:
In the car.
Matt Halloran:
In the car. You’re all by yourself so either you’re turning up the music and singing, which is wildly intimate, or you’re there. It’s not video-based. People don’t understand that video is quite impersonal, but podcasting is wildly intimate. And so, what has happened is his personality has blossomed, his business has grown, and he absolutely loves doing it. In fact, he wants to do it more often. We’re like, “Dude, you need to slow down,” because you don’t want to do too much. We believe two podcasts a month are more than enough.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. I’ll tell you a funny story. This has happened a few times lately. I was at a conference. I was going to speak, and a guy… I was just chatting to somebody and somebody turned around and he said, “I listen to your podcasts.” He said, “I know that voice.” Didn’t know me, didn’t know what I looked like. The number of people lately who’ve said to me, “It’s like your voice is in my head,” well, that’s a frightening thought, but interesting.
Steve Wershing:
But it is, yes. Like Matt said, yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
That’s meaningful at some level, right?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. It hits you in a very basic part of your brain. You have a great voice, by the way. Your voice in somebody’s brain is probably pretty awesome.
Julie Littlechild:
Please. Please. No, go ahead.
Steve Wershing:
Do you find a difference in engagement level between the episodes where your voice is interviewing the advisor versus when the advisor is interviewing an outside guest?
Matt Halloran:
It all depends on topic. That’s the important thing to understand about… You could have the greatest guest in the world, but if they’re talking about tax loss harvesting, and that’s not what your audience wants to listen to, it’s not going to be successful.
Steve Wershing:
Okay. Sure.
Matt Halloran:
Headlines are widely important, so how we market the podcast is super powerful. The greatest responses that we’ve gotten from podcasts have absolutely nothing to do with financial services. We have a gentleman who’s a distance ultramarathon guy, ultra distance dude, and him and I did a podcast on how he was preparing for this race in Colorado, and that got like 6,000 downloads. He got exposed to an entirely different market and his podcast got legs because it wasn’t just the normal asset allocation stuff, protection products, that sort of stuff.
People want to know who you are as a human before they want to know about what’s in your brain. So we always try to get them to talk a little bit more about themselves. Surprisingly enough, as egotistical as some advisors are, they’re really uncomfortable answering some of those questions.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t find that surprising because one of the things that I’ve found in talking with clients directly is that they don’t understand the investment process. They don’t want to understand the investment processes. It’s why they hire an advisor, and so if you want to talk about investment topics, you’re not talking about what they care about. If you talk about what they care about, even if it’s not financial services, they’ll feel a better connection with you.
Matt Halloran:
You’re absolutely right.
Julie Littlechild:
It’s like a lot of marketing we do today. The more we can do it on topics that are authentic to us and demonstrate your personality or are targeted to that individual… Are you finding that a lot of advisors are talking about topics that are tangential to wealth management then and that’s working?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. The tangential, the story-based podcast, right?
Julie Littlechild:
Mm-hmm
Matt Halloran:
That’s one of the things that we try to pull out with our guests all the time, is, tell me a story about- I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that, because clients could see themselves in that. A good example was one of my client’s clients wanted to go to Machu Picchu, okay?
Julie Littlechild:
Yep.
Matt Halloran:
Bucket list thing. I don’t know if you know this, but there are like 13,000 steps that you have to take straight up a mountain to get to Machu Picchu, and they don’t drop you off in a helicopter, by the way. So he did a podcast on how to prepare for some of your bucket list things, and it was about health and nutrition and exercise in your aging years.
Steve Wershing:
Oh, interesting, sure.
Matt Halloran:
Because you’ve got the go-go, the slow-go, and the no-go years. Everybody is talking about that now. In the go-go years, he was doing podcasts targeting that demographic and it was wildly successful.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting.
Julie Littlechild:
I have to imagine that the way that you guys package this is the kicker for advisors. I mean, the fact that you produce it, the fact that you’ll market it, all of that, I mean, that’s what stops a lot of people from doing a lot of this because… I remember when we started, it was figuring out how to record, what kind of equipment do I need. It’s confusing.
Matt Halloran:
Well, yeah. It’s not that-
Julie Littlechild:
We should have come to you.
Matt Halloran:
You know what? You should have. That’s a totally different story, Julie.
Steve Wershing:
Where were you two years ago?
