Brad Swineheart on Learning to Leverage the Virtual Environment

Show Timeline:
03:45 Examples of how to get in front of prospects, virtually
05:55 The importance of “being real” when connecting digitally
10:41 Leveraging social media to foster more engagement and connection
16:04 Overcoming the perceived challenges of virtual events
19:08 Ways to increase engagement during a virtual event
24:12 Modifying your skills to ensure your webinars are successful
26:26 Why it’s critical to develop skills to communicate virtually
27:48 Webinar topics that get the most traction
30:11 New growth opportunities that have emerged in a virtual environment  

Links:
Website:              https://whiteglove.com
LinkedIn:            https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradswineheart/
Twitter:                https://twitter.com/bswineheart

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referrable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing.

Steve Wershing:
Business development for professional service firms was turned upside down when the world went into pandemic just about a year ago and among the most affected people were advisors who attracted new clients primarily through seminars. And the leader in seminar marketing of course is White Glove. On this episode, we talk with Brad Swineheart, vice president of channel marketing and business development for White Glove.

Steve Wershing:
When we all went into lockdown, White Glove pivoted and refocused its attention from seminars into webinars, but whether or not you utilize webinars, you can use what Brad and White Glove learned to leverage the virtual environment, to meet new clients and get referrals over the internet and social media. Our conversation includes what makes for a successful virtual event, how attendee follow up is different from live and virtual events and how to do it successfully virtually and how to translate your presentation skills to the virtual environment. There’s a lot of timely and practical advice in this episode so let’s get right to our conversation with Brad Swineheart.

Steve Wershing:
Brad Swineheart, welcome to the Becoming Referrable podcast. It’s great to have you.

Brad Swineheart:
Hey, thanks for having me on. It sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Steve Wershing:
I think it will be. White Glove has made its name offering a seminar system for advisors and obviously a lot changed when the pandemic came in and all of a sudden we couldn’t get together in groups. What’s happened to you guys? And what’s happened with advisors who had in person seminars as a big element of their marketing plan?

Brad Swineheart:
Yeah, that’s a great question. For us specifically, we went right probably our best month ever in February. We were doing close to 900 in person events all across the US and Canada, right into March where we did zero. And we were in the exact same boat as advisors of having to figure out what’s next? Or what else can we do? Luckily for us, we had just brought on a brand new CEO who in his previous company, ran webinars for professionals. They trained professional business owners through a webinar series and they ran millions of hours of webinars. He just knew exactly what to do. And he said, “Oh, this is what we’re going to do.”

Brad Swineheart:
And we were able to kind of uniquely pivot in the industry because we had the marketing down, we had our follow-up procedures down. We had a bunch of event planners that could now learn the tech of webinars and run that for advisors. We pivoted almost overnight. And what was really interesting was to see the advisors we work with, what their take on it was. And there is there was really two clear groups. There was the group that said, “You know what? This is going to blow over. I’m just going to wait.” And then there was the group that said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s look at this as an opportunity and see what we can do to drive new business into the office.”

Julie Littlechild:
Webinars were obviously a big part of that, but there’s other things that you do. In general, what do you think that when you’re looking at advisors who are succeeding at this and who are progressive in kind of embracing all of this change, what are some of the ways that they are getting in front of prospects now?

Brad Swineheart:
Well, what’s interesting is that physical handshake has gone away. And for a long time advisors really relied on that. Seeing someone in person, having them come into the office, sitting down across from somebody. And that was almost immediately ripped away from them overnight and what we’ve seen and what we’ve put a lot of resources in to help our advisors, is having a virtual handshake, if you will. And where that starts is really an omnichannel approach, where you have value and credibility across social media, emails, your websites, be stalkable online, all these things that advisors kind of ignored because it was like, let’s just fill the top of the funnel. That was always the go to. Let’s just put more leads in the top, but now prospects will absolutely look you up online before they ever decide to do business with you and we wanted to make sure that we were able to support advisors in those efforts.

Brad Swineheart:
We pivoted, we put a ton of resources into a podcasting platform that we just launched. We do social media management for advisors. Very hands free so they don’t have to learn what Mark Zuckerberg is doing in the back office at Facebook. We’ll do that for them, but it’s really to increase their credibility where their prospects are going to find them. And the advisors that have that, the advisors that are credible in their network, their captive network, those are the ones that are actually converting those now virtual leads into actual clients.

Steve Wershing:
I’ve heard a lot of advisors say over time that, “It’s all about the personal connection. You have to have a personal relationship. It’s all about getting belly to belly with someone before you can build up the rapport to make them into a client.” Either what were we missing in that? Or what are the actual things that do that? Or what’s changed that now enable advisors to attract clients without that kind of in person interaction?

Brad Swineheart:
What’s interesting is so many different industries have the same business mentality. It’s a relationship business and that’s just Sales 101. People work with people that they like. It’s not always the best lead magnets. It’s not always the superstar person that they want to reach out to. People will work with people that they like. And outside of the financial industry, people have been doing that virtual for years. White Glove, we do 98% of our sales totally virtually. I have advisors that I would consider very close friends that I’ve never met in person. And what you do is be able to become referable, relatable and a real person digitally. There’s so many outlets right now that advisors have to look at as opportunities and not something to be scared of.

Brad Swineheart:
There’s too many advisors that I talk to that say, “I don’t want anything to do with Facebook or I don’t use LinkedIn, I don’t know what it’s for.” And those are opportunities to not only showcase your professionalism, but showcase that you’re a real human being. And people use that. If you’re going to do business with somebody, the first place you go is LinkedIn. Say, “You know what? I’m going to go stalk Julie on LinkedIn and see if she’s credible. Okay, that’s great. I know she’s credible. Well, now I’m going to hop over and see if I can find her on Facebook and see what she’s like as a person.” And if you can have a professional but personal appearance on both of those sites, you’ve already put yourself ahead of somebody that’s staying away from the social media game.