R. Jan Pinney: When we talk about MDRT being a global organization, the truth of that statement is clearly evident in this session, which will feature Top of the Table members from around the world. Even though MDRT members are from different parts of the world, the challenges we face are similar, and we can learn much from each other. This afternoon’s session is modeled after MDRT Speaks. Each speaker will share an idea that has helped them improve their business and can be adapted to fit a practice anywhere in the world.

Our first speaker is Marcelo De Rada. Marcelo is a 17-year MDRT member, with two Court of the Table and eight Top of the Table qualifications, from La Paz, Bolivia. He has represented Latin America on the MDRT Membership Communications Committee.

De Rada: Hello, MDRT. Hello, Miami. Hola, amigos. I have a mission impossible here. I have to talk in three languages, in seven minutes, and give a bunch of ideas. Well, actually I have to give one single idea, but I’ll be clear. This is a dream become true. Ben said to write down your dreams. I wrote this 10 years ago, and it says, “I want to be up there with the big ones. And I want to give lessons to other people.”

So, this is my dream, and I’m going to enjoy it. Please, you enjoy it as well. Imagine being in front of a client, and he invites you to have a coffee. This guy drinks really strong coffee. You drink it, and then he wants you to listen to him for half an hour. And you are inside, ready to explode and give ideas, but you have to control yourself, get in the mental mood, relax.

The name of the lesson is “From Amateur Advice [I was an amateur years back] to Expert Opinion.” You want to make it to Top of the Table. It’s not easy. You have to put in the hours. I’ll show you the way. How many would love to make it to Top of the Table? Believe on it. Dream. That’s your dream; it will come true.

My first lesson is, memories are more likely to stick if they combine information and emotion. Think about it. You know your products. You’ve read; you’ve trained; you’ve memorized. But once you’re in front of a client, he or she is a human being as you are. How are you going to connect to that client? That’s the key. It’s called financial independence. It’s when a country like Venezuela gets rid of Maduro. Done. You don’t have to worry; that’s what happens with families nowadays. You don’t want the businessman, the business owner to keep worrying about things of the future. You are the expert.

Don’t forget that clients buy concepts and solutions. This is important. How many clients will read the policy before you sell it to them? Maybe their lawyers will. How many actually read the life insurance policy? I’ll draw a question for you. Your client, $10 million policy — tomorrow he has a brain stroke. Brain stroke. And, all of a sudden, he doesn’t think. His attorney’s not next to him. The wife’s crying, and the kids don’t know what to do about it. The employees are shaking. So, who’s going to come and clarify? The person didn’t die; he’s still alive. The challenge — the bank calling, the suppliers, the customers. What happened to Marcelo? It is 90 degrees out there, and they’re having fun. He had a stroke.

How am I going to react? You are the expert. That’s the difference between being an amateur and becoming an expert. You’ve got to know the answers. You’ve got to challenge your client. You’ve got to go one step ahead. You have to read policies with everything you can put your hands on. Read the law, read newspapers, read The New York Times, read blogs. I don’t care if you want to watch Netflix; make it productive. Wherever you can get information. Your dream guides your understanding of artificial intelligence. That’s it. It’s your brain. Nobody told you about it. It’s how much you know about your client. That’s your artificial intelligence.

You have to understand your clients. How many of you say, “I represent company so and so, and somebody gave me your name, and I’m here.” No. Be practical. Talk the clients’ language. You’ve got to understand their situation so you can connect to them. Make key questions. Make important questions. Write them down before you go to the meetings. Practice your speech: “Hello. How are you?” It’s different, right? Don’t improvise. You won’t become an expert if you improvise.

The 10,000-hour rule — you can write it. Very simple. If you want to become an expert in something, you’ve got to put in time, which is 10,000 hours. If you calculate an hour per client, that’s being in front of 10,000 clients before you become an expert, which means seven, eight, nine, 10 years of nonstop visiting clients, waiting and answering their questions.

I watched a Netflix program about a Spanish restaurant. They came back and they opened five new ones, and they asked the guy, “What’s your secret?” And he answered one question. Work. Put in your time. Show empathy toward your friendships. I don’t mean be nice to them; I mean really empathize with them. Really understand what their situation is. You make your passion always by creating. I’m sorry I jumped to so many things, but I’ve got so much going on, so much emotion. You guys helped me; my dream became true.

R. Jan Pinney: Thank you, Marcelo. Great job. Our next speaker is Guy Mankey, a 17-year MDRT member, with two Court of the Table and nine Top of the Table qualifications, from Sidney, Australia. He’s received several national industry honors in Australia, including Advisor of the Year. He is known for his innovative, out-of-the box ideas, and the script says he’s going to share one great idea with us, but he really said it’s three. One great and a couple of so-so ones, I guess. So, it’s your job to figure out which is which.

Mankey: The problem I have following someone like that, being Australian, is I struggle to speak one language. So, I’m going to keep it really simple for you. Who here doesn’t sell insurance? Not many. If you don’t sell insurance, it’s going to be a good time to catch up on your emails, because the three ideas I’m going to share are all insurance related.

The first one is this little brochure. [visual] It’s the first thing I show any prospective client. And what this brochure does is show the 68 claims that I’ve had since 2010 and the fact that we’ve paid out over AU$38 million in claims. And the reason I show this to people is to make them understand that I’m not selling them insurance; I’m putting together a plan that’s going to pay off at the time in life when they need it most.

We sell claims. We don’t sell products. Remember that. I also mention when I’m talking about this that there are a few things that stand out in this brochure . First of all, every single person in it was in perfect health when they bought their insurance. Otherwise, they couldn’t have bought it. Right? You pay for insurance with money, but you buy it with good health. You’ve got to remember that. The second thing is, just about everybody in the brochure simply got sick. There’s one accident. Everyone thinks they’re going to go out in a blaze of glory. It doesn’t happen like that. If you can’t build your own list, do it within your team, do it within your company, but remember, we’re selling claims.

