Episode 718 - Professional Stalking

In Episode 718 of Monday Morning Mojo, Phil highlights a major misstep among top-performing wealth management teams: if your online presence is all about you, you're missing the mark. After working with high-performing firms, Phil calls out the common trap of advisor-centric messaging and shows how to flip the script: telling real, relatable client stories that actually resonate. Want to attract the right clients? Make them feel like you get them before they ever walk through the door.

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Transcript

Top performers in every field surround themselves with those who inspire them, who seek to build them up, and who push them to reach beyond their current limits. I am Phil Buchanan, executive chairman of Cannon Financial Institute. I designed Monday Morning Mojo to provide you with a weekly spark, a push and motivational insight to live your best life.

Thanks for joining. Good Monday morning, Cannon Nation. Phil here with episode 718 of Monday Morning Mojo. Just a shout out to all of you who have been sending in your comments and your feedback on prior podcast. We have gotten quite a few notes over the last several weeks. Those are appreciated. We love your comments. Please continue to send those in. Again, that is Mojo M-O-J-O at Cannon. That is with two n’s: C-A-N-N-O-N financial.com. We'd love to hear from you.

I recently hosted an event for 17 very high performing wealth management teams to begin their 2026 business planning. In preparation for the event, I spent several hours researching these teams’ online presence.

This included LinkedIn searches, examining their websites, random Google searches, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. To say that there was a wide disparity of presence and activity would be an understatement. Some of the teams had very impactful presences while others simply had a minimal presence. At the event, I asked the teams to define the situations, scenarios, and client personas that their businesses were designed to assist.

Invariably, most of the teams drifted towards a certain level of net worth as their main criteria. Now, I was not surprised by this having done the initial research as almost all of the sites position their businesses as providing guidance to high net worth or ultra-high net worth individuals and families.

Further their online presence referred to their process of engagement in the areas in which they provided counseling advice, be it investment management, risk management, retirement estate planning, et cetera. The challenge, and it's an unrecognized challenge for. All of these businesses is that the story they were telling online was being given from the advisor's point of view and not the client's point of view.

Lemme give you an example. One was the area of estate planning. Now, this was a common theme that was presented and it was centered around the capability to work with families to design tax effective estate plans and the ability to manage trust for the benefit of surviving spouses, generational heirs, charities, et cetera.

The problem is clients don't think in those terms, nor in that format. Another example was philanthropic planning. Again, this was a similar advisor centric theme around tax efficient charitable giving, utilizing appropriate tools like donor advised funds and family foundations. Now, I am willing to bet that very few wealthy individuals woke up this morning.

And told their spouse that today is the day that I want to learn more about tax efficient charitable gifting, utilizing vehicles like donor advised funds and family foundations. This disconnect is real, but it's relatively easy to fix. Your digital footprint needs to be client centric, not firm centric.

It needs to tell a story from the client's point of view. For example, rather than touting expertise in revocable living, trust, irrevocable, trust, estate settlement, et cetera, give examples of real client situations, real scenarios. What about saying something like, every family we serve has experienced varying degrees of financial success?

While the past, these successes are varied, almost all want to ensure it is sustained in the future generations. Now how to appropriately do this is going to differ for each family. Some families have special considerations for particular children or grandchildren. Some families wish to see certain values carried out by future generations, and many families have made decisions on these and other concerns, but they did it some time ago.

Yet, with time and evolution, their objectives and their desires have changed. Wherever you are today, a conversation with our team can give you the peace of mind that the legacy you desire will actually be realized. Now, is this perfect wording for you and your clients? Probably not, but this type of dialogue actually communicates your real value much better than a simple listing of various account types and strategies.

The purpose of your online presence is to draw people to you. Before a prospect ever decides to meet with you or your firm, they are going to professionally stalk you. They're going to do Google searches, they're going to look at LinkedIn, they're going to look at your webpage. You have to make certain that the story they read makes them say.

Wow, these folks understand what I'm dealing with. They work with people like me. A listing of account types and strategies simply doesn't convey that at the end of the day, people do business with people whom they can relate with. Create that perception in everything you do, especially online.

Monday Morning Mojo is a production of Cannon Financial Institute; executive producer of Monday Morning Mojo is Sarah Jones. Editing and mixing is done by Danny Brunner. Until next time, I'm Phil Buchanan reminding you to be a force for good. Have a great week and thanks for being part of the Mojo community.