Nuts and bolts discussion of seminar use for financial marketing

1. Seminar
Secrets
A Complete Guide
to
Seminar Marketing
&
Selling
By
Richard Howard, RFC
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
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2. CHAPTER 1 - SEMINAR SECRETS – INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 2 - WHY SEMINAR MARKETING?
CHAPTER 3 - SEMINAR MARKETING IS NOT DEAD!
CHAPTER 4 - “THE PROBLEM, MY FRIEND, IS THE PROBLEM WITHIN.”
CHAPTER 5 - I WANT TO BE LIKED.
CHAPTER 6 - IF IT IS TO BE IT IS UP TO ME
CHAPTER 7 - IT’S YOUR MIND
CHAPTER 8 - SUPERMAN – SPIDER-MAN – JEDI
CHAPTER 9 - MAKE A COMMITMENT
CHAPTER 10 - START YOUR COMMITMENT WITH A CALENDAR
CHAPTER 11 - DO YOUR HOMEWORK
CHAPTER 12- RETURN ON INVESTMENT + INVISABLE RETURN ON INVESTMENT
(IROI)
CHAPTER 13- GOOD EQUIPMENT & SIGNAGE
CHAPTER 14 - FEED OR NOT FEED? YES, YOU FEED
CHAPTER 15- AT THE RESTAURANT
CHAPTER 16- BEING SELECTIVE
CHAPTER 17 – HOW TO REACH THE RIGHT CLIENTS
CHAPTER 18 – CHOOSE THE RIGHT MAILING
CHAPTER 19 – YOUR INVITATION
CHAPTER 20 – HOW TO MAIL & TO WHOM
CHAPTER 21 – FIND ADJUSTED GROSS INCOME FOR THE ZIPS YOU MAIL
CHAPTER 22 – WHY NOT MAIL MORE
CHAPTER 23- MORE ON MAILING
CHAPTER 24 – MAILING: AGE MATTERS
CHAPTER 25 – WHAT TO DO WHEN RESPONSE RATES DROP
CHAPTER 26 – THE VALUE OF A GOOD RESPONSE SERVICE
CHAPTER 27 – FILLING THE ROOM
CHAPTER 28 – MULTIPLE SEMINARS
CHAPTER 29 – WHAT TIME TO HOLD SEMINARS?
CHAPTER 30 – HOW TO HANDLE ADVISORS COMING TO YOUR SEMINAR
CHAPTER 31 – REPEAT ATTENDEES & LATE ARRIVALS
CHAPTER 32 – USE OF A QUALIFIER & GUARANTEE IN YOUR INVITATION
CHAPTER 33 – YOUR HANDOUT & TESTIMONIALS
CHAPTER 34 – WEB SITE
CHAPTER 35 – WHY GIVE A SEMINAR
CHAPTER 36 – KEY MOMENT IN EVERY RELATIONSHIP
CHAPTER 37 – THE REGISTRATION TABLE
CHAPTER 38 – ROOM SET UP & SEATING
CHAPTER 39 – YOUR INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 40 – STARTING THE SEMINAR
CHAPTER 41 – WARMING UP THE AUDIENCE
CHAPTER 42 – TAKE QUESTIONS OR NOT
CHAPTER 43 – HOW MUCH INFORMATION-HOW TECHNICAL
CHAPTER 44 – IDENTIFY TYPES OF ATTENDEES
CHAPTER 45 – CLOSING THE SEMINAR
CHAPTER 46 – BE LAST TO LEAVE AFTER THE SEMINAR
CHAPTER 47 – DO & DON’T LIST
CHAPTER 48 – ABSOLUTELY NO ALCOHOL & NO CHILDREN
CHAPTER 49 – SET APPOINTMENTS AT THE SEMINAR
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3. CHAPTER 50 – FIRST APPOINTMENT
CHAPTER 51 – “LEAVE THEM NICE” BUT LEAVE THEM
CHAPTER 52 – MEN AND WOMEN WANT DIFFERENT INFORMATION
CHAPTER 53 – WHO RUNS THE RAILROAD
CHAPTER 54 – CALLING SENIORS BY THEIR FIRST NAME – DON’T
CHAPTER 55 – USE AN INTERVIEW SHEET BUT DON’T ATTACK WITH QUESTIONS
CHAPTER 56 – SECOND APPOINTMENT
CHAPTER 57 – THIRD APPOINTMENT - IMPLEMENTATION
CHAPTER 58 – #1 CLOSING TECHNIQUE – SHOW INCOME PLANNING SOFTWARE
CHAPTER 59 – THEY REALLY WANT SOMEONE TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO
CHAPTER 60 – THE CLINT’S MIND & SEMINAR MARKETING
CHAPTER 61 – USEFUL TOOLS
CHAPTER 62 - MARKETING SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER 63 – WILL YOUR SEMINAR STAND SCRUTINY
CHAPTER 64 – BE VERY CAREFUL GIVING INVESTMENT ADVICE
CHAPTER 65 – BE VERY CAREFUL OF UNAUTHORIZED PRACTICE OF LAW (UPL)
CHAPTER 66 – YOUR MENTAL THERMOSTAT
CHAPTER 67 – YOUR MIND & PERSONAL PERFORMANCE
CHAPTER 68 – A GOOD START: THE 4x4 RULE
CHAPTER 69 – MAKE MONEY AT LUNCH
CHAPTER 70 – HAVE CAPABLE RESOURCE PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T
CHAPTER 71 - SEMINAR MYTHS
CHAPTER 72 – HAVE POTENTIAL CLIENTS SEE YOUR SEMIANR BEFORE MEETING
CHAPTER 73 –MEETING YOUR APPOINTMENTS IN THEIR HOME
CHAPTER 74 – YOU NEED AN OFFICE
CHAPTER 75 – YOUR NEED A NICHE
CHAPTER 76 – NICHE SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER 77 – FROM GOOD TO BEST
CHAPTER 78 – QUICK TIPS
CHAPTER 79 – PERSISTENCE ABOVE ALL ELSE
CHAPTER 80 – LAST DAYS PLANNING
CHAPTER 81 - A LITTLE RESPECT FOR A BILION & A TRILLION
CHAPTER 82 – A GIFT FOR YOU Free Download-Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
SEMINAR SECRETS
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4. A C O M P L E T E G U I D E T O S E M I N A R
M A R K E T I N G A N D S E L L I N G
When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for
us.
Alexander Graham Bell
1. INTRODUCTION
Seminar marketing is not dead, no matter what anyone says. Yes,
response rates have fallen off from the glory days of ten or fifteen years
ago, but there are still seniors out there with assets who need and want
your advice. They will respond to a well-written invitation and they will
come to your seminar. The rest is up to you. You have to be a
consummate professional and you must realize that you are competing
with their existing advisors and with every other financial professional
who is giving seminars. This means that you must be good at what you
do. No, that isn’t right. You must be the very best at what you do.
This means that if you are going to go about building your seminar
business in a haphazard manner and hope that everything will turn out
right, you are doomed to failure. If your philosophy for giving seminars
is “just give me butts in the seats,” you will find tough sledding. You can
make a great living doing seminars, but you can also spend a lot of
money and fail if you don’t pay attention to every detail. Some of you
who read this will opt not to be involved in seminars because they are a
lot of work. For this, your competition will be grateful; the less crowded
the market, the better they like it. I can’t remember who said, “Vision
without execution is just another name for hallucination,” but I think
they were talking about seminar marketing.
In the following pages, I am going to give you some suggestions and
ideas that you may be able to use in your business. Most of what you
will read here is a result of lots of research and years of experience
giving seminars, but most of all, it is opinion, my opinion. As with
anything else, no one person’s opinion is the gospel on any subject and
certainly not when it relates to the seminar business. There are many
ways to be a successful financial services professional. There are also
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5. many ways to be successful in seminar marketing. All require hard
work and attention to detail. What you will read here is just a series of
steps that I hope covers all aspects of giving seminars and adds some
detailed “how-to-do-its” so that somewhere in all this information you
might have an “ah ha!” An “ah ha” is that one thing that you already
know instinctively but it hasn’t bubbled to the top of your conscious
mind just yet. It is just one or more ideas that you may not have thought
of or may not have heard before that will help you be successful in your
business.
Most of us who have been active in financial services for a long time
have encountered about every selling system, concept and sales
gimmick out there. You, like me, have read most of the self help books
and the leading “how to” sales success books. I know that when I buy a
book or tape of a good producer, I am not looking for that sales system
or gimmick. All I am looking for is just one idea that will help me do a
better job. If I manage to do that in the pages that follow, then I will feel
that I have been successful in writing Seminar Secrets and passing on to
the producers out there, both new and seasoned, some of the things that
I have learned over the years while giving financial seminars.
2. WHY SEMINAR
MARKETING?
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity
is where you are.
John Burroughs
It is just common sense. Very simply, it is the best way to meet lots of
prospects who will become clients. Instead of presenting to one person,
you get to present to forty people at one time. Assuming that you have
chosen the right seminar and you are able to motivate people to see you,
it is the quickest way to build your practice, and your return on
investment (ROI) for this marketing can be exceptional.
Another real advantage of seminars is that you are presented as the
expert and you establish credibility with a lot of people simultaneously.
The seminar also serves as your first appointment with the attendee.
This accelerates the process of making this attendee your client by
5