Julie Littlechild:
Sorry about that.
Matt Halloran:
You were just doing that too. That’s what it was. Well, I was just talking to a guy about that earlier. We have a white paper, just so you know. It’s entirely free, you don’t have to give us an email address, that will walk you through every single solitary thing you need to do to produce your own podcast. Soup to nuts, from syndication, to equipment, to editing, to editing techniques, to podcasting techniques, all that stuff, we’ve got it all. It’s like a 30-page white paper. That’s a great prospecting tool for us. Why? Because people look at it, they’re like, “I can’t do this.” I’m like, “Yeah, why would you do this?”
Matt Halloran:
I started doing radio when I was 13 years old when I would edit commercials with masking tape because it was real to real. I remember when we moved from LPs to discs, right?
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.
Matt Halloran:
I’ve been doing this forever. I’ve been editing waveform patterns for probably the last 15 years, and this is something that’s very second nature to me. Why would you, as a financial services professional want to even begin to screw with this? Because you know what? Here’s the deal. You’re going to suck at it. I’m sorry. It’s going to take you a long time to get good at it and it’s a terrible, terrible use of your time. That’s why you outsource it to somebody who is totally nerdy about wanting to make the best freaking podcast they can make for you.
Steve Wershing:
Right. Well, and it’s also about really focusing your time on the things that deliver the most value. Then if you’re editing podcasts, you’re not doing what is the most valuable. Now, one of the things that you and Kirk were talking about was you don’t just broadcast a full podcast episode. You make other uses of that. Can you tell us a little bit about how you can use that to promote?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. First off, we transcribe every single solitary podcast for compliance purposes, just for archiving. Then one of our team members will go through and pull out bullet points from that. Almost every podcast, even if it’s 30 minutes, will have 7 to 10 great talking points. We’ll turn those into quote memes or direct quotes.
Now we have a new piece of software that actually pulls those audio clips out, and so I can give you a quick 30-second to two-minute audio sample of my podcast which we know they’re going to end up probably either subscribing or listening to the full episode. I’ve really taken a lot of time to train our team to figure out, one, advisor speak, and then, two, how to highlight really the great talking points, because those are the hooks, right?
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.
Matt Halloran:
It’s like the chorus of a song. That’s what we want in these podcasts. We create about 30 social media posts through LinkedIn based off each podcast. That’s how much stuff we can pull.
Steve Wershing:
No, that’s a lot. That’s a lot.
Matt Halloran:
It is. I think so. Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
So it’s not the podcast is the thing, but it’s really how you leverage it. If you have advisors who are blogging or doing other things, do you try to integrate all of that?
Matt Halloran:
Absolutely. In fact, man, I’m telling you, our advisors who already blog, which are very, very few by the way, we use their blog topics as podcast topics, because here’s the thing. When I opened up, the opening of my book, The Social Media Handbook for Financial Advisors, it says communication has fundamentally changed. You have to communicate to your client in the medium in which they’re there when they want to hear it. When they want to hear it, right?
Julie Littlechild:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Matt Halloran:
Some people don’t like reading. Not to be mean, I would much rather listen to a podcast. I listen to audiobooks, podcasts. In fact, I listen to them on 1.5 times speed because I’m wildly impatient, and your brain corrects it. I can listen to an audiobook that’s a six-hour audiobook in three and a half, four hours. Guess what? I love every minute of it.
In fact, I tried to do this. Kirk and I had been talking a lot about blogging. I tried to find a good blogging app so that I could read blogs on my phone. Nothing. I got nothing.
Julie Littlechild:
Nothing?
Steve Wershing:
Really?
Matt Halloran:
It drives me crazy. All of them drive me nuts because they’re not user friendly, whereas I can go to iTunes podcasts, scroll down, bam. Hit it, it’s playing, and I’m in their world, and I like that.
Julie Littlechild:
Okay, because you’re talking about podcasts, but really it’s the influencer piece.
Matt Halloran:
That’s correct.
Julie Littlechild:
Is that where you start the conversation? It’s really the next wave of marketing, I think.
Matt Halloran:
It is. Advisors talk for a living. They don’t write for a living. When we would try to get advisors to write white paper or blogs or even social media posts, man, they’re getting up to the plate and they’re striking out left and right because they have it here. I’m pointing to my brain. You guys can’t see that.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, right.