Idea No. 2 is around your reviews. When do you review your clients? When’s the best time to do the review? Well, who here likes a good sale? I know every woman’s going to put her hand up — 10 percent off, you get what you want. It’s cheaper than it was yesterday. Who likes that?

I talk to all my clients about the fact that, once a year, insurance goes on sale. All of my reviews are based around the fact that insurance goes on sale. It depends on where you are in the world, but typically it goes on sale either just before your birthday or six months after your birthday, depending on where you’re from. So, all of my reviews start off three months ahead of, in Australia, the birthday. I ring clients, and I say, “We’ve got this opportunity. And once you have your birthday, it’s gone, and insurance will be more expensive for the rest of your life. Because the day before you turn 48, you can buy your insurance as a 47-year-old, and you won’t pay as a 48-year-old for a whole year. Whereas, two days to the day after your birthday, you’re paying as a 48-year-old. It’s 10, it’s 12, it’s 15 percent more expensive.” So my reviews are all done around that little sales hook. It is the best time for someone to buy; figure out when that date is in your country. Mark your reviews down so you can do the maximum good for your clients when you get the opportunity to see them.

Third idea. Who here has ever had a client ring them up and say, “Can you please cancel my policy?” or “Can you please reduce the sum assured?” And what do you do when you get that phone call? Most people say, “Yeah, why are you doing that? Yeah, all right.” Then it’s a matter of whether they sell you or you sell them. But, typically, people have a good reason for asking for a cancellation or a reduction. Next time you get that phone call, put a big smile on your face because they can hear that through the phone, and say, “No. Not going to do it.” It’s easy. Say after me: “No, I’m not going to do that.” See? It’s easy. What do you say next? Well, that’s where it gets a bit tricky. You say, “I’m not going to do that because I don’t know what’s going on inside you. What are you going to do if something’s going on inside that you don’t know about, and in six months’ time you realize that what you just asked me to do was the dumbest thing you will ever do in your life?”

I say to them, “Before we make any changes to your insurance, I want you to go and have a really solid medical.” This does two things. First of all, they might find something. It might be catastrophic; it might not be so bad. But you’re going to get clients who decide maybe that isn’t a good idea.

I’m going to finish with a little story about a mate of mine, Cam. Cam was 67 years old, and he had $720,000 worth of critical illness, which, as you know, is getting a bit expensive at that age. He had income protection. He was still going to work; he had no intention of retirement. He rang me up and said, “I want to reduce my critical illness from $720,000 to $250,000. I just don’t need any more than that, and I’m hating the premiums.” I said, “No.” He said, “Why?” You’ve heard that story. So, about three weeks later on a Thursday, I get a text from Cam that says, “Haven’t got cancer. On Monday they’re going to tell me my heart’s great, and then reduce the bloody policy.” I told you, we didn’t speak very good English. Monday, at 4 o’clock, I get a text: “My quadruple bypass has been scheduled for Wednesday.”

So Cam’s policy was drastically reduced. It went from $720,000 to nothing because he put $720,000 in his pocket. And he doesn’t have to pay anymore premiums. We also got him a 100,000-some odd dollars on his income protection. All because we said no. How easy is that?

You know the real reward, though? Cam took me out to lunch, and that was a pretty good reward because with 800,000 odd dollars in your pocket, you can buy really good red wine. And not just one bottle. It was a good day. At the end of it, when we were both feeling relaxed, or loose, depending on how you look at it, Cam said to me, “There’s one thing I haven’t told you. The surgeon told me that if you hadn’t made me go and have that ECG, I would have been dead within six months.” I looked at him and said, “Bummer about your life insurance; you’re going to have to pay that for a few more years.”

But think about it. What are we in the business of? We’re not in the business to flog insurance. We’re in the business to look after our clients. And the next time someone says to you, “Should I cancel? Should I reduce?” what do you say?

R. Jan Pinney: Guy, you lied to me — those were three great ideas. Our next speaker is Priti Kucheria. Priti is an 18-year MDRT member, with two Court of the Table and 15 Top of the Table honors, from Mumbai, India, and has served on numerous MDRT committees. Currently, she’s the regional chair for South Asia and Southeast Asia MDRT Membership Communications Committee. She’s a partner in her family firm, Wealth Guardian Services, LLP, which provides comprehensive financial services for clients.

Kucheria: Hello, friends. Eighteen years in this business, and I haven’t made a single cold call. So how do you suppose my business has been growing and I’ve been adding more and more clients and making it to Top of the Table year after year? Well, many things go into consistently qualifying for Top of the Table. But if there’s one thing that I’d like to share with you in the short time that we have today, if there’s one thing that I could point out, it would be the power of becoming referable.

Every step of the way, I create a wow moment or a wow experience for my clients. These may be different moments for different clients, but, the point is that it makes a place in their memories, so they prefer to come to me for advice. I become their preferred choice. With more and more such experiences, and newer ones, they become committed to me for advice. That commitment ensures that whenever there is a conversation about financial services or insurance plans, my name or our firm’s name comes up right on top, and such commitment leads to becoming more and more referable. I don’t have to ask for references. I don’t have to struggle for a prospect list. It has become an automatic process. And sometimes, even as I’m winding up a solution for the client, I can see signals of a prospect in the pipeline.

What are these unique experiences that have made me stand out from the sea of advisors out there? It’s no big mantra. I pondered on my way here, and I realized these are very, very simple things that I did. Perhaps I did it differently at every stage of the sale, be it while prospecting or introducing myself while the client’s walking into my office. While presenting, closing and servicing, with each and every step, I ensure that it is something different that they’ve never experienced before. Let me just share with you three of them.

