On My Mind: Part Three – What Does The Path To “Normal” Wholesaling Look Like After Covid-19?

[Part One of What Does The Path To “Normal” Wholesaling Look Like After Covid-19? can be found here]

[Part Two of What Does The Path To “Normal” Wholesaling Look Like After Covid-19? can be found here]

Like you, we’re on the lookout for information that helps us better understand what the future of our profession holds in light of COVID-19.

Today I attended a presentation from MMI, Money Management Institute.

They’re running a series called The New Paradigm for Distribution Success. It’s an MMI Virtual Event Series for Distribution Professionals.

Register to attend the next weekly sessions here.

Listen to our podcast and/or read the show’s transcription – both found below.

Get all the details about our newest program: Focus Fifteen Coaching here.

To see all of our Covid-19 Resources To Help You Weather The Coronavirus Storm visit: https://bit.ly/wmm-covid

What’s on your mind? Email me at rob[at]wholesalermasterminds.com

Subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Subscribe via Stitcher or find us on Spotify by searching The New Wholesaler Masterminds Radio Show in your app or wherever you get your favorite podcasts!

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TRANSCRIPTION

Today I attended a presentation from MMI, Money Management Institute.

They’re running a series called The New Paradigm for Distribution Success. It’s an MMI Virtual Event Series for Distribution Professionals.

Today the topic of the conversation was Tales from the Trenches: How Top Sales Teams Are Managing to Shift to Working Remotely. This, of course, is in answer to coronavirus, COVID-19.

What I wanted to just mention today is what I found super fascinating about a couple of the polling questions. Predictably there were hundreds of folks on the phone, hundreds of folks that took this particular series of polling questions.

The first question was asked, what has been your primary means of outbound communication with advisors since working from home?

The number one answer was email, 55.6% of respondents.

Now, as you might imagine, that just underscores the sheer volume of email that is hitting advisor’s inboxes.

The sheer volume of email that is hitting centers of influence inboxes and what that further means is we have to be reminded of all those great things that a great email contains, or doesn’t contain.

I want to remind you, there’s an email clinic available at Wholesaler Masterminds, if you go to bememorable.com you’ll see there’s an email clinic there.

I suggest you may want to take a look at it, but don’t forget we’ve got to be very attentive to things like: the subject line, the actual body of the email, how it is written, what that first sentence says, what story do we tell, the brevity of the email using p.s., etc..

The other thing that I found was really fascinating was that only 11.1% of respondents were using video conferencing.

And here I thought the entire world was Zoomed out? Maybe the reason that people are Zoomed out is because our firms have us on so many Zoom calls? But it’s not apparently because wholesalers are spending so much time Zooming with financial advisors.

That suggests to me that there is an opportunity for you to get better at video conferencing; for you to set up your office appropriately for video conferencing, and to get comfortable with it and get that human connection, though it isn’t face to face, it is face to screen.

There is still an opportunity for you to beef up the connectivity that you have with advisors and with centers of influence by becoming better at video conferencing and don’t forget, we do have that podcast episode that we did with Marquesa Pettway:

The What, Why and How of Virtual Meetings in the Coronavirus Era

The next polling question was, what impact will COVID-19 have on the way you wholesale one year from now?

So one year out, what impact do you think it will have, and 21% of the audience that was polled says it’ll be back to normal, full in-person calendar activity.

Yeah, but 74.7% said they’ll move from one to two days office per week. So those that haven’t been having office days, will now have one office day and those that hadn’t had but one office day might have two, or those that hadn’t had any, will now have two.

But in one way or another we’re going to have more office days. So we better get good at office days, get good at organization, get good at time blocking, making sure that you’re doing the things that are necessary to be more effective and efficient in your home office because you know what you’re going to be spending more time there.

Just as evidence of how much time you will be spending there, this was another polling question asked, when do you expect most of your advisor meetings will be in person again?

22.8% of the audience said in July, 21.5% said August, the majority, 29.1% said September and 24% said October or later.

Wholesalers, I thought it was important that I bring you these really up to the minute, hot off the press, tidbits of information about what our community is thinking about, the current state of wholesaling.

When do we return to whatever normal is going to represent, how will you continue to prepare to be the most memorable wholesaler possible?

That’s what’s on my mind, let me know what’s on yours.

Email me, rob[at]wholesalermasterminds.com.