Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Matthew Donaghue, who has transformed his successful financial education seminar marketing into webinar marketing.
Following is an edited transcript of this conversation, or you can watch the full interview below.
Quick Overview
Guest: Matthew Donaghue
San Antonio, Texas
Years in business: 20
Firm: Mission Financial Partners at Cetera Investors
What’s working now: Transforming educational seminars into webinars, complete with dinner
My 2020 lessons: Hire and delegate!
(Watch at 00:40)
I learned two major lessons in 2020. They’re simple, but sometimes those simple lessons are the most profound.
The first one is you can’t do it all by yourself. It’s just not possible. From my years of being a home office guy, I know that the vast majority of advisors out there—whether man, woman, new advisor, old advisor—the vast majority are solopreneurs, or solo entrepreneurs. Hire that staff. Get that staff on board as fast as you can. Especially in the digital world where there is more of an administrative burden, you’re going to need that help.
The second thing is don’t be shy about who you’re going to hire. I merged my practice with another advisor, and in doing so we agreed to hire some staff. The staff we’ve hired have done exactly what we ask them to do.
The hard part for both of us is letting that new advisor do what they are supposed to do. If you’re hiring someone to do a job, let them do the job. You’re used to doing it all yourself and you’re very hands-on. You’ve gotta take a step back and say, “Hey, I hired this person to do A, B and C. Let them do A, B and C and see how they did, and then give them feedback.”
Yeah, you can’t do it all yourself; get that staff on board as fast as you can.
Compensating junior staff
We went down the road of junior staff, which at Cetera Investors we call an associate advisor. We have a young man right out of college. We told him right off the bat, “The only thing you’re going to do is work on the phones. That’s it. However, you’ve gotta be fully licensed before we will hire you.”
He did all his licensing and all that. From a staffing perspective we told him, “OK, we’re willing to give you an 11% cut of the GDC that our team generates for 2021.” Our goal for 2021 is $900,000 in GDC, which means he’s going to come in just a shade under $100,000 GDC. Knock off taxes, knock off the revenue that the firm keeps, and he’s probably going to make about $60,000, maybe $65,000. We really like the revenue share concern because we want him to feel like he is tied to the success of the firm.
The next role we’re hiring for is an operations manager. That’s going to be a salaried position, again in that $50,000 to $70,000 range. We want you licensed, and if you’re going to work the phones and do a lot of client interaction, then we want to give you a revenue share if at all possible.
Diligent confirmation and follow-up crucial for webinars
(Watch at 5:21)
The biggest difference I notice for webinars, compared to in-person seminars, is that you will have to be much more diligent in your follow-up and your confirmation process. We’ve got a pretty detailed in-person follow-up and registration process, but it’s even more important for webinars.
Why? From what we saw, if you’re giving out some kind of gift card at the end of the webinar, you’re going to see only about a 30% show rate in terms of people who register. I’m not sure what other people’s experience has been, but that was ours. Of that 30%, when we reach out to them afterwards to say, “Hey, what’s the password we gave out so you can get your gift card?”—only about 75% of those people pick up the phone.
You need to have the diligence of: Call to confirm, call to confirm, call to confirm. Run the event, then call to follow-up, call to follow-up, call to follow-up. You’ve gotta make sure you do that.
Have a series ready to go
The other thing you’ve gotta make sure you do is have a scheduled series of events on your website already approved by your compliance team. It needs to be on your website, ready to go.
When you are in person, you’re auditioning. Guess what you’re doing with webinars? You’re auditioning. Same thing. If you’re saying, “Hey, we’re going to have another event, and I’m not sure when it is, and I’m not this and that,” suddenly you don’t look very prepared. If you say, “Hey, our next event is going to be on Thursday the 26th, and it’s going to be at 6:30 p.m. If you’re interested, feel free to reach out, but we’ll also send you an invite to it.” Whole different feel to those two statements.
For me, you’ve gotta be super diligent on follow-up, and then have follow-up events already locked in and planned and ready to go.
A series shows your expertise
(Watch at 12:49)
A series of multiple topics shows that you have a broad base of knowledge. Again, I don’t want to overstate that, but if you’re the presenter, and you’re the person doing it like we talked about with in-person events—wow, it adds a lot of credibility to it. It’s amazing.