No. 1 is under promise and overdeliver. For example, after the first meeting, when you have to present options to your clients, or if they ask you, “You know, can you compare this product with one more available in the marketplace?,” I say, “Sure, so I’ll send you one comparison,” and I send two. Invariably, I will promise something, and I will overdeliver. During issuance, we know the turnaround time, and you know that if a policy’s going to get issued in three weeks, I add a week or 10 days more, and I tell clients, “We will ensure that you have your policy in your hands by so and so date,” and, again, I see to it that it goes before that.

Some of your clients may be in need of funds. Now, I had a client, and I’m just sharing this experience with you, who was in urgent need of funds, and he told me, “Priti, I need to liquidate my entire mutual fund.” I didn’t say, “No, Guy,” because there was no critical illness on that one. So what would you as ordinary advisors do? Well, I’m not suggesting you are ordinary; you guys are the extraordinary ones because you decided to come to this session. I’m talking about the ones in the other room. So what would they do? First thing, they curse their day because a big chunk of assets and management is going to walk away. The second thing they will do is try to talk their client out of it. Well, he’s already made up his mind, and if you’ve done your proper fact finding and solutions, and you know that there’s a trust already established because he’s invested so much with you, there’s surely an emergency that he cannot share with you at this point in time. You have to trust him enough. And then, third, obviously he’s not going to budge. You’re going to say, “All right, sir, it’s going to take two weeks.” Because you want to do more productive things and tend to applications that are raking in the moolah. And you put it on your C priority list.

Well, we had such a client, and we worked overnight, overtime. The next day we carted out all the paperwork with all the AMCs, and the money was credited to him by evening, and he was blown away. He became a perpetual referral champion.

That brings me to the next point, which is to build strong centers of influence. When I came in, I was told, 18 years ago, “If you want to be successful in this business, you have to make so many calls a day, which will lead to so many appointments and so many sales.” Well, I couldn’t imagine myself doing that for the rest of my life. I wanted prospecting to become an automatic and effortless process. I didn’t want to make calls; I wanted people to call me. So how would that happen? I realized that I had to build a network of centers of influence.

How do you do that? I made sure that every meeting that I had with a client was never about the sale. It was about establishing a connection and building a relationship. The client had to see the passion and the conviction of the way I went about my business and see that I was not here to sell just a financial solution or a financial product, but I was here to genuinely make a difference in that person’s life. And when that transference of feeling happens, the wow moment has appeared. Because, whether the sale has been made or not, that transference of feeling has a certain connection and someday or another the client will buy or at least refer me to someone.

Let me give you an assignment, a sort of data analysis exercise. Go back to your home, and make a list of all the clients who have never referred you to anyone. Do you have such clients who have never given you a reference? Why do you suppose so? Well, because you didn’t stand out in any way. You did not stand out when you prospected, when the client went for the medicals, when the policy got issued. You did not give the client a special experience at all during the opportunities that you had. So the client is just going to remain a client whom you will monotonously suffer the rest of the policy’s life.

Now, do one more exercise. Make a list of all those clients who gave you even one reference, and think, Why did he or she do that? Are you able to identify “Why did the client refer me? What was that special thing that the client gave me a referral of his or her own?” If you can’t find that, go and approach the client and ask, and it will be an eye-opener.

And then you will realize that it’s different for different clients. Any client can just be wowed by a simple experience. For example, one of my clients said, “Priti, as soon as I entered your office, my name splashed on the screen. You know, ‘Welcome, Mr. Client.’ And I saw the fountain.” So we have a fountain that lights up and starts playing, and there’s twittering of birds. He said, “It just made me feel so fresh entering your office. I knew I had to do business with you.” So you don’t know — anything can wow a client. Go back, do that exercise, approach your clients and use those as tips to create wow moments. I mean, this was just a simple thing of entering the office, but there are hundreds of things that can wow your clients.

And, lastly, I think what worked in my case, in our favor, to become the preferred choice was having all services under one roof, be it insurance, mutual funds, estate planning or taxation planning. All of that. We become the personal CFO to our client families, and that way we can cross-sell and upsell to our clients. Think of it as our clients having their own personal hospital. So whether the clients have a stomachache or a brain injury, they have their own personal hospital to go to where their entire health will always be taken care of. Now, I do understand all of you may not have all the expertise in-house. Then become the go-to master physician. Whether as a dentist or an orthopedic physician, you become the person who coordinates it for them and always remains in the loop. You have built a center of influence with another professional. Both of you are centers of influence for each other, and your network only increases. These are very simple things that you’ve got to do, but you’ve got to do them all.

If you want to identify what is it in my practice or in my context, that can be a wow moment, all you have to do is stand in your clients’ shoes and you will get the answer. I mean, you are MDRT, and all of you are good at product selling, you have the knowledge of all the competition, etc. But now you have to give them that world-class experience and win their hearts and wow them. And, trust me, that’s what’s worked for me in business. It just flows in, and it took me from MDRT to Court of the Table to a consistent Top of the Table.

R. Jan Pinney: Thank you, Priti. That was excellent. Our next speaker is Derek Reed. Derek Reed is an 18-year MDRT member, with five Court of the Table and three Top of the Table qualifications, from Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is managing partner of Beauport Financial Services and currently serves as trustee of the MDRT Foundation.

Reed: I’ve got the chore of following a beautiful woman with many great ideas by the name of Priti. I’ll try to beat that, but I come from a small city, small town, I should say, of 30,000 people. As for the idea I’m going to share with you, I’m asking for your trust that it will work in a small town or big city. It will work with a mature practice or a young, fledgling practice, an old work with small, modest dollars or large, big dollars that are earmarked for charity.