6. building a comfort level at the seminar that under other circumstances
would not exist.
Also in seminar marketing, you can choose the criteria that you use to
select those people to invite to your seminar. You separate the sheep
from the goats, so to speak. Such things as age, owning a home, living in
a certain area, net worth and adjusted gross income for the area they
live in can be determined before you send out the invitation to your
seminar. Unlike putting an ad in a local newspaper that would invite
anyone who chose to respond to the ad, you are able to control who
shows up at your seminar. This is important to your seminar success
and will insure that you get a good return on the money you spend for
the mailers and food in putting on a quality seminar.
This all sounds elementary and like common sense, but it is crucial to
the process. In short, you can see more people in less time with more
favorable results and control some of the variables.
At one time, I was doing eighty seminars a year with most of these done
in the southeast U. S., but some were presented as far west as Oklahoma.
Most of what I give you in this book was learned by continually
experimenting with the process. I would review and revise my
presentation after every seminar. In short, it is bought experience, at a
high price, that was the result of very hard work over time. I am not
trying to impress you with how hard I worked, just to let you know that
if you make lots of money doing seminars, you will work hard for it and
pay the same price.
The use of seminars is a highly effective marketing approach that will
make you more money than you dreamed possible if done correctly and
for the right reasons. Your primary focus must be to keep your client’s
welfare as your most important goal. If you think money first instead of
client, you are doomed in the current environment. You certainly do not
need to consider using seminars as a marketing tool if your focus is
solely on how much money you will make.
3. SEMINAR MARKETING IS
NOT DEAD
No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.
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7. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s time to face the facts: “Gravy Train” marketing is dying. Putting on a
dog-and-pony show at the local “Chuck Wagon” just isn’t working like it
did five years ago…you get nothing but unqualified plate lickers looking
for a great dinner at your expense!
One of my friends told me recently that his last two seminars had twenty-
five buying units per event and didn’t yield a single new client. In the exit
survey, every single couple indicated they had come for the free meal!
This is an actual email from a marketer of selling systems sent to
producers across the U. S. I recently received this email. I had a good
laugh and forwarded the email to my partner, Keith Bowman, in
Birmingham, AL, who in turn had a good laugh. We do seminars
together regularly. We both agreed that the agent referenced in the
email is in trouble with his marketing plan.
You see, he was amused because we had just held a seminar for seniors
at an upscale restaurant that had thirty-eight attendees. There were
seventeen “buying units” in this group and he set fourteen appointments
at the seminar. This is an eighty-two percent appointment ratio and he
did not waste the next day calling the interested attendees. He set all
appointments immediately after the seminar. He has not seen all of the
appointments to date, but he has found over eight million dollars with
the clients he has seen already. His close rate is approximately twenty-
five percent, so you can do the numbers. He recently closed and has
been paid on a $1.5 million annuity with a client generated from a
seminar held one month earlier. Now you can understand why he
thought the email was humorous.
In response to this national marketer’s email message, let me suggest
what I think went wrong with his friend’s marketing where he gave two
seminars, had twenty-five buying units, and didn’t get a single
appointment. The problem was the seminar or the presenter--or both.
4. “THE PROBLEM MY FRIEND,
IS THE PROBLEM WITHIN”
Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the
lesson afterwards.
7

8. Anonymous
There is an old hippie ballad from the sixties with lyrics that say, “The
problem, my friend, is the problem within.” The friend the marketer
referenced who had two seminars with twenty-five potential buying
units in his seminar, yet did not set one single appointment, might take
these lyrics to heart. It is not the group he had in his seminar that is
responsible for poor results. The problem is with the type of seminar,
the invitation that set attendee expectations, the seminar set-up, the
information presented or the person giving the seminar. Seminar
marketing is about what you do, and you have to do all the parts right;
the audience has to believe that you have information they need before
they will set an appointment to see you about their money. Oh, and did I
mention that they must like you at the end of your presentation?
Obviously you must get qualified prospects in the seats, but to do this
you must pay strict attention to the entire process. All of the details
work in sync to produce good results with your seminars, but most
important of all is the presenter, the person who conducts the seminar.
This individual must make the audience like him or her and there is a
very limited amount of time to get this done. Ask yourself, how many
people do I do business with that I do not like? Seniors are the same.
Unless they like you, you build rapport, and make a good impression on
them you will not get the appointment. Would you want to go sit down
with someone you did not like for an hour or hour and a half and tell
them all of your family and financial information? It is that simple, and
yet I am amazed at how many smart people in our business are trying to
do seminars but just do not get this fact.
There is a scene in the children’s movie Snow White where the wicked
witch looks in her magic mirror and asks, “Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who is the fairest of them all?” Essentially, the answer that comes back
to the fairy tale witch is “Not you!” Maybe the producer who has
twenty- five buying units and doesn’t get a single appointment should
consult the mirror and realize that he might get a “not you!” This can
happen when the content is not something that motivates the client to
set an appointment, or the presentation is not compelling and
entertaining, or the preparation and attention to every detail in setting
the seminar up are lacking. These are all factors, but most of all, they
must like you. This is the primary purpose of a seminar, not just getting
the appointment.
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9. 5. I WANT TO BE LIKED
The Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they prefer to be done unto.
Otto Kroeger
I have a daughter named Melissa and when she was about three or four
years old, she asked me one day, “Daddy, are you mad at me?” I said,
“Oh, no, darling, I love you so much it makes my heart hurt. Why do you
ask me that?” She replied, “Well, Daddy, your face looks mad.” I
changed my face immediately. My face did not convey how I truly felt
toward my daughter. I am one of those people who, when they are
thinking or having a serious conversation, their face has a stern look. I
must have been thinking about something seriously and my daughter
interpreted the look on my face as being mad with her.
I have read many articles by Michael Lovas. He is an expert at using
psychology to improve results from sales and marketing, mainly in the
financial services industry. He is widely considered the "Father of Credibility
Marketing," having introduced the concept in 1991. And, he's a prolific
author and columnist, publishing at least one column every month since
1986. He also brings a deep background in Neuro-linguistic Programming
and Hypnotherapy. As such, he operates a very active coaching and
mentoring practice to the financial services industry. You can find his
articles and see his work at www.aboutpeople.com. This is a great site on
sales psychology and marketing. There is a complete library of articles on
their site that are free simply by clicking on RESOURCES.
He and his wife, Pam Holloway, have co-authored twelve books and
eBooks, including their Three Best Sellers:
FACE VALUES: HOW TO READ PEOPLE AND ADJUST YOUR
PRESENTATION TO CONNECT WITH THEM IN LESS THAN 3
MINUTES
AXIS OF INFLUENCE: HOW CREDIBILITY AND LIKEABILITY
INTERSECT TO DRIVE SUCCESS.
THE CREDIBILITY ADVANTAGE: STRATEGIES & TOOLS FOR
INCREASING BUSINESS RESULTS.
In “Finding Gold,” he states that the sincerity of your facial expressions
accounts for fifty-five percent of likeability. He also suggests that your
9

10. expressions need to be congruent, or in sync. By this, he is referring to your
eyes and your mouth. The expression your mouth makes must match your
eyes. For example, have you ever been talking to someone who was smiling
and you noticed their eyes wandering or that they were distracted? This is a
likeability factor. People notice this.
Have you ever been introduced in a crowd to someone of seeming
importance, like the speaker at a seminar? This person is shaking
several hands in a group and he does not look at you when he shakes
your hand. In fact, he is looking around the room or at the next person
he is going to meet. Have you ever had this happen? If so, what was
your impression of the person you were meeting? It wasn’t a positive
impression that you had, was it? Roving eyes is when the other person’s
eyes look in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your face broadcasts
this mismatch and this alone will stop someone from liking you.
Another example is when someone smiles but his eyes do not smile.
Know what I mean? When people are genuinely smiling, their eyes also
smile. Their facial features are in sync.
Your face must reflect your sincerity and concern for the client. Make
eye contact with the audience when you speak and engage them and
reflect it in your facial expressions. What happens when the facial
aspect of likeability is off? The other person (your seminar attendee)
doesn’t like you as much and doesn’t trust you as much, fifty-five
percent of the time statistically. And, this translates into the statistic
that he or she probably won’t do business with you eighty-three percent
of the time. Only getting the business seventeen percent of the time
because the client doesn’t like you is not good odds if you are planning
on huge seminar success.
There is good news here. Being liked is not the result of luck or
inherited traits. It is a skill set that can be learned. I worked for a short
time with a very competent Certified Financial Planner of many years.
He was a great planner and technically very sound, but he was
convinced he was not likeable. These were his words, not mine. I
haven’t heard from him lately, but the last time I did hear from him, he
was shopping around for the latest, greatest marketing system with the
proverbial silver bullet. I don’t think he is doing seminars anymore.
In his book, The Credibility Factor-Don’t Blame the Marketing, Michael
Lovas makes the statement that obviously, if your marketing no longer
works, you have to change it. But if you change only your marketing,
you’re going to continually run into the same problems. Remember the
10

11. old saying, “If you always do what you have always done, you are going
to get what you have always got.” Mr. Lovas puts it another way: “You
can only paint the outhouse so many times until you realize the smell
isn’t coming from the old paint.”
Ultimately, producers find this out. This happens when they are failing
at giving seminars but think that the problem is their FMO, IMO or a
particular seminar presentation that they are using is not getting any
results. To cure their problems, they change their FMO and get another
“packaged” seminar from the new FMO and off they go to fail again.
Here’s a news flash--it’s not the marketing. It’s you and your credibility.
The problem is limited to a lack of credibility and likeability.
6. IF IT IS TO BE, IT IS UP TO
ME
Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things,Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things,
which cannot be overcome when they are taken together, yieldwhich cannot be overcome when they are taken together, yield
themselves up when taken little by little.themselves up when taken little by little.
Plutarch (46-120 AD) Greek philosopherPlutarch (46-120 AD) Greek philosopher
In the following discussion of the advantages of seminars and the
detailed how-to of seminar giving, I will cover a wide range of topics. I
will be the first to say that the information and knowledge that I have
acquired over years about seminars comes from many sources and many
people. It is not my intent to claim someone else’s processes or ideas as my
own. Most of what I give you here was learned by standing in the road
and letting the truck run over me or continually bumping into the wall
until I finally found the door. In other words, I made mistakes and
gained experience. You will too, no matter how many books you read on
giving seminars as a marketing method for your business. You will learn
more by the doing than from someone’s advice on how to.
I hope with these suggestions that I can save you this trial and error
(lots of errors/mistakes) and save you some energy, time and most of
all, money. While helping you grow your business through the use of
seminars, this remarkable and highly effective marketing approach will
make you more money than you ever dreamed possible if done correctly
11