Matt Halloran:
I just realized I’m talking-
Julie Littlechild:
We can see it.
Matt Halloran:
I appreciate that. Yeah, you guys, you know it. But getting them to talk about it, right, and especially in the interview format, by asking some very targeted open-ended questions, I can get an advisor to spill the beans on stuff. In fact, one of the best gifts that I get as a podcast host is, you know what, Matt, I never thought of it that way before. And I’m like, ding ding ding ding! That’s like oh my gosh, or wow. When somebody truly says that was a good question, yes, I mean, I make money off this, don’t get me wrong, but that’s the icing on the cake, man. But it is all about influence. It’s all about who they are and what separates them from the advisor down the street, and that’s where we’re going to be focusing very, very closely on.
In fact, with this new package, we do blogging for them, because, again, like I said, you have to communicate in the medium in which they want to communicate to while they’re there. Some people love to read. Some people like to listen. Some people like to watch videos. We cover all three of those because we take the podcast and turn it into an MP4. I don’t know if you guys know this but half of all YouTube videos are watched audio only.
Julie Littlechild:
Oh, no. I didn’t know that.
Steve Wershing:
Really? That’s interesting. No, I didn’t know that either.
Matt Halloran:
So we create MP4s with a still image that people can just go ahead and consume their podcasts on YouTube.
Julie Littlechild:
Really?
Matt Halloran:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Julie Littlechild:
I did not know that.
Steve Wershing:
Is there an audience, do you think, for people watching a video of the podcast?
Matt Halloran:
No.
Steve Wershing:
No? Okay.
Matt Halloran:
Maybe once your influence gets to the point where you have a pretty substantial listenership. Livestreaming, it’s a great thing to do. I have an advisor who’s a friend of mine who’s in Roseburg, Oregon. He livestreams his radio show, I’m air quoting there, and he gets a lot of interaction. But it’s taken him years. Not many advisors are that patient.
Julie Littlechild:
Where do they start? They’re thinking influence sounds like a good plan, micro-influence sounds like a better plan. What are the two or three things I need to think about to get started?
Matt Halloran:
The first is, do you truly have a niche? If you don’t, please call Steve.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt Halloran:
There are people who you really need to have a-
Steve Wershing:
This message brought to you by… yeah, right. Thank you.
Matt Halloran:
I work with people who are over a million dollars who are 55 and above. That’s not a niche, not even in the ballpark of what that is. That’s number one. If you really do have one… we’ve got a guy who works with nurse anesthetists. God, that’s so hard to say.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.
Matt Halloran:
But he speaks all over the country at all of their conferences, because he’s the guy, right?
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, right. Sure.
Matt Halloran:
Now, it took him 15 years to get there, but if he would have used podcasts, we could have cut that time down exponentially. So you have to have a niche. That’s number one. Number two, you have to be willing to understand that social media works. If you can’t get past that, I don’t want you to call me at all, because I don’t want to convince you of something that you have a preconceived notion that it’s not going to work.
You do also need to have a LinkedIn presence a little bit, because starting from zero is really hard. All right?
Julie Littlechild:
What does that look like? What would you expect somebody to have in place?
Matt Halloran:
400 connections would be fine. Most advisors have 400 connections. Then what we’ll do is that we’ll turn that into 4,000. That’s our goal.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Okay. That’s first thing that you raised is probably the big question, right?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. That’s the hurdle, man.
Julie Littlechild:
An influencer in what, I guess is the question.
Matt Halloran:
There are people who have amazing planning processes. In fact, one of the advisors that is a client now, they have a process for 401k education, and it’s a patented or trademark process. He’s got 12 months of content already built in because that’s his educational process. Now, he doesn’t work with any 401k. They only work with hospital systems, and so talk about micro-focus. He uses very specific language that appeals to floor nurses, charge nurses, doctors, residents, all of that sort of stuff. That’s the sort of stuff that we try to tease out through our discovery process to see if there is anything there.
There are times where we go through a client segmentation-y sort of process and they’ll realize very quickly that, oh my gosh, I do have a niche. I do love these people. Oh my God, I would like to talk to them more. That’s like music to our ears.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, okay. Yeah. I think that’s important, the fact that you help them to get to that point.