I’m going to make a couple of assumptions, one being that some, many or all of you in this room do some client appreciation event throughout the course of a year. Is that a yes? Great. I’m also going to make a big assumption that some of you in the room are charitably inclined. You get solicited for donations to either clients’ charities or you’re working in a community where you support local community nonprofits. Is that a fair assessment? OK, awesome.

We’re really in the people business. No one sitting in these seats is in the financial planning business if that’s coming as news to you. Let me be the one to share the truth: We’re in the people business. We’re in the business of compassion. We’re in the business of empathy. The talk that I’m going to give right now is about throwing a client party with a huge meaningful purpose. If you’re doing client appreciation events, and you’re writing checks every year to charity in local nonprofits, streamline the two of them. Combine them, take the focus off yourself and your business and your team and your staff. Put the spotlight on those you serve, the folks who have hired you for great advice, and show your compassion and empathy for all the things they care about.

I’m going to talk about one idea. This is it: Party with a purpose. I’m going to tell you about the “what,” the “how” and the “why.” First, the “what.”

So, what do we do? Each year we have a holiday open house at a local golf club, and in the middle of the picture, there is Serena giving a big hug to Phyllis. And that’s me with a microphone behind the podium. [visual] In 2012, we made a big decision as a firm. We’re an eight-person practice, which has been around since 1985. I joined my business partner in 1997, and, in 2012, we decided to take 10 percent of our net operating profit and put it into a donor-advised fund. It’s called the Community Response Gift Fund.

At this party, we take the focus off us. We do not talk about economic events; we don’t talk about financial planning topics. We don’t talk about the economy. That’s all done one-on-one in review meetings or on the phone or in a conference call. What we do at this party is give out checks and support the charities that our clients are involved with and give of their time, their talent or their treasure.

That’s the “what.” The “how” is: How do we do it? We have a grant process. Now listen, I may be the least creative person in this entire room, no joke. What this whole process is, and what we’ve done at Beauport Financial, is really stolen from the idea of what the MDRT Foundation is doing with all of us through its grant program. Right on our website, in our conference forums, we have a one-page grant application that can only be submitted by a client to us. There’s a deadline. We set a cap on how much money that we’ll allow folks to ask for, and our team reviews these grant applications before Thanksgiving.

And, as you saw in the previous slide, we make our donations and give out the checks at our annual open house, which is in early December. Why is this important? Because I will tell you from a business standpoint, you don’t want every local nonprofit development person calling you, soliciting you for business. We tell them right on the phone that we have a deadline, A. We have a grant process, B. And you need to be endorsed by a client or be a client yourself. And we’ll encourage some clients who we know are doing great work in the community to submit a grant so that we can recognize them at that event. I will also tell you while we’re on this — many of you can’t see it, but five up from the bottom on the left, you cannot fake charity. [visual] You cannot fake compassion. You cannot fake empathy.

If you’re going to do this in any way, shape or form — it’s real easy to write a check, right? But we get involved. We roll up our sleeves. We cook meals at food pantries. We donate time at the homeless shelter. And five up from the bottom left is an organization called Pathways for Children, which benefited me as a four-year-old when I was part of the Head Start program’s preschool for poor kids. So, it’s part of my knitting. It’s part of our team’s knitting, and we really care, and it shows. That is the “how.”

Why do we do it? We felt like it was pretty important to get to know about charitable planning if we were going to promote it with our clients. And it is specifically a donor-advised fund. This 7.6 percent number, by the way, is old. [visual] It’s now about 10 percent, so one out of every 10 charitable dollars that’s going to a local nonprofit 501(c), a local charity, is coming from a donor-advised fund. This is in the United States. This is important. So, we felt like we should know something about it. We use our local county community foundation on purpose. I’m from the Boston area. We didn’t go with Fidelity. We wanted to support the local community foundation and the charities that it supports.

The other thing that I’ll tell you about the “why” we’re doing it: Our motto at Beauport Financial, our tagline right underneath our logo, is “Where care meets craft.” We want to live out our motto. We want our team and our staff to live out the motto, and if we’re going to promote charitable planning and legacy planning with our own clients, then we should be practicing what we preach. It works. It works for us. The other thing that I’d like to say about the “why” is, everyone likes to throw a party.

It’s really neat to see our clients interact with other clients who were recognized one time a year at this exclusive event at a country club with great wine and great food. And folks will tell us, “We don’t come to see you. We don’t come for the ‘why.’ We don’t come for the food. We want the big unveil.” We have a few tripods around the country club in a black blanket, and when folks walk in, we unveil this. [visual] We announce the charities, and we’ll highlight three or four of them and let the client talk about the charity for three or four minutes.

Now, strategic outcomes from doing this: One of the big things I will tell you is that without having to say it, without having to market it, we’ve become known in our little community of 30,000 people, surrounded by water on three sides, as the charitable planning and legacy planning firm. That’s really important to us, and it makes us feel great. It makes the clients feel great, and if you believe like we do that your next best client or advocate will come from an existing client, then you’re on the right path. I would say you’re doing the right thing. It works for us.

The other thing that we’ve figured out really quickly is that you’ve all heard the saying: “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” We’d rather be an inch wide and a mile deep with our clients, and we realized a number of years ago, you can’t be all things to everybody. You just can’t. You need to focus and take care of the folks who are already part of your business. The other thing that this does is separate us from the competition. Period. End of story. If you think anyone doing business with us who’s part of this party is going to leave us because someone’s going to discount our AUM, our asset advisory fee, by a 10th of a percent, or five basis points, they just don’t. Anecdotally, I will tell you about Paul in the back of the room two years ago, who’s a relative of a recurring client, coming through our open house, not yet a client at that point, and saying, “Derek, I can’t think of any reason why I wouldn’t do business with you guys. I love what you’re doing in the community. The feel in this room is powerful. It’s palpable, and it’s clear that your clients love you.”