12. and for the right reasons as you keep the client’s welfare as your most
important goal.
Many people in the financial services industry have abandoned seminars
as a marketing focus because of much lower attendance and subsequent
lower returns on the money invested in giving seminars. Also, this
market has become fiercely competitive with insurance professionals,
stock brokers, financial planners, banks, and estate planners all holding
seminars. Some CPAs are incorporating financial services into their
practices and giving seminars also. Depending on the locale, it is not
uncommon to find several seminar invitations per month in your
mailbox.
Most of the people who attend seminars have attended several and the
pressure to provide a quality seminar experience is increasing on the
advisors, no matter what financial area they work in. Although the
competition is becoming more intense, I firmly believe that seminar
marketing is not dead. We demonstrate this on a monthly basis with our
seminars by having waiting lists of qualified attendees who want the
information our seminars provide. We actually prefer that the people
who attend our seminar are those who have been to multiple seminars
by different presenters. We think that our seminar is unique and we
want them to make a comparison of the information that we give them
to the information they got at other seminars. Yes, they like to eat, but
they will respond to serious information that applies to them and their
lives. It is up to you to convince them that you have something to offer
for their situation that none of the other advisors giving seminars have.
It will be hard work.
I have given seminars with very competent people who are quality
financial advisors. They have been in the business for many years and
hold all the proper credentials. The one thing they lack to be successful
in the seminar business is a willingness to interact with the audience on
a continuous basis to establish rapport and trust for the basis of making
an appointment at the end of the seminar. Rather, they remain aloof and
distant and rely on an assistant who is present to do this for them. I can
name five of these individuals in various parts of the United States and
to the person; they were unsuccessful in using seminars to market. They
thought that it was the content of the seminar or that seminars just
didn’t work in “their part of the world.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most good producers have a
strong ego and when the results are poor from any specific marketing
12

13. approach, the first impulse is to blame the market, the system or
anything other than reassessing all the ingredients in the failed attempt.
This especially includes the person giving the seminar and his
involvement. The details surrounding seminar success are also critical.
By details, I mean:
1) The date you choose to do the seminar, the place you choose to hold
the seminar
2) The invitation you use
3) The information in your seminar
4) How well your audience likes you
5) Your ability to set the appointments
6) Your first meeting with the clients
7) Your ability to listen to them and their needs
8) Your evaluation of their finances and any problems you find
9) Your ability to present solutions and move the client forward in the
process to completion
All these factors will determine your success and income. Every element
in this process is important and you can’t skip any one of them if you are
to build the business you want using seminar marketing. In short, this is
an all or nothing game and the stakes are high.
7. IT’S YOUR MIND
Do what you know best; if you’re a runner, run; if you are a bell, ring.
Ignas Bernstein
How many of you know who Roger Bannister is? You are thinking, “Who
cares and how does this apply to seminar marketing and how does it
help me make a dollar?” Let me help you for the sake of the narrative.
Roger Bannister was a distance runner in England and he competed in
the mile distance run in 1954. In 1954, no one in history had ever
broken the four-minute mile. This means that no one had run a mile in
13

14. under four minutes. Roger Bannister did it. He was the first human to
run a mile in less than four minutes. This record stood for how long, do
you guess? It stood for forty-six days. It was broken by John Lindy and
then by Wes Santee. Since that date in 1954 when Roger Bannister
broke the world’s record for the four-minute mile, how many runners do
you think have broken this record that at one time no one could break?
The answer is over two thousand runners have broken this record.
Steve Scott of the United States has personally broken the four-minute
mile 137 times. John Walker of New Zealand has broken the record 128
times.
Why am I talking about a track and field event in a book that is supposed
to be giving you “secrets” of seminar marketing? No one had ever
broken the four-minute mile, no one could do it until one man did it, and
then everybody did it! What this tells us is that it wasn’t the four-minute
mile that was the obstacle. Although all runners at the time thought it
was, it really was the psychological barrier that all runners imposed on
themselves.
Now I will get to the point. Your limits on income and your achievement
in sales--especially seminar sales--are mental, not product-related or
circumstance-related. All producers must leave their comfort zone and
breach the mental barrier that is self imposed as to production and
income. As with runners and the four-minute mile world record, it is
only a mental barrier that producers set in their mind as to the success
that can be achieved. All other obstacles can be overcome. The lack of
training, money, time, etc. are all hurdles that can be surmounted.
Producers must avoid living up to or down to that mental barrier or
comfort level and understand that they alone limit and determine their
level of success.
8. SUPERMAN – SPIDERMAN-
JEDI
Ideals are like the stars. We will never reach them, but like the mariners
on the sea, we chart our course by them.
Carl Schurz, 1869
(Close friend of Abraham Lincoln)
14

15. I was waiting in line to get coffee at our local Starbucks when a man and
his five-year-old son came in and got in line. His son was really cute and
“supercharged.” He was wearing a Superman T shirt, red gloves that I
finally figured out were Spider-Man gloves (the kind that shoot out a
web) and he was holding a “light sword” of the Jedi version.
One super hero wasn’t enough for him. I began to think about that and
wondered why every small boy wants to be a super hero. What is it that
makes them want to wear the costume and emulate a fictional
character? When I got back to my office, I told my office manager about
the boy and posed the question to her. She answered that they probably
wanted to help people like the hero does and they liked the idea of
having super powers. I thought that was a pretty good answer.
Now the transfer:
Are salesmen like the five-year-old boy? Do they want to help people
and do they want super powers? I think the answer is yes. How do we
do that?
Treat every client and potential client like she is your mother or
grandmother and know your business, know your business, know your
business. Wanting to do well is admirable, especially as someone a
client trusts with their money. Contrary to the portrayal of all insurance
agents and financial advisors by Dateline (more on this later in the
section on compliance), most people in our business really have the best
interest of the client uppermost in their consciousness.
Superior knowledge in our business is like having a super power.
There is a corollary here. Knowledge that is not applied is just a bunch
of words. Also, for those of you who have been in the business for a long
time, I am not discounting experience. As Albert Einstein said,
“Experience is knowledge; everything else is just information.” Just
because you have defined the product or financial area where you do
most of your business doesn’t mean you can ignore the huge universe of
information (where the information is always changing along with the
rules) that impacts where you actually make a living. When I refer to
superior knowledge, I mean the entire spectrum of financial services,
investments and planning.
Like the super hero, you must have the super power, which is superior
knowledge, and you must want to help people. This means you must
have a meaningful relationship with your clients. You have to focus on
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16. two things to have a successful practice using seminars: relationships and
knowledge.
You absolutely must believe what you say. How you feel, what you
think, what you say and what you do must match your projection to the
client. You can’t say one thing and be thinking another. You cannot fake
sincerity. In other chapters, I have talked about being liked and your
facial expressions, smile matching body language and the impact of
these on your client’s perception of you. Just know that you will be
working with a group of people with a lifetime of experience in knowing
and judging people and they value honesty, sincerity and integrity. If you
don’t display these traits in all your dealings with them at your first
contact to the day they become your client, you will fail in this market.
I have owned horses for a long time and I know that if you are scared of
horses, they are able to sense it. I say that they can smell it when you
are afraid or hesitant around them. Seniors are more perceptive than
horses. They can smell it. They can tell immediately if you are there just
to make a sale and if you are a “needy” salesman. The old saying,
somewhat hackneyed but very true, “seniors don’t care what you know
until they know that you care” is definitely true.
9. MAKE A COMMITMENT
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were
failures. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.
George Bernard Shaw
If you are serious about making your living with seminar marketing,
then you must commit to doing more than one, two or three of them. Go
ahead and make out your schedule in advance for one year and commit
to doing seminars for one year. This long-term commitment is the acid
test for advisors considering this type of marketing. I suggest that you
plan to do a seminar every three weeks. This means that you will do
approximately seventeen in one year. If you want to be a kamikaze the
first year and have the money, then I suggest you do two seminars on
the same day. This will mean that you will have approximately thirty-
four seminars a year.
16

17. I realize that I am beginning to get specific in some of the
recommendations I am making as to what you should do in planning to
give your seminars. I want you to understand that I know there is no
one system or process that fits every personality, so here is what I want
you to take away from all the things I am about to cover that are detailed
and specific on seminars.
When you read a technique or suggested way to do something, give it a
try. If it works for you, fine--use it; it’s yours. If it doesn’t work for you,
let it go and try other things that may. When you find things that do
work for you, I advise you to follow Shakespeare’s advice: “Grapple
them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”
Also, I am aware that no matter how much advice you get from whatever
source, including me, I know that what Marcel Proust said is true. “We
don’t receive wisdom, we discover it for ourselves after a journey that no
one else can take for us or spare us.”
10. START YOUR
COMMITMENT WITH A
CALENDAR
Most of the critical things in life, which become the starting points of
human destiny, are little things.
R. Smith
Scheduling your seminars in advance is important because we all carry
that inside-the-mind mental parachute that says, “OK, I’ll try this but if
everything doesn’t work out the way I expect it to, I am out of here.”
Things never go as they are supposed to or as you imagine they will in
the beginning of any endeavor and hence the “automatic” bail-out at the
first sign that things are not working according to plan. This is where
scheduling and committing to this schedule in advance will deter you
from giving up on the process.
The Calendar
A very good, simple calendar that is free is available online at
www.calendarhome.com.
17