We’re actually doing mailers on the series, and we’re going to run four topics in the series. With webinars we do four, while for in-person events, we would do three. We’re adding “How Tax Planning Changes in Retirement” as the fourth webinar after Social Security, Medicare, and IRA Planning.
Depending on the results we get from the initial Social Security presentations, we’re mentally and financially prepared to say, “OK, let’s run this again in February for a different set of zip codes”—assuming we can generate enough ROI.
At a bare minimum, we want five times revenue. That would be a D-. We’re not all happy with that result, but if we can do that, it’s enough to finance another webinar, and then that’ll finance another one. What we’re really trying to do—the long-term strategic goal—is build a prospect list that has 10,000 names in it.
Is it worth buying those leads? Yeah, if you can make some money and turn a profit in the meantime, sure it is. Our plan is to run multiple series during the course of the year, with a series starting every month.
Timely topics
(Watch at 11:25)
Then the last part is what about our existing clients? What about our existing prospects that we’ve been talking to for the last couple of years? What do we do with them? We’ve already got our calendar year mapped out for four quarterly webinars. We’re going to start off with the “2020 Tax Briefing” in early February and go from there.
The client topics are timely. We coordinated them back to the quarterly post cards from our Key Planning & Investment Deadlines campaign. We send out the quarterly post cards, and the topic aligns with one of the deadlines in the card. They’re going to hear from us at least four times a year.
Our junior associate—guess whose job it is to call and invite people to that event? That takes that off my plate! Now I can focus on one-on-one client meetings and some of the other things we all know that you have gotta do as an advisor.
Adding dinner to webinar events
(Watch at 9:07)
For this year, we’re doing a couple things differently. One comes from working with our partners at LeadingResponse. They made the suggestion to send out an actual mailer like we used to do, and have dinner delivered to the prospect’s home the night of the event.
They saw the advisors who were pioneering that at other firms were getting about a 90% show rate—so three times what we’re getting. Still run a series. Still have the whole thing ready to go, but now you’re really bringing dinner.
How the dinner logistics work
The trick there is, and this is what made us hesitate a little bit, is how do we handle that administratively? Let’s say I have 20 households who say they want to participate in this webinar. That means I gotta get 20 dinners delivered. It’s not like catering where I can just have the food brought to a place. We called the restaurant chain we primarily used for in-person events—a local chain called Stone Werks—and talked to the chef about it. They said, “Give us some time.”
They negotiated a deal with GrubHub. All we have to do is give the restaurant the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people who are attending and their menu choice. The restaurant puts the orders in on GrubHub. GrubHub will send them one consolidated bill, which they will in turn forward to us, and we’ll pay it like we would a banquet hall.
That is going to save us hours of administrative time. It’s $200 versus $20 an hour work; it’s not costing us anything. When they said, “Do you think you can handle absorbing the GrubHub delivery fee? It’s going to put you over your threshold,” I said, “Sure. We can handle that.”
When it comes to the attendees, we are telling them: If you have a delivery issue, you need to contact the restaurant; we gave your name, address, and phone number to the restaurant. It’s the information you [the attendee] put in, so you’ve gotta take a little bit of responsibility for the information you provide. Garbage in, garbage out. That’s what it is.
We’ll send dinner for two, just like if you’re coming into the restaurant and you brought your spouse or significant other. Our budget is $25 a plate. They get a choice of steak, chicken, or fish entrée, with the sides and dessert as well.
The mailers have gone out for our first dinner webinar on January 26. We’ll have to see how it goes. We’re excited about that. We’ll run the series, just like we talked about before, only the series will be run more like a dinner seminar where each event we’re going to get you dinner and all that.
The restaurant logo is on the invite so they know where the food is coming from. The nice thing, too, is it’s a local chain, so people know it’s local versus one of the big national chains.
A new twist for college planning?
(Watch at 17:03)
A client of mine and I were discussing a new concept last Friday. She made a great suggestion. She said, “Have you done anything with college planning, younger families?” I said, “Not really. They’re not really the market for us.”
She said, “What if you took that idea and just had a pizza delivered to those families and say, ‘Hey, dinner for you and the kids is on us. Give us 45 minutes during this normally hectic time, and we’ll talk to you about something that’s timely and relevant to you.’”
I had never considered it.
Higher assets required for webinar marketing
(Watch at 15:35)
It’s very much like a live dinner seminar, the only thing that’s different is the presentation is virtual and the food is being delivered.