I can’t give you that. Hopefully, I can allow you to think of the picture of that, of Serena in the first slide. Our giving a big hug to Phyllis illustrates that, but it’s something that works for us. And, again, I will tell you, this isn’t advice. This is just something that we have done. We got serious about it. We wrapped the process around the party and the giving, and last thing I will proudly share with you is that we have a big, hairy, audacious goal of giving away seven figures, a million dollars. Since 2012, we’ve given over $510,000 to our local clients and their charities.

R. Jan Pinney: Our next speaker is Pio Park. Pio is a seven-year MDRT member, with one Court of the Table qualification, from Seoul, Korea. He has previously spoken in the ConneXion Zone and served on multiple MDRT committees.

Park: Hello, everybody. I’m Pio Park from South Korea, and I want to ask you a question: What is the worst answer that you can get when you ask to date somebody? Let’s say that before my marriage, if I asked a girl out for a date, I would say, “Willa, will you go out to have dinner with me?” She can say yes. Yes is a good answer. Or she can say no. No is also a good answer. It’s really straightforward; she doesn’t like me. But the worst answer that I can hear is “Why?”

“Can I take you out for dinner?” “Why?” I hate this kind of awkward situation.

Don’t we have this when we meet the clients? Let’s say I play golf with my client and other prospects, and at the end of the golf game, I want to meet these other two for a client meeting. I give them my name card. “Hey, I’m Pio Park, and let me come to your office next week for lunch.” Most of the time they will say OK if they like me or no if they don’t like me. But what if they say, “Why?” Then, in that situation, I cannot say, “I want to sell insurance to you.” I hate to hear this “why” answer.

There was another situation when I just started the job. I sat down with my friend, and I said, “I’m really good at icebreaking. I can say, ‘Hey, Jen, your tie is awesome, and you look younger than your age.’ Something like this. Right?”

I can go forever with that. But I really hate, at this moment, to change our conversation to insurance because I only sell life insurance. That’s the most awkward moment that I get. This guy was sitting at the table with me, and I was telling jokes, talking about his family, whatever we do to break the ice. As I was trying to reach something from my bag, he was going, “Oh, what is that? No, no, no, no, no.” So, like this. [visual] And I said, “Hey, this is insurance or something, and this guy’s face changed, his voice changed, and he didn’t say it to me, but his face is saying this: “Hey, I don’t want to do it.” That’s why I wanted to invent some questions that could lead into our insurance meeting right away.

From that time, I say to my clients, anytime I meet them, that I don’t break the ice and I don’t need to do funny jokes. I just ask them, “Do you have any assets to inherit?” or “Are there any assets that you are going to inherit?” That means that the asset comes from your family, or father or mother, and comes to you. You know, nobody hates that, but somebody won’t have that kind of asset. And so, there are two situations. If they say, “OK, yes, I have something to inherit,” then we can lead into our inheritance tax meeting. We can say, “Then how are you going to pay that tax? Do we pay with cash or borrowed money or sold asset money — that’s what I call it — or by insurance?”

Somebody told me that this is my sales idea. Let’s try to figure this out without the insurance. With cash you can pay, with borrowed money you can pay, with sold assets you can pay. But do you want to do that? Because we have laws if that kind of thing happens. If I say that, they will say, “Hey, how about the insurance? What happens with the insurance?” So we can lead with no awkward situations.

The second situation. What if I asked this question: “Do you have anything to inherit?” If most of the people can say, “No, because my parents already are gone, or they’re not that rich to have the assets,” then we can talk about the dreams. Usually we talk about what age and why you need insurance. You know, if you get sick, you need insurance, and we have this kind of conversation. But we can talk about the dreams right away.

For example, why do you work so hard to make your property asset make money, and why do you work so hard to get more money and get more property? It’s because we want to use it, and we want to live a rich life, and some people want to make their kids rich also. You don’t have that right now, but let’s dream about it. This is 100 liters. [visual] Before your death, this water is your asset, but 50 percent of the water is gone in one second. You know, I show this to my clients. This is going to be the inheritance tax. You work so hard to get 100 percent of your assets, but, right away, if you pass away, and if you don’t prepare to pay the inheritance tax, your assets are gone right away. And I drink half of the water.

Now your asset is zero. If you are sick before you die, you are going to use the other half. This is a visual for people, how the tax equals spending. [visual] People don’t think the tax is going to be equal to spending or lost money. Let’s say if I lost $10 million, then I will go to the police, I will go to the state or something, I’ll go to the bank, whatever. It’ll take months or years to find and get that money back.

But if you have to pay taxes, that’s right away, over there. That’s why I tell this to people, to the young or to people who want to build their assets. “You can prepare your tax paying money. It’s going to be mandatory anyway. If you prepare it a little bit younger, you can buy it cheaper.” And insurance — they don’t get it. They don’t get it if there’s no understanding of insurance. So which fits your country’s taxes? You can convert my idea into that.

Let me wrap this up. So I ask the girl out, and if she says why, I feel very awkward. I try, if I meet people, to say, “Do you have anything? Is there anything that you are going to inherit?” This can lead.

If I ask this question, it doesn’t feel bad. It’s like compared to a house: “What is your insurance doing — can I review it? How about how much you’re paying?” If we start with this, so many people already started with that. If I say something about the inheritance thing, the tax thing, then we can lead. They say they don’t feel bad because I am treating them as if they are going to inherit something. After that I can say, “How about the insurance? How is the critical illness? How about the patient? How about your investment?” And they don’t feel too awkward to compare it to other things. This is what’s my ICU.