18. When you get to the site, go to “free calendars” at the bottom of the page.
There will be several listings of different types of calendars such as
plain, 10,000-year calendars, etc. Click on the free calendar with the
year you want and a calendar will come up with all holidays for each
month. This is an important feature you will reference constantly as you
schedule your seminars. Go to the top of the page and click on the
“page” icon. You will get a drop down menu that will say “edit in word”;
click on this. The calendar will open in Word and you will have the
ability to make changes to the calendar. SAVE THIS CALENDAR TO
YOUR DESK TOP.
You can put your scheduled seminar dates in RED and your mailing
dates prior to each seminar in GREEN or any other color you choose that
will immediately show you critical dates at a glance. This becomes
important when you determine when to mail for your scheduled
seminars, allowing enough time for the mailing to hit and the recipients
time to respond to your invitation.
I know you are thinking, “That dummy must think that I don’t know how
to get a calendar online.” That is not the case. I know that you can find a
free calendar, but I think it is important to have one that lists by month
all the holidays and gives you the ability to edit it on an ongoing basis
with Word. This is critical to your process so you can save your calendar
and go back anytime and change a date if you want. Believe me; you will
change it many times during the year. The listing of holidays is
important because without this, you will plan a seminar that bumps up
against a holiday and it will affect your attendance. Also, putting the
dates in bold RED will make your mailings much easier because you can
find the number of days to mail before a scheduled seminar at a glance
by checking for the dates in GREEN. The green dates indicate your
critical last date to get the mailing out so that there will be time for the
recipients to respond
I print my calendar out and keep the most recent copy (you will make
changes) of this calendar hanging by my desk on the wall and I use it
constantly. This way, as I mentioned, you don’t have holiday conflicts
such as scheduling a seminar during Fourth of July week. Also, you
won’t miss a mailing date because you forgot it and instead of fifteen
days to get your mailing out, you now have only seven days to mail for a
seminar. Now the problem: You have already reserved the room at the
restaurant for your seminar and you have signed a contract for the
scheduled date and you have ordered 10,000 invitations and the bill is in
18

19. the mail. You made a mistake in scheduling and with only seven days to
your seminar date and you have to design a card, mail the card, set up
your response system for registrations and get your cards out. Get the
picture?
This should probably be covered under mailings but since I started my
explanation here, let me cover the minimum time allowed for a mailing.
I mention fifteen days that you need to mail before a seminar. What I
really mean is that I want ten business days between the time that my
mailing hits and the seminar date.
This gives me some slack in the event I have something come up that
needs to be dealt with. Believe me, something will eventually come up
that will require a change to your plans. REAL LIFE EXAMPLE: There
was a major roof leak in the only room we could use at the restaurant
where we were going to hold our seminar. The restaurant called us and
cancelled our seminar date. We had a contract, but it did not cover this.
Since I mentioned a contract here, let me say that you should never do a
seminar without a contract with the restaurant where you have the
seminar scheduled. Also, always carry that contract with you when you
go to give the seminar. Make sure you have this agreement before you
mail your invitations! Forgive me in advance if I repeat this later on in
this book because it is one of the most important things you will read
here.
This will save you from showing up at the restaurant and having your
seminar room assigned to your competitor. This has happened to us
more than once. Would you like to be the Merrill Lynch broker who had
to move out into the main body of the restaurant when we got there for
our seminar or would you have liked to have the private seminar room
that we got because we had a contract and produced it when there was a
conflict in scheduling by the restaurant? How could this happen?
Usually there are several managers at a larger, popular restaurant.
There are mistakes made in scheduling the available meeting rooms or
one manager may have a friend or someone who has been doing
business there longer than you that wants the meeting room you have
scheduled for a certain date. All of these things have happened to me. I
never gave up the room because I have always had a contract in hand
before I mailed my invitations.
Other people who give advice on how to do seminars may disagree on
the amount of time between when you drop your mailings and the
19

20. seminar date, but the ten-day window really is the best system that we
have found. There will be times when you miss this target by a couple of
days because of circumstances you can’t control.
The reverse of this rule is also true. Do not mail too far in advance of
your seminars. This allows too much time for the recipient to forget or
get other invitations to seminars that are earlier than yours. You will
have more cancellations and no-shows when you mail too early.
11. DO YOUR HOMEWORK
FIRST
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to
what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Would you go aboard an ocean liner in port and crank the engines, put
them in gear and assume that you could wind up at a port halfway
around the world? You would never do this because you would never
get out of port and you know it. You would have to spend years training,
studying and learning all the things necessary to running this ship and
navigating it to assure that you made the chosen port. Silly example, you
say, but not really. The principles are still the same; it is just a matter of
scale as to the task. The process you have to master in giving successful
seminars and having a successful seminar marketing business is not
nearly as complicated or as long but also requires study and training. If
you want to guarantee superior results and a return on the time and
money you will have to invest to be successful, I suggest you start with
the basics and learn everything you can about the process before
throwing money at seminar marketing and “winging it.”
Before I gave my first seminar, I spent almost two years researching
every aspect of the seminar business. I paid lots of money (over $4500
for one 3 day meeting on how to do seminars) to learn what everyone
else was doing in the business. I chose those people who seemed
successful and listened intently to what these gurus were saying about
how to generate billions of dollars in the seminar business. Some were
right and some were wrong, in my opinion. I will give you some of the
specifics later. It appeared that the more I listened to some of the
20

21. “experts,” the more “expert” they became. They would say something
that sounded good and I took it as the gospel. When I actually started
giving seminars, I found that sometimes what they said just didn’t work.
You must decide in advance what your approach to seminar marketing
will be. By this I mean that you will need to choose the topic of your
seminar, decide the number of attendees you think you should have in
your seminar, what kind of invitation you will mail with what mail
house, how to handle responses to your mailing, and all of the many
details attendant to the process. Do this first, not as you are in the
process. You must plan in advance; don’t wing it! I would suggest that
you trust your intuition, common sense, and your own good judgment in
deciding what to use and what to throw out, including my suggestions,
as you establish your seminar business.
Everyone is an individual and what works for me may not fit your style
or personality. You will know when a technique or method is correct for
you. With this said I will tell you that the things I will give you on the
following pages have been time tested and produce quality clients with
money. The industry average annuity sale is supposedly about $40,000.
Our average annuity sale is in excess of $200,000. I am a Top of the
Table producer and I attribute this success to seminar marketing using
the techniques covered here.
12. RETURN ON INVESTMENT
(ROI) + INVISABLE RETURN
ON INVESTMENT (IROI)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Mark Twain
Cost of invitations + cost of meal divided by the number of appointments
= cost of appointment (This will vary and will range from $100 to $250.)
This seems very high but even if it were $500 per appointment, you
would still have a decent return on your investment if you are good.
Usually you will have a five to one or higher return on the money you
spend to do seminars. This can go much higher in some instances.
21

22. Total dollars generated in fees or commissions by seminar attendees
who become clients divided by total expenses = ROI (Return-On-
Investment).
How much do you spend to do a seminar? What do you pay for meals to
feed attendees? How much do you spend for invitations and postage?
How do you determine the cost per appointment? What do you have to
do to keep good records so you can determine these things? What’s a
unit? How many units do you have at each seminar? Why should you
keep up with the number of units at your seminar and how many of
these do you make appointments with at the seminar? You will need to
know the answers to all of these questions to be successful in the
seminar business.
You cannot do seminars on a shoestring budget. You will have to make
an initial financial commitment. I would suggest that you plan to spend
at least $10,000. This will insure that you can have three or more
seminars, and it takes some time for the people you convert to clients
from your first seminar to go through the process where their
investments with you will generate income for you. In plain English,
don’t plan on making lots of money in the first three months. You may
experience success quicker than this and make more money, but I would
plan on worst case scenario and assume that it takes this long to bring
business through the pipeline. This amount ($10,000) should allow you
to do three seminars and feed the 120 attendees you can expect at your
three seminars. Of this number you should have approximately seventy
buying units and make appointments with at least sixty percent of these,
or forty-two appointments. A buying unit consists of a husband and wife
or a single attendee; both are considered buying units. One point here:
you should adjust your thinking to consider clients as more than buying
units. I use the term here as a means of explanation to help you
understand the potential of seminars and how I arrive at the numbers
we are showing.
You should close about twenty percent of the appointments you have.
Usually this happens on the third or fourth appointment. Sometimes
this can be accomplished on the second visit, but we are in favor of using
three meetings to move assets. This will depend on the individual, but
we find that clients are most comfortable at this juncture and willing to
have us handle their assets and do their planning. This results in bigger
cases because we work with all the assets.
22

23. This would be nine closes. Assume that each of these nine units has a
minimum of $100,000 to invest, or a total of $1.2 million. This is a very
low number that I have chosen to illustrate how much money you can
make. It is our experience that the clients we find through the seminar
process have from $500,000 to several million. The average is around
$1,000,000. If you can make the numbers work for you using the
$100,000 number, then you will be amazed at how successful you can be
with some experience in giving seminars. Most successful seminar
marketers should get a five to one or six to one return on the money
invested to give seminars. Others will do better than this.
If you assume a payout on this amount of seven percent, this means that,
at a minimum, you should make approximately $63,000 in three months
doing three seminars over this period, assuming one seminar every
month. If you extrapolate this over the entire year, using these
assumptions, you should make about $252,000 for the year. These
numbers are guesses, and the final results depend on your ability to
make the attendees like you and your skill in working with the
appointments you make, but you should do better than this example if
you prepare yourself in advance for this venture.
Seminars have an invisible return on investment ((IROI) that cannot be
readily calculated. This is the building of a valuable list of seminar
attendees who have responded to a mailing and have sat through your
seminar presentation. They now know who you are and you have had a
meal with them. They should have a good feeling about you and your
business.
Building a mailing list of people who respond to your invitations and
attend seminars can be a valuable resource, and as you give seminars,
you will build this valuable list. Do not underestimate the value of a list
of ten thousand to twelve thousand seniors who responded to a seminar
invitation and have met you and heard you present. This is a list of
people who will know your philosophy, like you, and possibly respond
to future mailings. You will want to cross market to these individuals at
a later date. Once you have this list, you can do specific product mailings
that will generate income.
Below is an example of an annuity product mailing sample that could
possibly be sent to this list you have accumulated as you give seminars.
This post card mailing will generate annuity sales and is another form of
marketing outside of your seminar business using the list of former
attendees at your seminars.
23

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13. GOOD EQUIPMENT &
SIGNAGE
Time and money are interchangeable. You can always save one by
spending more of the other.
Pennie Williams
Good equipment to conduct your seminar with is essential if you are in
the seminar business long term. The last thing you want to happen is to
spend your money mailing and feeding and then, during your seminar,
have the attendee in the back with $10 million ask the person next to
him, “What did he just say?” Buy the best laptop computer, the best
lapel mike, speakers and projector. Hint: Don’t wait until a bulb blows in
24
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ARE SICK FOR A
LONG TIME? ARE YOU PREPARED
FINANCIALLY TO TAKE CARE OF THIS?

