How to Find Financial Advisors in Your Area with Geoff Zimpfer

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Go check it out right now. Visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, it's Jeff Clause here, Santa Clause. Get into my intro. Yeah, hey, pardon me, I'm just getting into my little intro riff there. Dig that guitar riff. I think I'm going to have to learn that as I'm struggling learning guitar player. Anyway, hey, coming to you for another episode, just me, just me. Yes, that's it. Only me. Hope you don't mind. Anyway, so here's what I want to do. First of all, foremost, how do you reach me? How do you connect with me? A couple of ways. Number one, join the Facebook group, Jess for podcast listeners. You go to Facebook, you have to type in the search bar, mortgage marketing radio. Answer a couple of questions and you're let in, assuming you actually answer the questions and answer them correctly, that you are a mortgage professional. So do that and you'll get access to more good stuff. Downloads, checklists, we're going live, things like that. And then secondly, if you do want to email me at any point, you want to talk, you got some ideas, content suggestions, whatever, you can email me podcast at mortgage marketing radio.com. And I want to give a quick shout out. People, it's like I take them up on emailing me and very few people do, but I want to give a quick shout out to Mr. Nathan Willer. Nathan Willer. Nathan Willer. Yeah. The crowd war is on for Nathan, Nathan with TCF Bank out of Jamestown, North Dakota. Hey folks, we are reaching the big cities, all cities in between, even internationally. So Nathan sent me an email, thank you for the kind of words Nathan and because of his graciousness and his willingness to take action, Nathan's got a little time on the call with me. So I'm looking forward to that, Nathan, appreciate that. So you guys can do the same podcast at mortgage marketing radio.com, email me comments, thoughts, suggestions. If you think I need a haircut or any to shave, if you tell me what it ever is, I don't know. Okay. Thank you very much. Timing a little better. Actually, I'm on it. All right. Today, here's what we're going to do. Mix it up a little bit. Tell you a true life story, real life story from a coaching call I had just yesterday. Here's the deal. Talking to the loan officer. We're talking about plans for 2021. What do you want your focus to be? What do you want to do differently? Right. What are you thinking about? And one of the things that came up is, hey, I want to diversify by referral partners a bit. I'm still, right, leaning in with real estate agents. Yes, for sure. Doing past client database, a little bit of consumer direct, but this loan officer Mary said, you know what? She wanted to start to add a few financial advisors to her mix of referral partners. So we talked through a few different ways to do that, which is, of course, one of those ways to do that is when you're taking an application, you know, and you see that these people are of some financial wear with all, right? What I mean by that is, you know, they don't have like $2,000 in the bank, whatever, and might not have the need or might not be the right appropriate person that has a financial advisor in their life, yet, although they could be. But my point is, this is when you think it's appropriate, ask the question, right? Hey, do you have a financial advisor, a CFP, a tax planner? Great. Would you mind if I made an introduction or made a call to them on your behalf, letting them know that we're actually structuring this, in this case, refinance or purchase, and I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page and bring your financial team into the loop. So that's a tried and true classic way that people have been getting themselves, you know, introduced to financial advisors on behalf of clients in the past. It works. And that's great. So if you're not doing that, you want to go after financial advisors, CFPs, whatever, consider that as an option. I know I did a really high level overview on that, but if you want to go deeper, hey, let me know, jump in the Facebook group and let us know. So the other approach though is this, I started thinking to myself, how would I create awareness for me as a loan officer? What did I do, actually, when I was originating that to gain exposure in the financial planning community? And lo and behold, one of the things I did was I researched. I got online and I decided to find out how I could finance financial advisors. And wouldn't you know that there's this organization called the financial planning association? That's right. They have how many chapters, 86 chapters around the country. So they're not like huge, right? They're similar to perhaps mortgage banking association, whatever, but it's an association of financial professionals, committed pranat practitioners who want to master the practice of financial planning and help shape the future of the profession. That's a good quality group of professionals there, you know what I mean? They hold themselves to high standards. So it's all about learning, leading, connecting, right? They've got local educational opportunities, meetings, they have events, they've got sponsors, conferences. I mean, you name it, right? And of course, local