Advisor Products Inc.

See Three CRM Workflow Engines Today At 4 ET

Andrew Gluck — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:59:00 -0500

At this afternoon’s webinar at 4 p.m. ET, Blane Warrene, an operations consultant, is going to talk about how advisory firms can embed their processes in their CRM.

This is the single most important way to improve your efficiency, scalability, and client service.

To help Blane illustrate how you do this, I asked three of the leading CRM vendors specializing in the independent advisor market (Junxure, Redtail, and XLR8) to provide two-minute videos showing how you use theirn software to embed your workflows.

We’re going to show each of the two-minute videos at Blane’s presentation today and post them for members of advisors4advisors.

Register for today’s webinar here.

Advisors Sound Off On Financial Advisor Webinar Series

Andrew Gluck — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:53:00 -0500

It's been just over a year since we started the Financial Advisor Webinar Series in the throes of the global financial crisis, and I have to say it's been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my career.

The Series started out as a way to support advisors at a time when it looked like the global economic system was about to collapse, and it was originally known as The Financial Crisis Webinar Series. Over the past year, as we backed away from the edge of the abyss, we've continued the webinars every Friday at 4 p.m.

We've been privileged to produce sessions that inform advisors about how to run their businesses better and cope with the upheaval of recent months. And advisors have responded.

About 200 advisors attend the live sessions and another 300 listen to replays every week. And more advisors steadily continue to participate.

Last week's session featured compliance specialist Chris Winn, of AdvisorAssist, offering tips on 2010 compliance planning for RIAs. He was great. (See comments from attendees below.)

We ask advisors to fill in a survey after each webinar. The average rating of attendees at this session was 4.4, putting it among the highest rated of the 49 sessions we've produced.

What amazes me is that from last February, when we started systematically tabulating the ratings of each session, through the end of August, only two sessions had better than a 4.4 average rating. However, five of the last eight sessions has a rating of 4.4 or better. (And we're getting these high scores despite my clumsy skills as a moderator!) Your feedback is genuinely appreciated.

Please remember that many of the sessions are eligible for continuing education credit from the CFP Board of Standards. Also, keep in mind that you can receive free CE credit by attending any of the live sessions, and you can get CE credit on replays of many sessions by becoming a member of our new advisor practice management portal, Advisors4Advisors.com.

Below is feedback from attendees of last Friday's session about RIA compliance. Please join us at an upcoming session or log in to A4A to discuss any webinar with other advisors.

Comments and feedback from advisors who attended 2010 RIA Compliance Planning with Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist:

Thank you - just keep doing it.
Very informative. My first look at Advisors for Advisors.
Excellent
Great timing for a compliance webinar. Thank you for the presentation.
Good topic coverage
It is refreshing to have someone who can speak compliance language in easily understandable terms. Chris obviously knows his stuff.
Great session. One of your best yet.
Terrific content! Wish we had time for more questions.
Very informative, good supporting visuals, well presented.
Really great info...too much for one hour!
Great webinar. The best one that I've seen from Advisor Products
This one was fantastic
No complaints
Excellent, Chris made the subject matter very understandable. Thank you
Very informative
Great webinar! Gets you started thinking about the different issues to address.
This was truly a great webinar and I thank you so much for providing this to us. Great job!
Excellent presentation. Very helpful.
Excellent content
Considering the amount of potential info and the time available it was very well done.
I thought it was great, would love to get copies of the slides.
Well done and useful
Fantastic + extremely useful - one of the BEST you have ever hosted. full of very useful + actionable items.
Great Webinar. Can't think of anything you could have done to improve it.
Excellent - very good topic choice - obviously, a topic like this will have many basic components to it as well as some issue some just venturing into the fray may think are overwhelming, but the presenter did a nice job of balancing so there was something for everybody (more than likely) to take away
It was helpful. thank you.
Outstanding informative and very comforting.
I learned a few new things such as the potential for the SEC to raise the minimum assets under management to $100,000,000 to be registered with them
Important issues most advisors don't work with on a daily basis
Nice outline of issues.
Covered a lot of material I already knew but was good to be reminded anyway.
Good overview for office manager, though went fast and I'll need to review the replay
Good coverage of some of the basics of compliance. The idea of a Compliance Calendar is useful.
Good information. Condense and do more frequently.
I thought it was very well done. Chris is knowledgeable and shared that information well. I appreciated his willingness to spend extra time answering questions afterward.
It is a dry subject, but overall it was packed with important info.

Advisor Products Responds To The Need For Speed

Andrew Gluck — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:48:00 -0500

If we host your firm’s website and use our BackOffice content management system, you may have noticed a boost in speed.

That’s because we replaced the main server that powers Advisor Products’ websites and BackOffice last week.

Your website is loading faster for prospects and clients now.

In our drive for constant improvement, we’ve instituted a policy to replace aging web servers before they reach the end of their useful lives.

This means that if, Advisor Products hosts your website, the server housing your website gets replaced on a regular basis.

Your site, thus, is always running on the latest hardware and software.

We’ll keep you posted as we continue to upgrade hardware for other systems.

2010 RIA Compliance Calendar At Advisors4Advisors.com

Andrew Gluck — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:53:00 -0500

The 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar was posted for free distribution to members of Advisors4Advisors.com, a practice management portal site for independent financial advisors.

Advisors interested in getting a copy of the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar can email me for a free six-month membership in advisors4advisors. It will take 10 minutes to register and fill in your profile and then you can download the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar.

The RIA Compliance Calendar was created by Chris Winn of AdvisorAssist, a compliance consulting firm serving RIAs and B-Ds. It lists 27 key compliance activities for RIAs month-by-month, helping organize RIA compliance responsibilities on a timely basis.

Winn delivered a presentation entitled, “2010 Compliance Planning For RIAs” last Friday at the Financial Advisor Webinar Series. You can replay the session at advisorproducts.com. (Members of AdvisorsforAdvisors.com are eligible for free CFP CE credit on the replay.)

At the session, Winn answered about 15 questions from attendees. But we ran out of time and could not answer many questions chatted in by attendees. Winn, who writes a blog about RIA, B-D, and Registered Rep compliance issues at Advisors4Advisors.com, will be answering many questions that we did not have time to answer at the webinar.

Please join us at advisors4advisors.com to access Winn’s blog, obtain CE credit for the webinar, and download the 2010 RIA Compliance Calendar.

Business Development Conference Next Week

Andrew Gluck — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:53:00 -0500

Advisors seeking to capitalize on post-financial crisis business development opportunities may want to attend a three-day conference produced by Advisor Solutions Network starting Thursday, November 5 and running through Sunday, November 8.

I'm one of the speakers along with PR guru Marie Swift, business devleopment coach Steve Saenz, and many others. You can listen to brief interviews of each of the speakers.

My presentation, "A Revolution In Practice Management," will focus on how the Web 2.0 technology of a client portal system can help Advisors handle day-to-day tasks far more efficiently.

The program focuses on four themes: Providing Advice in a Post-Black Swan Era; Rebuilding Client Confidence; Rebuilding Your Business; Sharing of Best Practices. You can listen to brief interviews of each of the speakers.

Advisor Solutions Network has carefully planned this event. There are only a handful of seats left for this small conference, which will accommodate only about 100 attendees. I strongly recommend you attend, especially if you are in the Atlanta area.

Tell the organizers you heard about the event from at the Advisor Products blog and you'll receive a 50% discount on the registration fee.