10 Worst Sales Mistakes Advisors Make

This is a horrendous mistake: Not having an hour-by-hour agenda of how you're going to use your time every day. A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach is ineffective at best. A daily plan makes you more organized and gives you flexibility to move things around. In the life of a financial advisor, money is on the line every day – yours and other people's. If you're not making a plan of attack that's specific, immediate and clear, and are passively approaching prospecting and client care, that's lazy and irresponsible. You aren't serious. Professional football players always have a plan of attack. The teams are strategizing – just like in war – studying the opponent and how they're going to beat them. 

There's a proverb associated with King Richard III about the neglect of a simple detail. He [supposedly] was unprepared in a crucial battle because of a missing horseshoe nail, causing him to fall off his horse and his army to scatter. Shakespeare wrote: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" [Factually, the horse got stuck in mud.]

5.  Focusing on Results vs. Activities Over Which You Have Control

It's not just advisors that do this — it's branch managers and all the way up the company. They focus their attention on results — gross production — instead of rewarding advisors' good activities that will lead to good results. This can cause advisors to become depressed and discouraged, leading to emotional exhaustion. Many branch managers think concentrating on results will push you harder; but if your focus is on results and you have a fear of success, that can backfire. This destroys your emotional strength, bringing on low self-esteem and all kinds of other negative issues.

If you're a smart branch manager, you do not want that to happen. If you're an advisor focusing on the goal to make $1 million in gross production next year and on January 10, you land the largest client of your career and already surpass your goal, you might think, "Guess I'll take a vacation for the rest of the year." No! What you earned yesterday is irrelevant. How many people are you going to talk to today? If you want to make your branch manager happy, set a darn goal. But then try forgetting about it and start focusing on the daily activities that you have 100% control over. Focus on what you can control, not on what you can't.

4.  Neglecting to Effectively Manage Daily Stress and Anxiety

The higher your stress level, the lower your productivity and the poorer your performance. If you feel stress but are doing nothing about it, you become worn out emotionally and physically. This affects your mood, productivity, sales and ability to prospect. Performance anxiety is about stress; it typically comes from a fear of rejection or looking foolish. Ruminating about the past or worrying about future production is a distraction; it wastes your emotional energy and creates stress. Many advisors self-medicate for stress. The most common way is to surf the Internet.

But this is an avoidance behavior that actually exacerbates  stress: you've lost an hour or two procrastinating, putting you behind; and now you're anxious about something that has to be done. Drugs are another way to self-medicate: caffeine or cocaine – both are drugs. Alcohol is the most common self-medicating drug used for stress. But instead of feeling better, you've made the problem worse by taking a depressant. Be sensitive to your stress level. When you notice it's getting out of control, do some deep diaphragmatic breathing, for example, and generate relaxing, peaceful thoughts. This helps keep your motivation, energy and emotional strength at healthy levels.

3.  Pride

A self-defeating behavior, pride negatively affects sales because it prevents learning and growth. Pride is, in this sense, more than conceit or arrogance: it is a state of opposition. If you're a truly prideful person, you have a very difficult time accepting authority or direction and if you need help, are highly unlikely to seek it. You might not even admit that you have a problem. If you're capable of but not quadrupling your gross production by using all your talents and time effectively, you're choosing to act irresponsibly. You have a fear of failure, a fear of success or a fear of rejection. It requires humility to seek out help when you're struggling, but prideful people are not humble enough to do that. They make everyone their adversary and pit their intellectual ability, talent, wealth – any other worldly measure – against everyone else.

2.  Habitual Distorted Thinking

Negative thinking can be both accurate and true, but distorted thinking is different: there is something wrong with a distorted thought. It is inaccurate and untrue. And it tends to be negative as well. Distorted thinking is the root of all irrational fear. We create our own fear through the distorted thoughts we choose to entertain. "Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda" is a type of distorted thinking. Fantasy daydreaming is self-defeating too because it wastes time: it's avoidance from work.

One of the most common types of distorted thinking that financial advisors engage in is "mind-reading": they think they know what another person is thinking and feeling about them. For instance: You have a fear of asking for a referral because you imagine that clients will think you're rude or offensive. This leads to the belief system that asking for referrals is rude, annoying, makes people angry and that they therefore won't like you. The big, encompassing fear is the fear of rejection. Advisors need to learn how to control distorted thoughts by using the three C's: Catch it, Challenge it, Change it – into healthy, rational thoughts.

1. Fear of Prospecting

This is the most damaging fear – and it's pretty prevalent.

Prospecting is the one thing that financial advisors, almost without exception, avoid because of fear of rejection, fear of failure or fear of success. Everyone has fears; but if they're causing you to perform below your potential, hide out in your office and not prospect day after day – and if you aren't seeking help – that is going to lead to failure in the industry. At a bare minimum, you won't be as effective. You might be able to somehow get by, but you'll be performing far below your true potential because you're not handling your fear. You control your own fear. You exacerbate it. And you can choose to start minimizing it.

If you're just sitting on your behind waiting for referrals to fall in your lap, you're rationalizing. That's a very passive, lazy approach to prospecting. In fact, you're not prospecting – you're making excuses for not prospecting. All advisors know they need to prospect to grow their business. So avoiding it creates anxiety, worry, remorse, frustration and self-loathing. You can't wait for referrals to magically come to you. The biggest problem is choosing not to do something proactive to eliminate any fear that interferes with doing your job effectively.

– Check out these related stories on ThinkAdvisor:

• The 6 Cold Calling Skills You Really Need
• How to Master the Second 'Cold' Call
• Aiming High—6 Strategies for Success
• Time Management: The Key to Boosting Revenue