chapters, like I said. So I'm on the coaching call this week with Mary, again, just two days ago. And I say, well, let's do this. Let's look up and see if there's a local chapter in your area. So what here's what we do, we go to the financial planning association.org site. That's financial planning association.org. And I go to chapters, FPA chapters, 86 local chapters, and I click on the host meetings and events and other ways to connect throughout the year. And I've already been on another website in the past and I see that they've got some lenders involved, right? So now here I am, by the way, I'm on the website and I'm looking at the country and I decide to type in the state. So I'm going to filter by state and I'm going to do California, because that's where Mary is. And California's got a few different locations, let's see. I want the Newport Beach location. So there's a search. I type in California, it brings up a map with all the pins on the map and I click on Newport Beach and lo and behold, it tells me who the chapter contact is. This is the chapter executive. Her name is Carol. There's an email there for her. There's also a couple of different phone numbers. And so follow me here. What I do is I say, so let's get Carol's name, right? So I'm going to cut and paste Carol's name and I'm going to go to what is the online networking site, right, where professionals network, you guys know what it is, it's LinkedIn. So I'm going to take Carol's name, I'm going to go to LinkedIn, LinkedIn. I'm going to paste her name in there and I'm going to see what comes up for Carol. And all of a sudden I can see, okay, right, I'm doing my intel, doing some research and see Carol. So there she is. Oh, by the way, there's two mutual connections. And get this. One of the mutual connections that Carol and I have happens to be the loan officer that I'm on the call with that I'm doing the coaching way. Interesting. Okay. So hang with me. I'm going to look at her experience. She's been an executive director at the chapter in California and Orange County for 10 years, 10 years. Pretty well established. By the way, there's 3,000 members in state of California itself. Hmm. Interesting. So I scroll down further and further and then I take a look at education. Now, here's how I use LinkedIn. What I'm looking for is for points of commonality, points of connection or just interests that we might have similar or that I might find interesting or that I would think that the person I'm researching might be passionate about. I can see she's a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. You might have gone there. You might know people have gone there. You might have been there. You know, I don't know. But what I honed in on was this, her volunteer experience. There's typically what people volunteer for it, right, it matters to them. It's important, right? And especially if you're going to show it on your LinkedIn profile. So she was a marriage mentor for 8 years at a place called the Crossline Church in Irvine. And as I'm sharing that with Mary, my loan officer, and I'm, by the way, doing this for the loan officer, right? She goes, wait a minute. What's her name again? No. Carol. And she did what? Oh, she was a marriage mentor at the church. All of a sudden, here's what's mind-blowing about this to me is the loan officer knows Carol. Yeah. And is already connected to her on LinkedIn. And like knows Carol well enough to say, hey, Carol, this is what I would recommend to the loan officer. This is what I did. I said, Mary, here's what you do from here on out. You call Carol up. Now this is, yeah, I'll give you two examples of this. One because Mary already knows Carol personally. Call her up. Mary at XYZ Mortgage. I was just doing some planning for 2021 and I wanted to expand my network of financial advisors. And I got on LinkedIn and did some research. And what I realized was that you and I are connected. And you are the executive chair for the local organization of the FPA, the chapter. Yes, I am. Mary. Well, first of all, what would happen is some small talk, right? Hey, Carol, it's Mary. Remember you and I worked together at the such and such church, whatever, all that. Yeah, yeah. Hey, Carol, the reason why I'm calling is, right? And so here's a transitional phrase. Carol, I'm looking to expand my network of financial advisors. And I'm wondering, would you be able to help me out with any ideas or suggestions along those lines? What would you suggest? I was considering possibly joining the FPA, financial planning association. So guys, sometimes here's the lesson. Sometimes your acres of diamonds are right under your feet. If you old school peeps, you old school personal development people, you remember Earl Nightingale, right? You used to have this cassette tape series that was called your acres of diamonds. And literally, oftentimes, we don't realize that our greatest opportunities lie right beneath us, right in front of us. We just need to reach out and grab them. And so I wanted to share this with you. It was a little bit of something different on this session of the podcast, just me coming at you. And just to give you something to think about, if you're pursuing financial advisors, I think that website could be a great resource for you. Now, let me go back to the website and