Except, when we did the in-person seminars, we really weren’t too concerned about minimum assets, because when you get a couple extra bodies in the room it can help fill the room up and make it look really good, right? You know pretty quickly who you’re going to be able to work with or not.
On a webinar, you can’t tell who is there. They can’t tell. Their cameras are off. We set up Zoom so that they can’t see how many other attendees are on the call. For us, we said, “OK, we put a much higher threshold in place. We know we’re driving attendance down a little bit, but it should be much higher quality.”
Normally we would have 5,000 mailers, but we cut a lot at the bottom. This time was about 4,000 mailers. If we get a 1% response rate, that’s 40. We’re spreading it out over three nights, so hopefully it’s 10–15 a night. With a 90% show rate, we’re looking at 9–12 or 13 households each webinar.
We’ve been working with LeadingResponse for the mailers, the same as we did for in-person seminars. They handle all the RSVPs. They’ve got a call center and everything, so people register with them. We’ve got a portal we can log into where we can see how many have signed up, all those things. We’ve had about 30 people at each webinar.
The downside of Facebook ads
(Watch at 36:24)
We were advertising via Facebook, through LeadingResponse. They’d run the Facebook ad, it would flow back to us and all that. We were very disappointed in the tonality of the responses. What I mean by that is you’d see the Facebook ad, and you’d see these overwhelmingly negative comments about Social Security from the general public.
If you’re going to do social media advertising, you’ve gotta be active. You’ve gotta respond. After four months of dealing with 20 negative responses a day, I was like, “OK, I really want to get off of Facebook for advertising.” I know that’s probably running counter to what a lot of people are doing right now.
I’d much rather advertise on Google, where it’s not live. You’re not expected to respond. You don’t have to defend a position, versus social media where you’ve gotta defend your advertisement when people start commenting, otherwise you’ll get fried by somebody.
We had very few people who would ever respond back. We’d say, “Well, that could be a concern, but here’s the actual numbers.” Then I would always say, “Give me a call if you’d like to discuss,” and I’d put my phone number up there. I never got one phone call from those people.
Webinar and presentation mechanics
(Watch at 19:01)
We want the orders out the door from the restaurant and hopefully at the client’s home between 5:30 and 6:00. We’ll start at 6:30 p.m.
This is where having staff helps. I don’t run the webinar all by myself. You’ve gotta have somebody helping you. It doesn’t matter if all they’re there for is just to start the event, and then manage the chat. If someone is having a technical problem, they want you to help them. You’ve gotta have help so you can just focus on your presentation. That’s key.
I don’t care necessarily who it is who’s helping you. If you’ve got a teenager at home who could do this for you, have them do it for you. Someone who can help is super important to make sure you can stay focused and on point.
We tell attendees right up front that you’re on mute, your camera’s not on, so if you want to have a beer, whatever, while you’re watching, we don’t care. If you have any questions, type them into the chat. I’ll address them at the end of the presentation.
It’s interesting. There aren’t as many questions on a webinar as there are in person. Part of it is in person you’ve got the one who knows enough to be dangerous, so they’re going to try to pepper you in front of a crowd. That person doesn’t really have a megaphone when it’s a webinar and they’re typing in. We haven’t had an issue yet where we haven’t been able to address all the questions.
Every eight to 10 slides, we’ll do a poll. We consistently do them so that there is a level of engagement. Even though we don’t get a ton of questions, we get almost 100% response rate on the polls. They’re gimmes. They’re based on stuff we just went through in the last eight to 10 slides. One of the ones we use for Social Security is, “What does FRA stand for?” Your options are “Free Retirement Advisor” or “Full Retirement Age.” That’s our little dig, if you will. People get that one right.
Catering to preretiree women
(Watch at 22:42)
Our niche is preretiree women. We use the Savvy Social Security Planning for Women presentation, and it just grew from there. We don’t get any pushback on the fact that, “Wait a second, this is a team of guys coming up to give this presentation.” One person has asked me that question, and I just said, “You realize I have a mom, I have a sister, I have a wife, I have two daughters, I have four nieces. Got a lot of women in my life that I care about.”
The biggest challenge we see, though, and I saw it again right before the holiday, is when one spouse, typically the male, tends to shelter the other spouse from financial decisions. In this case, it was a very affluent father who was too involved in his children’s financial lives. When he died, one adult child had never actually purchased a car in their life, at age 67. They said, “Dad had always done it for me. Now I’ve gotta buy a car. What questions should I be asking?”