25. the projector in the middle of a seminar to change it. Do it when you
have used it for a long period of time. Trust me; it will make you money
and a break-down is a disaster. My equipment costs about $5000 and it
is top of the line.
Here’s one example of why you need good equipment. I have an
amplifier that accommodates my wireless mike and a cd that plays
Frank Sinatra music before the seminar starts and during dinner. When
the noise in the adjoining restaurant gets to be too much, or if someone
is presenting in an adjacent room, I don’t have to worry about someone
speaking over me. You have too much invested in your seminar to have
a Merrill Lynch broker next door talking about the market and his voice
bleeding over into your meeting room.
Also, imagine that the older guy in the very back of the restaurant
meeting room is the wealthiest person in the audience and really is
interested in what you have to say but can’t hear very well, even with
hearing aids. I want to be loud enough and project well enough that this
person can hear me in the back of the room without effort.
Buy the largest portable screen you can buy. Seniors like the big screen
for the obvious reason that the writing is easier to see with the big
screen. It is a little more trouble to carry from seminar to seminar but
well worth the investment. A tip here on the colors you use in your
presentation slides. Seniors can see and respond to some colors better
than others. You do the research.
Another thing: Use a lapel mike. A lapel mike allows you to walk
around the room and interact with the audience without losing sound
quality. It also says that you are a professional and implies a
professional message worth hearing. A great sound system will save
your life and make you money.
SIGNAGE
It is your choice as to whether you have signs directing attendees to
your seminar. If you choose to do this, you should pay a sign maker to
do the signs. You want a sign with your seminar title with a logo or two.
This adds a degree of professionalism to your seminar because very few
people who give seminars do this. I talked with someone in the Mid-
west who bills himself as the “King of Annuity Salesmen” and he said
that he wrote on a sheet of paper, drew an arrow to his seminar, and
taped it up in the restaurant. Do not hand-write your seminar title on a
25

26. sheet of paper even if the “King” says it’s OK. You probably wouldn’t do
this anyway, but in case you thought it was a good idea, don’t do this.
Our seminar title is “Safe Money Solutions®” and we have this with the
subject of the seminar and we use these signs over and over. The sign
has a black arrow at the bottom and we have several with the arrows
pointing in different directions. We have a collapsible, light metal easel
that folds and we set this up with the sign at the entrance. If there is a
turn to get to the room where we are presenting, we set up another sign.
The sign looks very good and we don’t have to rely on restaurant staff to
direct the attendees to our room. They really are busy and don’t like
doing this anyway. One note here: If you can, it is always a good idea to
have an assistant to greet the attendees and lead them to your
registration table just outside the seminar room.
We also have a fifteen foot by three foot sign that rolls up that we put up
on the wall using a Velcro strip. I know this is a little over-the-top, but it
really adds a nice touch to the room. This takes about ten minutes to put
up, but again, no one else does this and the attendees certainly notice.
This sign is the same as the signs directing traffic at the entrance and it
is professionally done in color. It cost about $600 but it’s worth every
penny and we have used the same sign now for four years.
We have had no problems with restaurants or major hotels (one four-
star) using this sign. If questioned about how we are going to put it up,
we simply say that we are using a Velcro strip and that ends the
discussion. They don’t want you to drive nails or put tacks in their walls.
In all the years we have done seminars, I have never had a damaged wall
except one time when I did not take down the Velcro strip myself and
the clean-up crew did it after we were gone. If you put up a big sign,
take it down yourself. You can do the seminar without signs, and results
are debatable. I prefer to use them because we are going to talk about
safety in our seminars and it helps promote the “safe money” concept
which fits well with our niche marketing.
14. FEED OR NOT FEED-YES,
YOU FEED
A cliché is a truth one doesn’t believe.
26

27. Bernard Taper
It is a proven fact that attendance is greater and the quality of your
audience is better when you offer a meal at an appropriate restaurant.
Yes, I said restaurant. Although I have had successful seminars at major
hotels, your best bet is a well known, senior friendly, higher-end
restaurant. We particularly want a restaurant that has been in business
for a long time (not a chain) and is a local restaurant but upscale if
possible. Every senior in the city knows where it is and knows the
quality of the food. It would be the restaurant of choice for a senior’s
surprise birthday party or where most seniors would go after church on
Sunday. We call the restaurant about one month to a month and a half
before our seminar is scheduled. To be safe you need to back that up to
two months to get the day or days that you want. We reserve for the
noon and evening meals at the same restaurant.
Selecting your restaurant is critical to the success of your seminar.
It is upscale but not super fancy and no hotels or country clubs, although
we have done seminars at both. The restaurant we are looking for has
been in one location for a long time and is well known to the senior
population of that particular town or city.
The restaurant needs to have adequate space to accommodate forty
attendees and space for the presenter. Be aware that nearly all
restaurants overstate the number that a room will accommodate. If you
make a point of asking how many the room will accommodate with
someone presenting using a projector, they usually will reduce the
number that the room will seat. This is why you need to be there two
hours early. Almost always, there are adjustments to make.
Never hold a seminar for seniors where they have to climb stairs to a
second floor. If there is an elevator available, then this is OK. You will
have some attendees who are handicapped and having to climb stairs to
attend a seminar is not good. Many will just opt to have a meal
downstairs at the restaurant and not attend your seminar when they
realize they have to climb the stairs.
Make sure that the restaurant you choose has adequate parking and has
easy access from the main highway. The seniors in the area you mail
will know this, and if the traffic is bad, it will discourage them from
registering for your seminar.
27

28. 15. AT THE RESTAURANT
You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
Randy Pausch
If possible, always visit the restaurant and see the room you are
presenting in prior to your seminar. This will save you time on the day
of your seminar and you will be able to address any perceived problems
with management before the day of your seminar. You may realize that
you have an outside room and the sunsets in the summertime are
blinding in the room. If the windows have no coverings, the audience
cannot see the slides of your presentation on the projection screen. You
may have to unscrew a recessed lighting bulb because it is shining down
directly over your screen. The only way to know this is to set up and
look for these types of problems.
This is just couple of real-life examples. Another is when I arrived at a
restaurant in Newport News, Virginia, at my usual time, 2:00 p. m. for a
4:30 p. m. seminar. I was setting up and was looking for an outlet to
plug in my projector and could not find an outlet in the room. I found
out that the restaurant was over one hundred years old and there wasn’t
an outlet in the room I was using. The room was a part of the original
building. I solved the problem by running an extension cord to where
the cash register was and plugging in there. I always carry a one
hundred-foot and fifty-foot cord with me to every presentation. Imagine
showing up fifteen minutes before the seminar started and having to
deal with this with no extension cord. This is just an example of what
you will encounter if you give many seminars over time.
When you arrive to set up, speak to your servers. Treat them nicely and
tell them the details they need to know to handle your audience and
your seminar. For starters, I tell them that all orders for food
(sometimes we allow the audience to order from the menu) must be
completed by 4:30, which is our starting time. I do not want a server
whispering about an order when I am being introduced. Without
exception, all restaurant staff is to be out of the room before we start the
seminar.
We schedule our evening seminars to start at 4:30. We encourage
people, when they call our reservation service, to come twenty minutes
early to get a good seat. This means that they will begin to show up at
28

29. 4:00 p. m. and some will come even earlier. I tell the servers to have
water and bread or crackers on the table by 3:45 p. m. I also tell them
that once our seminar starts, I do not want anyone entering the room for
any reason unless there is a fire. Seniors will want water and something
to nibble on while they wait for the seminar to start. I have a Frank
Sinatra album playing on the computer. The playtime is fifty-four
minutes on the CD I use, so I know that if I start it at 3:36 p. m., it will
end at 4:30 p. m. This is when we start our seminar, and once we close
the door, we do not let anyone in. The reason for this is that you will
have people who come in the middle of your seminar just for the meal.
Usually this is the result of someone getting the invitation and not being
able to go, so they hand it to someone and say, “Here is a free meal; do
you want to go?” When this happens, they are not interested in the
information you are presenting, only the meal. You eliminate this
problem and make sure that you are not interrupted during your
presentation. We have this on our card: “No one admitted after the
seminar starts.” We show this card to the late arrivals and that usually
solves the problem. Whoever is handling the registration table just
outside the door to the meeting room has the discretion to admit a
couple if they are a few minutes late.
After the presentation, I want the salad on the table as quickly as
possible and I do not want any lag time between the salad and the
entrée. The people in your audience have been sitting in the room for
one and a half hours by this time, and any delay in feeding them is not
good. I say one and a half hours here but would encourage you to take a
little less time than this for your seminar if you can cover all the
information. Sometimes, less is more. The old saying that the mind
cannot absorb more than the fanny can endure has meaning here.
Francis Cole Jones says it best in her book, How to Wow: “More isn’t
better, better is better.”
I have seen seminars where the food is deliberately delayed a short time
to allow the presenter and assistants to make appointments with
attendees. I am aware of one advisor who has a boot camp on how to
give seminars who tells his audience that the food isn’t coming out until
he has made it around to set appointments with everyone in the
audience. Good luck with that.
It is my opinion that you want to feed them as quickly as possible. You
need to work the room fast, and you can get this done in the time it takes
them to eat a salad and entrée. They will get grumpy if they have to
29

