Financial Advisors: Your Candid Input is Extremely Valuable

Financial Advisors play an obvious vital role in the distribution of financial services products. They are relied upon by millions of customers for expert guidance, and they are indispensable to countless product providers whose distribution strategy is based upon intermediaries.

I’d like to begin a thread for the expression of financial advisors’ views on issues they view as important. Ideally this will become a free-wheeling discussion that will reveal many insights of importance to many industry participants including senior executives at investment companies, insurers and broker-dealers.

To stimulate discussion I’d like to ask your views on these questions:

Do you find that your career provides you the degree of personal and professional satisfaction you crave?

What challenges do you face in marketing yourself? Is it relatively easier today to promote your practice, or more difficult in comparison to the past?

How do you view today’s product set? Is complexity a problem? Are you able to adequately and effectively express today’s products to your customers? Do you feel that there are too many products to choose from? Do you notice genuine innovation in product development, or, only marginal differences between products?

In terms of the Boomer retirement security opportunity, is this yet “real” to you or something less? Do you feel that you are prepared for it in terms of your own education? Do you have access to products that you feel have been specifically designed to generate income over long-lasting retirements? What do you feel that the industry hasn’t delivered to you that you may need to capitalize with Boomer clients? Do you feel that you have convenient access to appropriate software tools and marketing tools?

How do your clients view their future retirements? Do you feel that typical clients have the appropriate level of insight in terms of the income-generation challenges they will face?

What strategies, if any, do you rely upon to generate retirement income? Do you employ SWPs, income annuities or laddered strategies, for instance? Have you created your own hybrid solutions?

How do you view your level of productivity? Do you attract an adequate number of new clients each year? What prospecting techniques do you find to be effective? Is technology a part of your prospecting strategies? Do you use web-based strategies?

How do you view product wholesalers? Do you rely upon them? Are they helpful to you? How do you manage the sharing of your time with wholesalers?