let's just say, okay, cool. I don't know, Carol, right? Let's just say I'm completely cold on this. Well, what would I do differently? I wouldn't do much differently, right? Let me just grab Arizona. Let's see. Yep. We've got a couple chapters in Arizona. I'm going to pull this up here. Okay. There's a couple there. There's the greater Phoenix one. If I click on that, I can see Melissa Kemp. She's there and there's her contact info and stuff like that. Now, I'm going to do the exact same thing. I'm going to grab Melissa's first and last name. I'm going to go to LinkedIn. I'm going to put her name in there and I'm going to hopefully find her. There's a lot of Melissa Kemp, so it's a very common name. Okay. So I found Melissa Kemp on LinkedIn. She is the executive director of the Financial Planning Association for Greater Phoenix and she, she too went to University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. What else do I see? Toastmasters, all that kind of stuff. Some other things. I'm looking for any mutual connections if I have any. I don't. But anyway, the point is this is here's how you can use LinkedIn. If you don't have a mutual connection. First of all, with LinkedIn, up at the top, there is opportunity to connect with somebody. Now, sometimes what people do on LinkedIn to minimize or prevent spam is you have to enter their email to connect. Now, let me try this. Let me see if I can use the email for the, her email that's from the FPA website. I bet you I can. Let me try to test right now live without a net. Okay. So she has to accept my request. Now, I don't find that that happens very often. So once again, here's the lesson. If you're looking to pursue some financial advisors, right, go where they are, right? And the good ones, right? I say that based on my knowledge of who's joining the FPA, right? It's similar to the MBA or whatnot. But you go to the Financial Planning Association. You type in your state. You find a local chapter. You find who's the chair of the chapter. And you go to LinkedIn, you see if you have any commonalities, connections, right? Things like that. And you make a connection. You reach out to this person. You don't just send it connect. You don't just hit that button connect. You hit add a personal note, okay? And then you add a little something in there that says, hey, Melissa, notice you were the, what is her title again, the executive director for the FPA greater Phoenix. Wanted to reach out because I've been considering joining the FPA as I want to expand my network of financial advisors in the greater Phoenix area. Would you be able to help me with appropriate next steps or any suggestions? Question mark. Sincerely Jeff Simper, ABC Mortgage, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's what I would do, okay? Now again, there's only going to be this chapter director that you could possibly reach out to. But I'm just, I'm sharing this with you because you could do this with other influential people. You could do it with who? Have you closed alone with anybody who's an influential executive at a local company? A business leader, right? A volunteer leader or whatever. The point is is let's not forget the power of LinkedIn to connect with people and make connections. You could do the same thing with real estate agents quite honestly, after doing some research about them, their business, maybe didn't find any charities that are involved in, organizations, things that they're passionate about, and just do a similar approach, right? And just say, I'm looking to expand my network of real estate agents in the local area. I see you happen to be a graduate of University of Colorado. Hey, my uncle went there, or I see you're passionate about you're a, you're on the board of the no-kill dog shelter. You're on the board of the food bank, right? And always approach it from the standpoint of how do you add value? How do you contribute? So again, I just wanted this to be a quick, off-the-cuff, you know, quick tip Tuesday, if you will. I'm recording this on Tuesday. So that's what you're getting on this Tuesday. But hopefully that's helpful once again, if you are going after financial planning advisors, check the website. We'll put a links to the show notes, financial planning association.org, check it out. And lastly, if you are looking to grow your realtor referral business in a brand new purchase market in 2021, if you would like to get consistent, dependable, realtor referrals for purchase business without ever making a call call again, without chasing begging, and having realtors come into you, go to this website, mortgagemarketing.pro. And you'll see stories and examples of other loan officers who are leveraging an educational platform to attract agents in your local community, not chase, but attract, and allow you to choose who you work with, and create a stream of steady referrals. Like my friend Chris Cogel has done that, 102 loans this year so far, exclusively from agent classes, delivered over Zoom virtually, all done for you, turnkey, mortgagemarketing.pro. And that's it. So I appreciate you tuning in, and I hope you found this valuable. Feel free to reach out to me, and we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey guys, what's up real quick? 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