R. Jan Pinney: Thank you, Pio. Ross Hultgren is a 21-year MDRT member, with 11 Court of the Table and two Top of the Table qualifications, from Geelong, Australia. He is a principal of a comprehensive advisory firm and MDRT Global Council member.

Hultgren: Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a great honor to be here, and I’m that guy — I only speak one language. But I decided sitting down there that I wanted to have as much fun as Marcelo. So, we’ll have a crack, eh?

My two ideas that I want to share with you today are two ideas that I picked up at meetings just like this. I don’t know who gave them to me. I’m sorry about that. I can’t reference someone who gave them to me, but I’ve been using them for a long time, and they work, so I wanted to share them with you. What I want to talk about is the TMR Success Formula. This is a way of thinking. It’s been interesting listening to the other Top of the Table advisors here. None of us knew what our presentations were, but they all center around connecting with clients and not about product.

It’s never about the product. So, the first thing that we need in any relationship is trust. We’ve got to build trust before we can go anywhere with any clients. And trust is made up of three Cs. The first C that we must prove is competency. The clients must know that we know what we’re doing.

Our business is a people business. It’s 90 percent people skills and 10 percent product knowledge, but you’d better know 100 percent of the 10 percent, so our job is to make sure that we know that 100 percent. That’s our job. But the rest of our job is around our people skills. So, competency — we must somehow work into our process a way of letting the clients know that we’re competent.

The second thing we must be able to prove is clarity. We must be able to take the complex and make it simple. You know, I’m not a technical person in terms of, if I buy a car, I don’t need to know how it works. I just need to know that it’s going to get me to where it goes. And our clients are the same. One out of every 20 or 30 clients may ask a few questions more than others will. That’s OK. We know the answers, but we do need to make sure that there’s clarity. So, we need competency; we need clarity.

And the third one, once we’ve gotten to that point, is constant communication. We all know what happens if we don’t communicate with our clients. When prospects come to meet with us, trust is at a very low point. Once they become clients, trust is at a very high point. They’ve decided that you’re their advisor.

If we don’t stay in touch, trust starts falling away again; it starts falling off the cliff. So, we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got processes in place in our business to ensure that we’re staying in touch. There’s got to be constant communication. Once we have trust, we can then move to money. In Australia, like other countries, the only way we can get paid is if we provide a fee for service. So, we’ve got to have that discussion with our clients around what we’re going to charge and what they’re going to get. But we have to provide value. And that’s your value proposition. You’ve got to be able to articulate that every time, and you’ve got to be able to do it the same way every time.

So, we’ve got trust; we’ve agreed on what we’re going to charge. And then you’ll get the R — the R is the repeat business and the referrals; you can never mix this formula up. If you ask for money before you have trust, you won’t get the R. If you go straight for the R, before you have the T and the M in place, it won’t work. So, you must focus on trust, then the money, and then the rest will follow.

And if you’re ever in doubt about where to spend your time in your client base, spend it on communication, and the benefits will come. So that’s my one idea, and I’ll never mix the formula up.

This one I’ve been using for 24 years. I still use it three times a week in my office, or I use a whiteboard. I don’t have a whiteboard today, but clients come to see me, and they say, “We want to talk about insurance, but we don’t know how much we need.” Or I ask, “Do you know how much you need?” And they say no. I say, “Well, here’s a concept that I use.” I’ve normally got the husband and wife. And I say, “OK, if something happened to David, I want to be able to provide his wife with three checks. Check No. 1: She wants to be able to say goodbye to David with a nice funeral with top-shelf liquor, where everyone’s happy, and it’s a great service. So, we need to allocate some money for check No. 1. Check No. 2: We need to be able to take the bank out of David’s wife’s life. So, we have a discussion around what they currently owe to banks or for cars or tax or whatever.

Now, I’ve just got a quote that says, “No debt should last longer than the person who created it,” so any debt that David’s got should disappear when David goes. Normally, most people would stop there. If they’re doing this online, husband and wife might stop there, but the third check is the most important check. This is David’s legacy check. This is the last check that David’s ever going to leave for his family, and this is the check that’s going to replace the 25 years of income that he would have brought in. It’s going to replace the school fees; it’s going to replace everything that would have been in place if David had still been around. It’s about them doing some calculations around what that check will look like. I always ask David this question: “What would your wife need to live on, assuming she’s debt-free?” That’s always an interesting discussion because David always underestimates it. So we have a discussion around that, and then I have the same discussion about David’s wife, because I could say, “We could insure David for $3 million,” but if something happens to his wife, and he’s got two young children, he could still be in the financial toilet. So, we need to set up three checks for David’s wife.

It’s just a matter then that once we get the sums insured worked out, I say, “It’s my job to go away and work out who’s going to own the insurance, how it’s going to be structured, where it’s going to be paid from, and whether you can afford it. That’s my job, but today all we’ve done is work out how much you need.” Sometimes one of them, normally the husband, will say, “She doesn’t need to get that much,” and I’ll say, “OK,” and she’s sitting there. I’ll say, “David, which check don’t you want her to get?” And that’s always an interesting discussion. The other thing that happens with this concept, because it’s so easy to understand, is that clients then ring me and say, “We need to increase check No. 2. We’ve just borrowed some money. We need to come and see you to increase check No. 2.” On review, I bring out the discussion that we had the previous year, and I say, “This is why you’ve got the sums insured you had. Remember, we talked about the three checks?” They always go, “Oh, we were going to complain about how expensive the insurance was, but now we remember why we took it out.”

It’s a very simple concept. It works, and people remember it. You’re talking the legacy, as I said, and you’re talking about what’s going to be left behind. It’s not really an insurance discussion, and it’s very soft, and it works.

R. Jan Pinney: Thank you, that was excellent. Our next speaker is Remigiusz Stanislawek. Remi is a seven-year MDRT member, with one Court of the Table and five Top of the Table honors, from Oslo, Poland. He specialized in ethical, financial advice and tax-efficient retirement solutions for insurance and investments.