Matt Halloran:
I think they should go through Stephen first. I mean, honestly, or go through your client feedback process. There are a lot of things that I would… in order for them to be wildly successful, if they don’t hire you before they come to us, I don’t think they’re going to be as successful, because you set a foundation of understanding what their clients want that nobody really does that in the industry. I’m totally shilling you two right now-
Julie Littlechild:
Thank you.
Matt Halloran:
… because I freaking love you both, and you know that.
Julie Littlechild:
No, no. Carry on. Don’t have to stop you there. Actually, let me just ask you one quick question, and I think I know the answer, but it’s worth asking. We talk about becoming referable.
Matt Halloran:
Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
How are you seeing your clients use micro-influence and podcasting to generate more referrals?
Matt Halloran:
It is so much easier for me to say, “Julie, listen to my podcast,” than, “Why don’t you go ahead and tell all your friends and family about me?” That’s a terrible referral talk, and I know that’s not what you guys talk about. But it’s just a very convenient, very passive, but very intimate way to have somebody get to know who you are without having a hard ask. Because there are people right now, research is playing it out, if you don’t ask correctly, which I know you guys help with, but if you don’t ask correctly, it does more harm than good.
Steve Wershing:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Matt Halloran:
If I can say to you, “Julie, you know what? Hey, I just did a podcast on starting to invest when your children are young,” and I know that you have younger children. You know what? Do you have any other friends who have younger children? Of course, you do because you’re going to hang out with people… if you know anybody who asks you a question, just say, “Hey, I’ve got a great podcast. Why don’t you listen to that?” You’re not using my name. You’re not saying I’m a financial advisor, all of those triggers that make people not want to deal with us, it’s just a podcast. I think that makes you way more referable.
Julie Littlechild:
And we want to share that stuff. You wouldn’t even want to mention it, right? We share. Any good resource, we share.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, and I would think from the clients… and this may be what you were saying. I wasn’t sure if the advisor was talking to the client or if it is the client talking to a friend. But I would think that from the client’s standpoint, it would be a lot more comfortable for them to say to a friend, “I just heard this really good interview talking about this topic. You should really listen to it.”
Matt Halloran:
That’s right.
Steve Wershing:
As opposed to saying, “You should really talk to my financial advisor.”
Matt Halloran:
Right, because what are they going to say immediately? Oh, I already have a financial advisor.
Steve Wershing:
Exactly. Exactly.
Matt Halloran:
But they don’t have that information that you’re providing. Again, then I’m in their head. It’s wildly intimate. The probability of them subscribing to my podcast is much higher. Then when I do reach out, if I do ever reach out, whether it’s through our system or through that friend, they’re going to be like, “Oh my God.” It’s just like what you said earlier. “I know your voice.” Yeah, you do know my voice. You listen to my podcast. If somebody listens to your podcast, there is no closing. You don’t close anybody. They’re already a client. When they come in, they’re ready to go because you are the person who’s been providing them with the information that they needed and wanted in a way that’s really convenient and not salesy, and that’s pretty good.
Julie Littlechild:
That’s awesome.
Steve Wershing:
Well, Matt, it’s always a great pleasure to have you on. It’s always great to talk to you. We’re really excited about this new program you’ve got going. Where should people go to find out more about that?
Matt Halloran:
Yeah. So they go to topadvisormarketing.com and they’re just going to click on micro-influencer and, bam, all of the stuff will come up. We’re going to be launching a pretty substantial campaign on this. In fact, you guys are going to help us with that. I really, really appreciate that. We’re launching it here at the SEI Conference today. I’m launching in Salt Lake City next week to another company, so we’re going to be hitting this really hard, because it’s not just financial advisors who can use this. It’s people who provide services to financial advisors, that B2B market, heck, that’s how we grew our business.
If you are a person who provides services to advisors, this is just as good. If you’re a wholesaler, whatever, money manager, this works really well for you too. I really appreciate it. You guys are freaking awesome. And I said this to Julie last time, I’ve referred so much business to you. I’ve referred business to you. I’m learning so much more about who you are, Stephen, and I just love what you’re doing. This advisory counsel thing in a box is freaking brilliant. Your doing it in person is brilliant, and you’re coming back with something that you did a long time ago. I’m pointing at Julie now. I’m going to have you on our podcast to talk more about that.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Absolutely happy to. Thanks so much for your time.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Thanks, Matt.
Hey, folks. Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free record, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Until next time, so long.