We see that a lot, and to me it’s alarming more than anything. “Wait a second, you can’t be that sheltered!” But it turns out some people are. In fact, our team was just discussing pursuing a couple of designations or credentials in divorce planning. You’ve been sheltered, and now you’ve got questions, and you’re not sure where to turn to—boy, let’s sit down and have a conversation.
Build trust with a Social Security analysis
(Watch at 24:34)
Our call to action is as simple as it could be. “You need to talk to us, or schedule your Social Security analysis.” That’s it. It’s that simple. We even have a PDF of a Social Security analysis based on me and my wife ready to go. We pull it up, show it to them at the very end of the presentation, and say, “Look, this is what it is. We commit to you that that is what you will get out of your first appointment with us. We’ll send you a copy of it afterwards.”
Then when we get to that first appointment, we do exactly what we said we would do. Yes, we introduce the firm. Yes, we talk about retirement planning. But the bulk of the appointment is going through Social Security. You take them through their analysis and all that. Once we get that far, I’d say at least two thirds of those will continue to the next step, which is, “OK, now let’s take a look at Medicare.”
We talk a little bit about the analysis at the beginning, but the big thing we say is, “Look, you’re here to learn about Social Security, and we commit to you that is what we are going to talk about.” I know that there are some insurance companies who put out some great Social Security presentations, then have those three or four annuity slides worked into the presentation. That’s one of the beautiful things about Horsesmouth, that stuff’s not in there.
We get a load of great feedback saying, “Hey, this is what you said you were going to do, and then you did it.” Right up front we say, “You’re going to get this. At the end, you’re going to want to know more about a Social Security analysis, which we’ll talk about in more detail towards the end of the night. For now, let’s jump into Social Security.”
Has anyone else shown you all these scenarios?
(Watch at 26:39)
We touch on the fact that the report is part of a one-on-one analysis all the time. That’s one of the things we really like about the analysis we get from Horsesmouth.&v=m541wh1rdyyrkntlozmxsivg I highly recommend that you share your screen during a virtual appointment so they can see you putting in the information.
Depending on the scenario, you can show them when it’s running the scenarios and it comes back with the report that says, “Ran 12,000 scenarios in 5.2 seconds.” We always zero in on that number. “Mr. and Ms. Client, has anyone ever sat down with you and said, ‘Hey, there’s literally 12,000 different claiming strategies you could choose? Here’s the ones that will get you the most income possible. It just depends on which scenario might make the most sense for you.’”
To get their PIA (primary insurance amount, or benefit), I tell them one of two things. One, go ahead and call the Social Security Administration. You’re going to have about a 20-minute wait time. It’s not as bad as you might think. It’s actually way faster than going to the Social Security office, if you can go, depending on your state, with Covid and all that. Number two is go online.
One side effect to come out of the Covid crisis is that a lot of people in their 60s who weren’t very technology savvy have been forced to become at least proficient. How do you get on the Internet, create an account somewhere, and look stuff up? It’s been a huge benefit for us.
The vast majority of people show up with their PIA. If not, we’ll say, “Hey, the max is going to be right around three grand. Were you a max earner for 35 years?” “No, not even close.” “OK. Maybe $1,500 a month? $1,600?” “Yeah, probably, that seems reasonable.”
Scheduling the first meeting
(Watch at 27:50)
We tell attendees that we will call to follow up. That’s the one thing I’d say that we’re a little nervous about. For in-person events, and then webinars in ’20, we used to say, “We’ll call to follow up to make sure we get your gift card choice,” because we always gave them a couple choices. Although some people wouldn’t even pick up the phone after we told them we were going to be calling.
The challenge for us then is, “OK, here’s the list of people who attended. Get that screenshot. While you’re doing it, all right, square it back.” That’s where your cohost will help you. Most people will put in at least their name, and you can cross-reference it back to your registration list. There’s always one or two who just have a phone or device number showing on their Zoom account. We’ll say, “VZW1513, could you just let us know in the chat your first name and the first initial of your last name so we can check to see who actually showed up tonight?” Most of the time they respond. We get a couple that don’t, but most of the time they respond.
Bridging to the next meeting
(Watch at 32:00)
When we frame out retirement income for people, we always start with guaranteed income sources, one of which of course is Social Security. We talk about investment management, and we talk about insurance planning, and we talk about legacy planning. We give them two or three bullet points under each one, and then at the end when we’re done with the Social Security analysis, we say, “How do you feel? What did you think of today? Did we do what we said we were going to do?”