Stanislawek: Welcome, MDRT. What strange types of clients I have. As Marcelo said, nobody wants to read all these long statements, all these long papers. I tell you, my clients do. They do read every single line, and they ask thousands of questions, and I love it. This is what brought me to Top of the Table several times.

So, how the story started. As you probably know from information from MDRT, I’m doing everything online, so I don’t talk to people. I don’t call people, and I don’t make home phone calls, even cold or even those warm calls. It started as a business about 12, 13 years ago. At the beginning, I found out that I didn’t really like repeating the same thing day after day, time after time, with every client — driving to different locations, traffic jams and having just a short holiday. I thought, Maybe there is another way.

So, the first thing that came to mind, maybe, was, Let’s hire some more people to the organization. It’s a good point, but I didn’t want to work like this. Why other people? Because your time is not extendible. You can’t extend the time. The day has only 24 hours, and if you meet people, you can’t do it for 24 hours a day, but maybe someone would like to. I don’t, so I thought, Another way must be somewhere. There must be another way to have no meetings, to have many clients, to have three months’ holiday every year (even though on holiday, my business is still running), and to not have to hire any employees. The solution is an online way of making this business. You may say it’s impossible; it’s hard to do. Everyone can do it if only you can speak in your own language or write, two simple things.

So how did I do it? Today, I will show you just the beginning of the process. What you should start with is what I started with. I started with publishing a lot of information online, so I set up a blog about investment funds. Then I set up another blog. Then I started to set up specialized portals, like webpages, with several pages that defined information about the single products. So, if you have some products in investment, insurance products, just to teach people about them, put the information online. You might ask, “Where can I get the ideas to write about? What should I write about?” Well, just take your papers, your leaflets, and redefine them. Write about them in a normal form of internet articles. When you start writing, Google and other internet systems will get you noticed, so you will be present on the internet.

It takes time. For me, it took about five years before it started to generate any profits, but now, if you put my name on the internet and add “blog” or some investments or some insurance, I just pop up. I’m everywhere because I have so many portals. If someone wanted to know something about venture capital investments, he’ll find the special portal dedicated to it. If somebody wants to get some information about some other kinds of investments, he gets another portal about this topic. But what happens if somebody reads your webpage and finds very interesting information, and, in the competitive market, there are hundreds and thousands of other financial insurance pieces of advice that can offer the same product? Why should they buy from you and not from the others? Because if they learn the information, they can simply, after one month, say, “Oh, I need insurance because I read it’s important,” and then they will take that information to another person. So, you have to ask them to leave some information. The best thing is a simple online form: “Just leave your email, and I will give you some more information.” Don’t put everything online; you ask them to leave a message, a message that says, “I need more information.”

One tip is that people are very afraid to put a pop-up window on their blog or webpage. They put on the side a small place to write an email. I encourage you to put it on the top. Years ago, I thought it was stupid because I said, “Well, if they see the pop-up, they will just go.” No, it doesn’t work like this. If somebody is interested, he doesn’t mind the pop-up. He will put his email on it. If he’s not interested, well, I don’t care. He’ll never need to know anything about me, so the sooner he goes away, the better.

This is how it works, so this was the first idea. Then I invite them, and I sent them a set of messages. Then I ask them to sign in to my membership site, which gives much more information, and, on this site, there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of education, about different topics, sometimes not even connected to insurance or financial services. And then there is the marketplace. I put what is available, this month, for investments, or what kind of insurance they can buy from me, and I don’t sell them anything. I don’t ask them to buy. I very simply have to grow and be ready. Some of them are ready the very next day to get the information from me, and sometimes they tell me, “Remi, I’ve been watching what you have been doing for 10 years before I invested” or “I referred you to 20 of my friends, and they said it’s OK; they needed to meet you in person.” So sometimes meeting in person is very, very important.

The last thing I prepared for today is a short, three-sentence presentation on how to get referrals because, as we heard, you have to sometimes ask for referrals. So, if you want to ask for referrals, you can do it online, offline, in the meeting, face-to-face, anywhere. This idea, I think, I hope, might work for you. It goes like this. You say or you write to somebody: “So, Mr. Prospect, did you know that there was a study made on whether people give referrals? This study said that 20 percent of people will never refer you. Well, it’s just the way they are; they don’t refer anybody, so don’t worry about them. The other part, the other 20 percent, will always refer you because they love to refer good services, but there is still 60 percent of people who will refer only if they are asked. So, Mr. Prospect, which group you are in?”

I hope you like it. To conclude, I used this kind of sentence a lot of times about referrals, but once I asked people for some information about one of my portals, about investment funds. I sent it to a mailing list with 30,000 names, and I got over 1,000 replies, and the form was six pages long. It took a huge amount of time to fill it up, and they filled it. I hope you agree that the internet can be a good idea to get new customers, and, believe me, there are a lot of them. They want to know everything, and they read everything. Good luck to all of you, and see you next year, MDRT.

R. Jan Pinney: Wow, that was fantastic. Our concluding speaker is Sol Hicks. Sol is a 32-year MDRT member, with three Court of the Table and 20 Top of the Table honors, from Kennesaw, Georgia. He is a coach who mentors advisors all over the world and has been named GAMA International’s agent of the year four times.

Hicks: I am so delighted and honored to be with you today. Congratulations for all of the hard work of attending this great conference. I have been in the business now 49 years. I am 75 years old, and I am still passionate, and there’s one thing that I can leave with you on how I have been able to have this love for this great business of ours, and the ideas I’d like to share with you that have allowed me, this year, to qualify for Top of the Table in three days. Last year, five days. The year before that, 16 days. And the year before that, five weeks.