30. wait on their food. This is easy to avoid by telling your servers in
advance to bring the food out quickly after the presentation is over.
16. BEING SELECTIVE
S E P A R A T I N G T H E S H E E P F R O M T H E G O A T S
A smart businessperson is one who makes a mistake, learns from it, and
never makes it again. A wise businessperson is one who finds a smart
businessperson and learns from him how to avoid the mistakes he made.
Jim Abrams
Don’t worry about “plate lickers.” We all know what the definition of a
plate licker is, don’t we? This is the couple or individual that gets your
invitation and comes just for the meal with no intention of doing
business with you and has no interest in hearing your information. They
are there for the meal only. I know that this is an aspect of seminar
marketing that grates on your nerves, but you just need to get used to it.
It is just a part of doing business that you will have to accept. There are
ways to almost eliminate this element of your seminar but not entirely.
You will always have one or two. There are several ways to lower the
number of people you get in your seminars who are there just for the
meal. Here are some suggestions:
Put a qualifier in your invitation such as, “You should have $100,000 in
your IRA to attend this seminar.”
After the second and by the third registration, you will recognize the
names of people who have attended before. If you recognize the name,
you can verify that they have been to your previous seminars by
accessing the records of your response service. More about this later…
We give them a call (when we confirm attendance the day before the
seminar) and say that we saw they were registered and just wanted to
check with them to let them know that the information is the same as
the last two times they attended, and would they mind if we took their
name off the list because we have a waiting list of people who have not
been to our seminar.
Never allow anyone to come into your seminar after you have started.
There will be those who get the invitation and will wait thirty or forty
30

31. minutes to try to get in. They are definitely there for the meal and you
have a snowball’s chance of making an appointment. We put this on the
invitation: “No one admitted after the program starts” and this takes
care of the problem. You might have a couple that is five to ten minutes
late because of traffic or parking, and the person at the door can make
the call as to whether or not they can be admitted. Usually I allow these
to come in, but only couples but if it is an individual that arrives late, no.
One word here on people who are challenging or want to argue. I do not
permit this. If they are creating a disturbance, offer to have them pre-
registered for the next seminar with a “special invitation” beforehand.
Of course, you will not pre-register troublemakers but this will get them
away from your seminar. If this doesn’t satisfy them, ask them to leave.
An extended harangue at the door to your seminar starts the event in a
bad way. I repeat, do not allow these people to stand there and argue
with an assistant. All the people already in your seminar room will hear
them and it does great damage. I know you are already saying that this
will never occur, but believe me, if you give enough seminars, you will
have this exact same situation. Better to decide in advance how you will
handle it.
We will call and discourage a financial advisor from coming if we can
determine that we have one registered. We do call and ask if he is a
financial advisor. If he says yes, we say that we would like to get
together to share the information we cover in the seminar and we are
sure he will want to see it because some of it is proprietary.
We would like to do this, but we would prefer not to feed financial
advisors to share this information. We would be glad to have them come
by our office if they want to schedule a time; not many make
appointments. Come to think of it, we have never had one make an
appointment. We usually do not get any financial advisors because we
preclude this from happening by putting this on our invitation. We say
that there is a fee charged for insurance and financial professionals.
Some producers take all comers to their seminars and this includes
advisors. I prefer not to educate my competition, unless they buy this
book.
17. HOW TO REACH THE
RIGHT CLIENTS
31

32. The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to
grow sharper.
Eden Philpotts
You need to have a unique invitation and a unique seminar. Remember,
the people who get your invitation have seen so many invitations from
other advisors who are giving seminars that they probably could quote
the bullet points on most invitations in advance.
You must use compelling language that evokes emotion and has
meaning to the person getting the invitation. It must be emotional. The
old saying “Nothing great was ever achieved without emotion” is
certainly true when giving seminars. You must believe that you have
great, life-changing information that you want to give to the people who
attend your seminar, and you must convey this feeling to the person
who reads your invitation.
There must be many different attractors, or hooks. A colored card
works best. Use a qualifier on the card. Cover contingencies such as late
comers and advisors. Give a guarantee. If you mail a large mailing and
plan to do multiple seminars, do same-day lunch and dinner. Rotate
your seminars. Some suggested topics are: IRA Distribution
Strategies/Income Planning Seminar/ Trusts and Estate Planning /
Social Security and Taxes/ and Business and Succession Planning and
Converting your IRA to a Roth IRA.
32

33. 18. CHOOSE THE RIGHT
MAILING
Opportunity is as scarce as oxygen; men fairly breathe it and do not know
it.
Doc Sane
Some producers I know mail a wedding-style invitation that provides
tickets to their seminar. We just do not think that this type of invitation
has any advantage over a postcard when done correctly. I see several
advantages of the postcard mailing. Some of these are:
1) Much cheaper
2) You don’t have to worry about the card being read and opened as
with the wedding-style invitation.
3) The recipient sees the message before it is classed as junk mail and
goes in the trash. Nothing to open and doesn’t have to be
personalized to get attention.
4) Response rates are just as good.
5) When the recipient delays in making a decision in registering for
your seminar to check a possible conflict in dates, they will put your
card on the refrigerator and they will not put a bulky wedding-style
invitation with tickets up there--too much stuff for the refrigerator.
6) The largest producers in the business use cards.
You can buy four-color, two-sided, heavy stock, slick postcards for less
than forty five cents each. This is a killer bargain. This includes zip
count search, design help--unlimited changes until you are satisfied,
printing, first class postage and taking them to the post office.
I am of the opinion that you need to use color. The cost is not much
more and really makes a statement about your business. I have never
used the oversized post cards because I have never had to. We have
been successful using the regular sized postcards and until we are not
successful, we will continue using the regular sized card. This is the way
you get people to come to your seminar and you must make sure that
the invitation you mail will draw. If it takes the larger card to do this,
33

34. then by all means mail the large card. There is additional expense to do
this, but it may be necessary occasionally. If you do this, be sure to track
your results for future reference.
SAMPLE CARDS:
34

35. 19. YOUR INVITATION
Great opportunities come to all, but many do not know they have met them.
The only preparation to take advantage of them is single fidelity to watch
what each day brings.
Albert E. Dunning
If you decide to write your own invitation, I would suggest you invest
$10 in The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert W. Bly. You can buy this
book at Amazon.com for less if you don’t mind a used copy. This is a
step by step guide to writing copy that sells. Keep this on your desk and
read it every time you create a card, a sales piece, or advertising for your
practice. It is good stuff, especially if you decide to write your own
invitations that you think will draw people to your seminar. Initially, as
you get started with seminars, I would suggest you use a card designed
by one of the mail houses. All of these companies that do mailings will
have a number of sample cards you can use and will tell you the ones
that have the highest response rates. You may want to tweak one of
these for your initial mailings.
Your card must motivate. It has to have something that is not an
invitation they have seen fifty times, i.e., ten reasons seniors lose their
money, five money traps, why the dog ate their retirement, etc. It must
convey serious intent with serious information. Most of these people
have an advisor already. Your copy is crucial.
As mentioned previously, most mail houses have sample cards that you
can use that have been successful for other advisors. There are many
choices here as to type of invitation and method of delivery. Choose a
good mail service and use one of their cards to get started and save
yourself lots of time. If you know successful advisors who are doing
seminars, I would give them a call and ask them who they use. If you are
not a competitor in their market area, they will help you. Ask them if
they would share their best response card. They will know which card
they mail that gets the most attendees to their seminar. After you give a
few seminars, you should know this also.
Whichever mailing service/company you use, you have to be able to
trust the person you are working with. In all the years of seminar
marketing that we have done, I have found one person that stands out
from all the rest in my dealings. Whether you are just starting to give
35

36. seminars or if you are a seasoned veteran, I would recommend that you
call Susie Zolo, Senior Consultant for Seminar Crowds, Inc. She can
be reached at www.seminarcrowds.com. Susie has been with Seminar
Crowds since its founding many years ago. She is a consummate
professional and without reservation I can say that she has the advisor’s
best interests at heart. From your first contact with her, you know that
she wants you to succeed in your business. I have mailed hundreds of
thousands of cards with Seminar Crowds. My response rate has been
above average and the service has been the best. The best
recommendation I can give is that in all the time I did business with
them, I never missed a mail date or cancelled a seminar because I did
not have enough attendees. We all want to save money as we give
seminars and Seminar Crowds’ mailing costs are among the lowest in
the industry. They have the total package from design assistance to out
the door mailing as a part of the cost of their cards.
In addition to being a professional with the advisor’s success as her
driving force, Susie knows the business from the marketing side. She
understands what it takes to succeed and make a living giving financial
seminars. She is also Senior Vice President for Marketing for The
Randall Group, a very successful FMO in California and works closely
with many producers on a daily basis.
**I HAVE NO AFFILIATION WITH NOR RECEIVE ANY
CONSIDERATION OR COMPENSATION FROM SEMINAR CROWDS OR
RANDALL MARKETING GROUP FOR MY RECOMMENDATION**
20. HOW TO MAIL & TO WHOM
Everyone has something valuable he can teach you, schoolboy, if you’ll only
take the time to learn.
Earl (“Ted”) Tedder, steelworker, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
How do you choose the parameters for your mailing so that you almost
always can generate a room full of qualified prospects? Do you choose
$25K+, $40K+ or $50K+ income, homeowner, and ages fifty-five, sixty,
sixty-five to seventy-five, eighty, or do you just mail the zip code without
any screens on who gets mailed? Do you pay attention to net worth of
the recipients or adjusted gross income for a particular zip? How do you
36