The answers are usually, “Hey, I feel pretty good about this. It’s better than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, you guys did exactly what you said.” “OK, great. The next time we get together, what we’d like to do is X.” X is always put together a bigger plan, or start working on the bigger plan.
For the ones who know how to shop for a financial advisor, that’s when they’ll start asking about fees and so on. The ones who really aren’t sure, that fee question will come up later. The ones who are savvy, where we think, “OK, here’s someone who’s worth really digging in on,” they start asking about fees right there.
If they’re willing to share all their information up front, that’s fine. If not, we’re real candid that the second appointment will be more of a discovery session. We tell them, “Here’s the things you need to bring with you.” Then we build out the rough framework for them.
Third appointment, I show them the rough framework, ask them, “Are we close? Are we not close?” That’s the only commitment we’re asking for. Are we hitting the mark that you’re wanting to see on this? Most of the time it’s, “Yeah, you guys are really close. This looks good. This is what I was looking for.” OK, great. The next time we get together it’s going to be, “Here’s your final presentation. Let’s start the account opening process.”
Then if we have to follow up with the old 401(k) provider, something like that, we’ll schedule some separate time to do that. We use a three or four appointment process at this point. Most of it just depends on the client, though.
2020 results
(Watch at 30:13)
My partner Kenny Hamilton was a huge part of our 2020 success, as well. Ken was in field management until basically July 1. Then he came into the field as an advisor, similar to my scenario. It’s formalized now. We’re now Mission Financial Planners at Cetera Investors.
Between the two of us, we did about $525,000 in gross dealer concession (GDC) in 2020. It was my first full year in, and Ken’s first six months in, and keep in mind we had about a 12-week pause in our marketing efforts as we changed gears from webinars to seminars. Of that, 60% of that came in in the second half of the year.
Webinars work, but you’ve gotta work them. If you’re not diligent on the follow-up, if you’re not having an assistant help you run the webinar, if you’re not making sure everybody is signed up and knows how to get on, you’re in trouble. You’re going to think, “This is a huge waste of my time, and I’m not sure why I’m even doing it.”
Our goal was $750,000. We came in right around $550,000. We missed our goal by about $200,000. We run our practice off an income statement, so those numbers are real. We did turn a profit, which we were very happy about, but we missed our own goals by about $200,000.
Going strong in 2021
(Watch at 40:23)
That didn’t make us pause on our ’21 goal, though. Our ’21 goal is $900,000. We do think given the great support we get from Horsesmouth, the great support we get from Cetera, that hopefully we all get vaccinated here in the next few months—If all those things continue to happen or do happen, we’ve got a full seminar schedule already ready to go starting in June.
It’s very aggressive. It’s something that as a solo advisor, I could have never been that aggressive. Someone who’s got a team, though? Yeah, we can do it. We’ll keep doing webinars, though. It’s a question of scale. Two in-person events for good clients and prospects every year, two webinars. From a prospecting standpoint, like I said before, if that webinar prospecting system works as well as we hope it will, yeah, we’re going to run that webinar series. We’re going to begin a new webinar series every month, and just keep it going.
We came to a decision…It wasn’t a light conversation. We really talked this through. We think the vast majority, and when I say vast majority, I mean over 90% of our first meetings, all the Social Security analysis, all are going to be virtual going forward.
We’ve got a three-advisor team at this point. We’re bringing on more staff. You’ve got that client who maybe doesn’t have much to do, but they’re going to be more of a fee-based planning client. OK, our junior associate can handle that client. That’s not worth my time. That’s not worth Ken’s time. We all face that struggle. We want to help people, but there are some people that you just can’t help. For us, Zoom is going to be a great way to help filter out who we should really be spending our time with.
Keep your chin up
(Watch at 42:38)
2020 was a crazy year for our business, and it was super busy, and a lot of people had great years, but a lot of people had their marketing plan completely disrupted and are probably still trying to find their standing in this world. Given the events in D.C. and all that, so far ’21 has been every bit as challenging. Keep your chin up. Nothing is forever.
Someday we’ll be looking at Covid and all this political unrest in the rear view mirror. You’re going to get there. Just don’t give up. Keep your chin up and keep your practice moving forward. Five years from now, you’ll totally thank yourself that you did.