Here’s what I’m going to share with you: The things that I have learned is that to consistently do what I have done, I go wide and deep. “Wide” means that I stand before and see a lot of clients and prospects going wide, which means that I talk to a lot of people and, when sitting, to thousands at one time. My year is a little different from other years because my year starts in November. It enables me not to run and be all exhausted just trying to make the year. I’m able to do that. There are two things that we need to continue to sustain ourselves. One is professional trust, because there are one or two things that cause our business to grow: people we know and people we don’t know. That’s the only way we’ll get prospects: people we know and people we don’t know. So for professional trust you need that. You must have integrity. Knowledge will allow you to go wide, but to go deep, you need relational equity.

What is relational equity? It is taking and bringing value to your clients. Just like if you buy a home, you start off by putting equity into your home. How are you able to do that? You start off with five C’s, and it has to be in this order: When you’re getting information, we’re kind of taught to make small talk, and most people you run into, whom you meet, have a mask on. In order for them to take the mask off — I’m talking in terms of doing what I’ve done now for 49 years — is that you must know that you care about them. When they know that you care about them, then and only then will they make a connection with you. They may buy from you just because of a need, but to go deep, you now have people like a silent sales team working behind you when you connect with them.

The third thing, once I show that I care about them, is that I make a connection with them, and then I make a commitment. And that commitment is, I’m going to take all of my talent, all of my ability, all of my gifts, and use it on their behalf. Then, from there, you can customize the product to give them clarity, to give them peace, to give them light. But, beyond that, we can take our smartphones, and we can get information. What people are looking for is insight, creativity: “How do you see my situation 20 years from now, 25 years from now?” That is creativity. Once you do those things, you make disciples, because when you have professional trust, it’s like taking a basket of apples. You eat all those apples, you work hard, you’re talking about volume, bringing in a lot of clients, building your client base. If you eat all the apples, there’s nothing left in the basket. What you want is an orchard. It just keeps reproducing, keeps reproducing, keeps reproducing.

That’s why today I’m so effective. I do workshops around the United States where I talk to thousands of people. They bring them to me. To get referrals is great, but people run out of referrals. When you make disciples, they bring them to you. If I could leave anything with you today, it’s that I have been doing this now for 49 years. I have retired four times. I keep coming back because I don’t fall in love with the product; I fall in love with the people. If we just kind of keep that in mind, it’s not the product that you sell; it’s the stories. Learn the stories and how to balance what it is that you’re doing. I am proud that I will continue to live on, one, because of the people I mentor around the world, but, second, I’m just so proud. I want my daughter Cynthia to stand up. She’s Court of the Table; she’s five times MDRT. Miss Cynthia Hicks.

So, to go wide is having a lot of clients, but you get tired. To go deep, let people know that you care about them in this great business that we are in, and you will never, as I did, think of retiring. I’m just going to go until I’m empty, and even at 75 years old, and even being in the business for 49 years, I still have a half a tank of gas left, so I’m going to still be around for a long time. I will continue to let my light shine. I’m getting ready to walk off this stage, but before I walk off this stage, I want you all to make this commitment. All of us have a light — it’s a choice that we make — and we want to shine our light into a dark place, so help my mama because everywhere I go, my mother, who’s in heaven right now, is saying, “Son, let your light shine.” I want all of you to honor my mother, who’s in heaven right now, by standing on your feet, and I want it to come all the way from your belly, all the way from the inside. You want to say, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.” Turn to your neighbor and say, “Are you going to let your light shine?”

So, when I say, “One, two, three, I want you to go, ‘One, two, three.’ What you going to do?”

[singing]

Marcelo H. De Rada, CLF, MBA, is a 16-year MDRT member with one Court of the Table and nine Top of the Table qualifications from La Paz, Bolivia. He has represented Latin America on the Membership Communications Committee.

Sol Hicks is a 32-year MDRT member with three Court of the Table and 20 Top of the Table honors. He is the founder and CEO of Hicks Global Enterprises Inc., a career coach and consultant, and the author of three books. He has been named GAMA International’s Agent of the Year four times.

Ross G. Hultgren, CFP, DFP, is a 21-year MDRT member with 11 Court of the Table and two Top of the Table qualifications. A current Global Council Member for MDRT, Hultgren is CEO of an advice business in Australia with his two sons as business partners.

Priti Ajit Kucheria, LUTCF, CFP, is an 18-year MDRT member with two Court of the Table and 15 Top of the Table honors who began her journey as a financial advisor after being a housewife for 15 years. She's a partner in her family firm Wealth Guardian Services LLP, which delivers all financial services under one roof. Kucheria has served on several MDRT committees.

Guy Munro Mankey is a 16-year MDRT member with two Court of the Table and eight Top of the Table qualifications. As founder and CEO of PAX Financial Group, he has worked with personal and corporate clients since 1979. He has received the national Practice and Adviser of the Year honors as well as the CEO award for industry contributions. Mankey has workshopped his innovative ideas to advisors throughout the world including MDRT’s Main Platform and Top of the Table.

Hyoun Pio Park is a six-year MDRT member with one Court of the Table qualification from Seoul, Republic of Korea. She has previously spoken in the ConneXion Zone and served on multiple MDRT committees, most recently as part of the Member Resources Task Force.

Derek J. Reed, CFP, CLU, is a 17-year MDRT member with five Court of the Table and three Top of the Table qualifications from Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is currently a trustee of the MDRT Foundation.

Remigiusz Stanislawek, EAFP, EFC, is a six-year MDRT member with one Court of the Table and five Top of the Table honors. He is an experienced speaker on ethics for financial advisors and tax-efficient retirement solutions. He specializes in both insurance and investments and serves as a lecturer at the University of Economics and Business in Poznan, Poland.