37. decide which of these to choose when the mailing house asks you whom
do you want to mail to?
There are several schools of thought. There is a producer who claims to
be the largest annuity producer in the country and he mails every zip
and takes all comers. Others use net worth screens. We qualify and use
a higher income amount; some producers mail everyone but you get
more “eaters” when you do this and the quality of the attendees is not as
high. You may miss the blue collar person once in a while who has a
large IRA but the asset quality of your audience will be better when you
skip mailing the lower income brackets. At the other end are the
sophisticated investors with several advisors, harder to get as a client
but more rewarding when you get them.
Our mailing limits are as follows:
Ages 60-80 / Homeowner / Net Worth of $250,000+ / Income of $50K+/
No Apartments
You could drop the minimum age to 55 to attract the person who has a
sizable IRA that is beginning to think about retirement, especially if you
are doing IRA seminars. Also, you might want to make a value judgment
about mailing to age 80 because of problems with recommending
appropriate investments, ability to make investment decisions, etc. Also,
we sometimes drop the income level to $40,000 depending on the area.
After you have selected the restaurant or the place you plan to hold your
seminar, get the zip code of the restaurant and go to
www.melissadata.com or http://www.searchbug.com/tools/zip-
radius.aspx. These companies provide this information free. Here you
will be able to enter the zip code and get all zip codes within a radius of
ten miles. www.melissadata .com limits your search to five zip codes
unless you register. Obviously, you will put the zip code of the
restaurant you have chosen for your seminar into the search engine at
the site you choose because you want to work out in a radius from the
restaurant to find potential attendees that match your chosen
demographics. Although I rarely use all the zip codes this far from the
restaurant, I ask the mailing service to run all of them for a count that I
compare to the information I find at the sites I just gave you. I do this
because if I have to change the location and choose another site to do the
seminar, I will have a good idea of what zip code I want to go to for the
alternate restaurant. It also gives me a number to compare to the
results that the mailing service provides and it is a check on the mailing
37

38. service to see if they are giving me a good mailing list. Remember, you
are paying to mail the list they provide, so do your homework. I print
out the zip codes and it will tell me how far the zip codes are from the
restaurant. I try to stay within a five-mile radius of the restaurant I have
chosen. This is harder to do in less populated areas.
Once I have selected the zip codes, I decide whether or not I want to
have a noon and evening seminar at this restaurant on the chosen date
or if I want to do only one seminar on that date. If I choose to do only
one seminar, I always make this an evening seminar. This is because the
response rates are almost always higher for the evening seminar. This is
important because it will determine how many invitations you will mail
and consequently how many of the zip codes you will use and how far
from the restaurant you will mail. One hint here: If you are in a
moderate-sized city, your attendance will drop off sequentially as you
move away from the restaurant. Usually the maximum distance I ever
mail is seven miles. In a more sparsely populated area and in smaller
towns, people are willing to drive farther so you can mail to a zip code
that is a greater distance from the restaurant. This is something you will
learn as you mail. You will get to know your market and you will know
what to expect as to response rates and corresponding distances.
21. FIND ADJUSTED GROSS
INCOME FOR THE ZIPS YOU
MAIL
Life is like an echo. We get from it what we put in it and, just like an echo; it
often gives us much more.
Boris Lauer-Leonardi
Believe me; you will save money by finding the adjusted gross
income for the zips you mail. Go to www.MelissaData.com and click
on “free reports.” Register first because if you don’t, it will limit the
number of accesses you will have and if you are evaluating fifteen zip
codes for possible mailing, this is a problem. This is a free service but a
valuable one. Click on Lookups at the right side in the subject bar. Go to
Income Tax Statistics in the middle of the page and click, and then put
in the zip you are checking. Use the zip of the restaurant where you are
38

39. giving the seminar first. At the top of the listing, you will see Average
Adjusted Gross Income. If the zip shows adjusted gross income of less
that 40K, I don’t use it. As I say, some producers mail everything. We
don’t, and we save money by doing our homework up front. Also, you
increase the quality of your attendees with less “plate lickers.” In
addition, the amount of money you will get to work with will be much
higher when you do convert these attendees to clients. Next to the
bottom of the listing you will see Primary Taxpayers Age Greater
Than 60. There are listings for younger ages but this is the important
one for us. Note the number of taxpayers older than 60. The reason this
number is of interest is that it gives you a cross reference check on the
number from your list provider to see how accurate the number is that
they are mailing for you. The numbers will seldom be the same but
should be in the same ball park.
HOW MANY DO YOU MAIL?
Figure .7% is a reasonable response in this environment, so if you need
seventy attendees, you mail ten thousand. .7% X 10,000 = 70 (If you
want a conservative estimate of people who will respond, use .5% as a
response rate). If you want only thirty-five attendees, then you mail five
thousand. .7% X 5000 = 35 respondents, etc. If you get more, and we
usually do, then you can hold another seminar with the overflow and
you save the mailing costs for the additional seminar. I know these are
conservative numbers. I also know that you, like me, see testimonials
from mailing houses that say a particularly satisfied producer has gotten
a five percent response on his mailings and had to have three more
seminars to accommodate the people who responded to his mailing. I
caution you to err on the conservative side when you are estimating the
number of responders you will have to your mailing. Unless you are just
a killer copy writer or the person who writes your invitation is the “best
in the west” type, you should use .5% to .7% as your guide to the
number you will have respond to a good invitation in the current
environment. Again, a number of factors influence the final number.
The restaurant, time of year, time of the seminar, parking, etc. are
factors that will determine your response rate. When you control as
many of these variables as you can, your attendance and success rate
improve.
22. WHY NOT MAIL MORE?
39

40. Be wiser than other people if you can but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
There is an Independent Marketing Organization (IMO) that suggests
you have 100 to 150 attendees at a seminar. They are looking at what
they call a “Wow Factor.” This is supposed to mean that the more
people who show up at your seminar, the more credibility the speaker
or seminar will have. I will grant that when attendees walk in and see
this many people they may say to themselves that this must be a good
seminar. After you start to speak, all bets are off. It is strictly how good
the information is and how well you present.
You do not want ten or fifteen in your seminar so you need to mail to get
approximately forty. Why this number? It is impossible to see more
than fifteen to twenty appointments in the time between this seminar
and your next scheduled seminar. You should have a seminar at least
once a month but we prefer to have one every three weeks. Some
producers do one every two weeks. It doesn’t matter the frequency, just
that you can see all the people who want to meet with you without
letting them fall through the cracks by having too many. This is wasted
money and wasted prospects. When you over-mail, you have a great
crowd, but remember that you have to take them through the process of
discovery, research and recommendations and this takes time. In
addition, you are still seeing people for the second, third and fourth
appointments from previous seminars. Another important
consideration in favor of forty attendees for your seminar is that most
restaurant meeting rooms cannot accommodate a larger number
comfortably.
If most of your registration is couples, you will have a very low
cancellation rate. My guess on forty with seventeen couples and six
singles making up the registration, there would be a final number of
approximately thirty-six. This is about a ten percent cancellation rate. If
you want to be safe, figure a twenty percent cancellation rate. In this
instance, twenty percent cancellation would mean a crowd of thirty-two.
To offset this number of cancellations, I allow about 45 to register or go
on the waiting list. Why is it so crucial to keep this number around forty?
Simply, that is all you can see effectively before your next seminar. Also,
when the seminar is over, you (preferably your trained assistant) should
make the appointments at the seminar. You should average sixty to
seventy percent of the units there making appointments at the seminar.
This is not hard to do, even though you hear that a fifty percent
40

41. appointment rate is a good number industry- wide. If we have less than
a fifty percent appointment rate, I have not done a good job with the
seminar, we need to change subjects or re-evaluate our processes.
It stands to reason that the more you mail, the more attendees and the
more potential appointments you will have. Let me repeat: If you have
too many appointments, you can’t get to them all in a timely manner.
Some will drop through the cracks, cancel on you, or you will lose them
in the process. This is wasted money. You have done all the right things
to get them to your seminar and you have made the appointment. You
now have to convert them to being clients. This process is not instant.
You do not add water, stir and “whoosh” have a million dollar case.
Serious money takes serious information and longer to move. You want
to be the advisor for all of the client’s money and not just that industry
average $40,000 or $50,000 annuity sale. You probably will have to see
this type of client a minimum of three, four or more times. Usually the
fourth time is the magic meeting if you have done the preparation and
education of the client for clients with substantial assets.
One last comment on mailing and the number you need to mail. This is a
nebulous number depending on the area and your philosophy. This will
develop over time and as you decide how you want to conduct your
business. The more you mail, the more you save on the unit cost of the
invitation. This makes sense, especially with postal rates going up every
year. A good number of invitations to mail that generates two seminars
is ten thousand using the assumptions I talked about earlier of .5% to .
7% response rate. You will alter this to meet your preferences when
you have been through this process over time. This number of
invitations seems to generate the best results for us.
YOU DO NOT WANT TO HAVE A SEMINAR ROOM WITH ONLY SIX TO
TEN ATTENDEES. THEY GET THE “DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS” LOOK
AND ARE UNCOMFORTABLE THINKING YOU ARE ABOUT TO POUNCE
ON THEM. GIVE THEM A CROWD TO HIDE IN UNTIL THEY LIKE AND
TRUST YOU.
23. MORE ON MAILING
We are more easily persuaded, in general, by the reasons we ourselves
discover than by those which are given to us by others.
41

