When choosing the best financial product for your clients, you must take the tax advantages or disadvantages into account. The way contributions, earnings, distributions, and death benefits are taxed could dramatically impact how much your clients or their beneficiaries receive when their accounts are cashed out. Here's a high level comparison of how taxes impact your clients' different financial accounts.

Case design and illustration requests are common daily events that Independent Marketing Organizations (IMOs) handle for advisors they work with. Many of the advisors we work with do a great job of fact finding during the first meeting with a client. Getting the facts and details up-front are extremely important for putting together a good, strong recommendation that can be presented during your next meeting.

As I work with advisors on a daily basis, I’m hearing one question that stands out the most: “Can you help me get in front of more qualified prospects?” There are many ways to put yourself in the same room as higher-net worth and better fit prospects. Your tools can include seminars, direct mail campaigns, fundraisers, and referrals. 

When conducting prospecting events, location selection is a vital piece of the marketing puzzle and can have a great influence on its success as well as failure. With that said, we know that the entire outcome of the event is not solely based on the location as other factors such as presentation, topic, demographics etc. are vital as well. But the location selection should not be taken lightly or discounted.

The purpose for PowerPoints has been lost on many financial professionals because of those presenters’ own shortcomings at presenting. For many that do presentations wrong, the idea of putting together a long deck of beautiful slides that are extremely wordy automatically makes them think the presentation will be well received. The amount of time preparing for what is really important— practicing the words you use and how you use them—has gone by the wayside.

A question some clients raise is that they’ve been told that indexed universal life policies won’t perform over the long term, in other words the policy performance isn’t as rosy as illustrated. Before AG 49, many producers over-illustrated the power of IUL, and today those new guidelines help temper some of the more outrageous claims. However, many carriers are finding unique ways to enhance policy performance by reducing the costs to buy the indexing options.

Selling indexed universal life over the phone is relatively easy if you have access to products that overcome the big objections to buying life insurance. The first objection to IUL that you’ll typically hear is that it is expensive. Here's why IUL isn't as expensive as your prospects think...

When we discuss the topic of presentation or workshop preparation the first statement that comes to mind is “everything matters”. That may seem like a broad statement but it’s true. We must take a lot of things into consideration, especially who we're talking to.

I have talked to many advisors in my career and I have lost count how many times I have heard “I only sell annuities” or "I only sell life insurance”. There are several things wrong with this picture. Agents that think like this are not fully helping their clients. They are leaving cracks in their financial plans and as an advisor they are leaving dollars on the table. 

For many years the approach to conveying a specific or broad topic was done by what is called a concept presentation. This approach gave the presenter the ability to discuss or highlight a specific product feature or planning technique without going into specific details. Now clients are looking for detailed information on their own before visiting with a financial advisor.