Transactional Sales

Making transactional sales not only does a disservice to your clients but could land you in a heap of trouble. Selling financial products without doing all of the investigational work before, like fact-finding and suitability evaluations can hurt clients financially, gives our industry a bad name and may make you party to a lawsuit. Yet there are still some in our industry that want to take the path of least resistance, the easy way out, to make a fast buck. Those of you out there who shy away from the question of suitability and doing things right, know who you are, I am talking to you. You are single-handedly hurting all of us in this great industry with your practices. Stop now, change your habits, help others and become more successful by doing things the right way. You’ll be happy you did.

Retirement Analyzer and Tweakability

In talking to financial professionals from all over the country every day, one of the questions that I’m asked time and time again is “Will the RA program work for my specific client?” 

Do you have clients who:

§  Are looking to map out a plan for the next 50 to 60 years?

§  Are four to five years away from retirement and want to know how their financial picture looks for the rest of their lives. 

§  Are in retirement and want to make sure they are going to be able to keep their current standard of living throughout the rest of their lives.

The Retirement Analyzer works well with all types of clients and all types of scenarios.  We all know that the younger you are, the more time you have to plan.  Younger clients have what we call tweakability; the ability to make changes to their plans today to help generate adequate funds through retirement.  Most clients nearing retirement still have the ability to make moves today to solidify their lifestyles in retirement.  Older clients may not have as much tweakability, but the Retirement Analyzer will provide valuable information and projections regarding current spending habits and how long there retirement funds will last. How many times, when faced with a crucial decision, have you said to yourself “If I only knew the outcome I would know which direction to take”?  Retirement Analyzer will help you project the future for your clients. One program that will handle every possible situation!

We The "Sheeple"

Transactionality

Let’s talk Transactionality for a second; it’s a new word that we came up with here at Thomas Gold Solutions and is really to blame for a premature end to an agent or financial advisor’s career. I caution all of you and recommend that you analyze your “infrastructure”, in other words, your processes and the way you go about building your business. Are you constantly looking for new leads, begging for referrals, running from appointment to appointment talking product and leading with a 10% bonus if you can even find one today without a 20 year surrender schedule? If it’s all about the sale to you and you let the client know that it’s all about the sale to you, then your closing ratios will suffer miserably and you will be working harder and harder to stay afloat. Yes I said stay afloat because it will not be long before you are replaced. Here is your competition; today’s new agents/advisors are providing their clients with an easy to understand look into their futures where all of the pieces of the puzzle come into play. If you’re doing this now I tip my hat to you. If you are making the transition, I wish you the best and I’m happy that you can read the writing on the wall. If you still have a client base of 3,000 people that you’ve seen once it is now put up or shut up time. Changes must be made now or the competition will prove to be too much and I don’t have to tell you what will happen next.

Please feel free to post feedback and stay tuned for more on this important topic.

Thomas Gold Solutions Welcomes Marlina Randazzo!

We wanted to take a minute to share some exciting news with all of you. We are very happy to announce the addition of a new member to our team. Some of you may have had an opportunity to speak with Marlina Randazzo already, but if you haven’t, we urge you to call her and introduce yourself. Marlina is a Registered Representative as well as a Registered Investment Advisor and has been in the industry for over 12 years. She uses the software on each and every client appointment so she truly understands what you are up against and has been instrumental in helping financial professionals all around the country with their software questions and in preparing for their upcoming appointments. We have already received so much positive feedback about what she has brought to our organization and are delighted that she has agreed to become a permanent member of our team.

We also wanted to take a few minutes to thank each and every one of you for your business and your continued support of the software. We have heard from many of you and continue to get testimonials on a daily basis sharing your success stories. We have been truly inspired by these testimonials and hope that you continue to send them.

For those of you we haven’t talked to, remember that we’re only a phone call away. We would love to hear from you and assist you with any software or case design questions. We understand that it’s not enough to just give you a tool. We are here to ensure that you feel comfortable using our program in every single client appointment. With that in mind, we recently developed our PowerLine. By calling us at 800-854-6621, you are able to reach a dedicated Thomas Gold employee who is not only adept with the software and able to answer all of your questions, but who is also an agent in the field. We are available Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST.

Thank you again for your business and we look forward to hearing from you in the future!

Brooke Thomas & Steve Goldstein

The Retirement Planning program promotes good fact-finding, which will help you uncover opportunities to make sales that, in turn, will help your clients solve their problems. You can use this program with every one of your clients, regardless of age. You will soon feel as if you've missed something without it.

Our software will help you to explain even the toughest of concepts through easy to understand graphs and charts. The program illustrates different scenarios, for example: You might need a product that produces an average 4.5% annual rate of return to make the plan work. There are many products in the market place that may average 4.5%, so product becomes less important than the solution and making the plan work! Specific product pushing becomes unnessary. If a specific product has a bonus, you can present it as such, but you will never have to use the bonus to make a sale. If you have a client with too much risk, you can ask the question: "Why would you put your hard earned money at risk if we can make your plan work with a lower guarantee"? Using our software to illustrate this will help you to close sales.

When first using the Retirement Planning software, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy the software is to work with and get acclimated to. We suggest that you begin by running the program on yourself. Look at your age, how long you intend to work, your savings for retirement and your budget. You will be amazed, after going through this process, how much more organized you feel. You will be able to set some strategic goals because of the data the program produces.

Using the program, together with it's sales materials, you will be creating structure to work in and a repeatable sales process. The process consists of the following:

*Establishing the advisor/client relationship
*Determining goals and gathering data
*Analyzing and evaluating the data
*Developing and printing the plan
*Implementing and monitoring the plan