42. Blaise Pascal
Initially, you have to trust your mailing service to use the best lists.
After you have been in the seminar business for a while, you may feel
the need to experiment. I never do. I trust the mailer and if my results
are not good, then we talk. The bottom line is that if you get good results
and quality audiences, then the list being mailed is a good one. The
reverse is true if you don’t get good response rates and the quality of the
respondents is not what you would like. I don’t have time to be a list
expert. That is what you are paying them for. If your mail campaigns
are not working and generating enough people for you seminars, change
mail houses.
There is a way to upgrade the quality of your audience through your
mailing. If your mailing service does not provide net worth screening,
you may want to find one that does. Make sure that they do not charge
for this service because it is free with some mail houses. One of the
ways that I screen my zip codes before I ask the mailing house for zip
counts is that I go to www.melissadata.com and log in. I know that I
have talked about this before in an earlier chapter and I am being
redundant. This aspect of determining who you will mail is so important
I would like to repeat some of the things to do to insure a good mailing.
This service is free and you will want to log in, because otherwise the
number of times you can access information for free is limited to ten
queries. Instead of flying blind and mailing every zip count you get back
from the mailing house, go to income statistics on the Melissa data site
and put in the zip codes that you are planning on mailing. Remember
that I request every zip code within a ten-mile radius whether I plan to
mail this distance or not. You will see why you do this as you gain
experience. By this I mean that if a zip code adjusted gross income
number for a particular zip code is $21,000, you do not want to mail that
zip no matter what you have heard about mailing every zip. You are just
wasting your money. Yes, the mailing house is in the business of
providing people to mail to in every zip and they sent you back a good
number that they could mail in this zip. It doesn’t matter. If you want to
do this right and have a quality audience, do not mail this low income
zip, even though it shows a sufficient count to warrant your interest.
You will have a larger number of people there for the meal only and the
assets that you will find with this group will be much less, if any, and if
you are able to get an appointment they will usually cancel or be a no
show. They will come and eat your meal, some will even make an
42

43. appointment but they will not keep the appointment. This is bought
experience talking.
Some producers mail everyone. That is how they do their business and
some of them are successful. If you want to spend the least amount of
money and book the most appointments with serious money, you should
pay careful attention to net worth and adjusted gross income numbers
for each zip. In addition, you will also see two other bits of information
that are helpful. It will list all of the taxpayers who filed who got an
earned income tax credit. The lower this number is the better it is. Also,
it will give you the number of taxpayers in that zip who are sixty years
old or older who filed. Once I see what the adjusted gross income
average for the zip is, I determine how far it is from the restaurant and I
always mail the zip if it has $50,000 adjusted gross income and is less
than five miles from the restaurant. I sometimes mail those zips with
$40,000 adjusted gross income if I need this zip and income level to
make enough names to mail. Put this simple research with the net
worth information and numbers you get back from the mailing house
with your requested zip counts and you should be ready to send your
order in. Doing this in advance of asking for a zip count from your mail
house allows you to check what you have gotten from your adjusted
gross income search against the number in a specific zip code. If the
number from the list service is radically different from the number I get
searching adjusted gross income, I tell the list service and we talk about
it. Ultimately, I will trust the adjusted gross income number for a
particular zip code over the list service.
I always estimate that I will need to mail a minimum of six thousand
invitations to generate approximately forty respondents. This means
that you would have to get a .7% response rate and have forty-two
people register for the seminar. Many times we will get a higher
response rate than this and when this happens, we simply add a lunch
seminar. We only do this when we have a waiting list that will fill up
this noon seminar. I have found that attendees do not mind if we call
them and ask them to swap to the noon seminar.
One last tip: Never send your cards or mailers bulk postage or third
class. I cannot prove this, but in years past, we have had situations
where we did not get one single response from a particular zip code in a
large city where I have mailed before. I am almost certain that the
mailman threw the bulk mailed pieces in the dumpster rather than
deliver them to every house. I can’t prove this, but I did complain up the
43

44. food chain at the post office and it did not happen again because I mailed
first class from then on. You will save a few cents by mailing bulk or
third class but instead of three to five days delivery, it turns into a seven
to eight day delivery and it is hard to schedule for this type delivery and
response.
24. MAILING: AGE MATTERS
There are two worlds: the world that we can measure with line and rule,
and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.
Leigh Hunt
"I never expected conviction," Neasham told the Wall
Street Journal. "I thought the case would be thrown out."
The JOURNAL reports that the case “is sending shivers down the spines of
Mr. Neasham's peers across the country.” "It's very scary," Peter
Langelier, an agent in Maine, is quoted as saying. "There is nothing in
insurance-licensing that prepares you as a nonmedical person to
diagnose dementia."
Insurance New Net/ By Steven A. Morelli March 10, 2012
Glenn A. Neasham was sure the state didn’t have a strong case against him
as he watched the jury file into the courtroom with his verdict. But, still, he
awoke that October morning with a bad feeling.
So, when he heard the word “guilty,” he was not shocked like his family,
friends, lawyer and many people in his community were. The 51-year-old
Neasham was already numb from more than three years of an ever-deepening
nightmare. His insurance business was in ruins; he was relying on private
and public assistance; and now he was facing as many as four years in jail for
his felony conviction of grand theft from an elder, all for selling one annuity.
“A day or two later, it hit me that they found me guilty,” Neasham said. “At the
beginning of all this, my attorney told me the only way there would be a
conviction is fate.”
44

45. Few would have predicted Neasham’s current fate if they saw him before his
arrest. He had a thriving insurance business for more than 20 years in his
hometown of Lakeport, the county seat on the shore of Clear Lake in northern
California. He was involved in the Mormon Church and in the community as a
board member of civic organizations. The married father of three young
children (soon to be four) lived in a lovely home. His sales led him to qualify
for the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT) for seven years and he made more
than $500,000 income in 2007, his best year.
By the time the verdict came down, Neasham had made $20,000 in all of 2011,
was renting a house from his in-laws and his family was relying on food
stamps.
His alleged victim not only still held the indexed annuity he sold her, she had
earned more than $40,000 on it, despite the worst recession since World War
II.
I hesitated to use this example of Mr. Neasham’s problems to illustrate
the need of every advisor to approach marketing to the elderly with
caution and preparation. It does demonstrate how an agent with a
clean record, respected in his community and with many years
experience can run afoul of the regulatory agencies in dealing with this
special population.
We may be the exception in mailing the older ages, but this age group
fits our “niche” market and what we do. When you deal with this age
group you must exercise extreme caution in your dealings with the
client. More and more there are compliance issues relating to marketing
to seniors, especially the older age groups. I might say that there have
always been issues that we need to be aware of with this age group, but
it is becoming more of an area of scrutiny for regulatory agencies.
There can be serious ramifications to advising a senior who may be at
the beginning stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s without your
knowledge as illustrated in real life by Mr. Neasham’s experience with
his client. You can lessen the chances of this type of occurrence by
including the children, or if there are no children, including the closest
relative. Again, this is done with the client’s approval.
45

46. We turn this into a positive by inviting the children of the clients into the
meetings (with the clients’ approval, of course) to be sure that we cover
all the relevant issues for all parties. This solidifies our relationship
with the people who will ultimately get the money we are managing for
the senior clients. We like this process and we see ourselves as multi-
generational advisors. We actually become the trusted advisors because
we are endorsed or recommended by the parents. It also helps us better
understand some aspects of the planning we will do and influences our
recommendations.
I would suggest that anyone who markets to seniors take a training
course on the compliance aspects of marketing to seniors. Much of what
you must know about marketing to seniors can be gleaned from these
courses. It will better prepare you to work with this age group. These
compliance courses can be found at various services that provide CE
credit for insurance licensing purposes.
I would also suggest that someone who plans to market to seniors as a
permanent form of marketing through seminars to take the Chartered
Advisor in Senior Living (CASL) course from the American College.
I understand that it is a major effort to stop action and take a course for
a designation, but if this is the segment of the population you want to
market to, it is important to have the credentials when compliance
comes calling, and they will. In addition, the information is timely and
covers a broad range of topics about the elderly that you would never
get otherwise. The information will help you understand this special
population that you are doing seminars for. Another valuable resource
is www.elderlawanswers.com. This should be a primer for you to read
to acquaint yourself with issues your clients will face.
25. WHAT TO DO WHEN
RESPONSE RATES DROP
The solutions all are simple--after you have arrived at them. But they’re
simple only when you know already what they are.
Robert M. Persig
You live in a medium-sized town and you continue to mail the same zips.
What happens to your response rates?
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47. Your response rates will begin to decline after you mail a selected zip
code group over a longer period of time. This is especially true in lower
population areas or small towns. In larger cities, you can rotate the zips
you mail. When your response rates fall off dramatically, it is time to
change your topic and/or your mailing piece.
A question that always comes up is, “How can you tell when you have
mailed the zip codes in your marketing area too many times?” There is a
simple formula you can use to tell when you are approaching the
saturation point.
One way to determine in advance when you have about reached the
maximum number of mailings for a group of zip codes (before you make
changes) is to add up your previous response rates for the zip group you
are mailing. If the total is close to ten percent, it is time for a change. You
should track your responses from each seminar as a part of your record
keeping. Keep all information about each seminar in one file for future
reference.
You might consider mailing surrounding cities and setting up a “day”
office in that city and scheduling all appointments on the day you have
reserved, or revising your mailing piece and giving your seminar on a
different topic. You should have more than one seminar. Ideally, you
would have at least three prepared that are of interest to your target
market. This would allow the zips you normally mail to rest.
Something that you should keep in mind is that a major percentage of
seniors do not go to seminars and many times those who do have
conflicting engagements. Some seniors will come to your seminar after
seeing your invitation for the third or fourth time. Even so, if you mail
the same zips continuously, your response rate will decline. It is always
good to anticipate this in advance. It will save you thousands of dollars.
26. THE VALUE OF A GOOD
RESPONSE SERVICE
Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There’s a price to
pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just leaving things as
they are, a price for everything.
Harry Browne
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