Mitch Anthony’s most popular presentation is based on the bestselling book he coauthored with Scott West, StorySelling for Financial Advisors.  As successful financial services professionals know, it’s all about making human connections—and it takes more than mathematical, selling, and organizational skills to make those connections. It takes intuitive insight and a desire to know who your clients are, so you can begin speaking a language they will understand. 

In this affecting and illuminating presentation, Mitch talks about the three aspects of becoming a more intuitive financial services professional:

• Understanding the power of emotion in the decision-making process
• Understanding your client’s story before attempting to tell your own story
• Understanding the power of the analogy and metaphor in explaining your products and services

Based on his seminal book, The New Retirementality: Planning Your Life and Living Your Dreams…At Any Age You Want!, The Changing Face of Retirement will show audience members how ROL (Return on Life™—getting the best life possible with the money you have) is replacing ROI as the core consideration when planning for the future.

This presentation will discuss the confluence of four modern trends that herald the end of retirement thinking as we know it:

• The evolving pursuit of fulfillment in our times.
• The end of the paternalistic employer.
• The advent of dismantling ageism.
• Distribution-driven Armageddon for financial services.

Growing old with lots of money is no longer the goal. Dying rich can’t compete with living rich, and making a living doesn’t measure up to making a life. When the idea of retirement was born, people traded physical capital for a paycheck—and it was a practical necessity for people to retire. As a knowledge-based economy, intellectual capital, experiential capital, and relational capital are traded for a paycheck, leaving only one question to answer regarding the appropriate time to retire: What is the expiration date on my intellectual capital and on my experience? What those people still working in their 70s and even 80s will tell you is that they would be dead if they had not continued to engage their intellectual faculties.

The Changing Face of Retirement will help audience members find answers to the following questions:

• How will you spend your time? You have 168 hours a week; how will you make those hours meaningful?
• How will you invest yourself? How will you parlay what you know, what you’ve experienced, and who you are into the next phase of your life?

The 5 Skills for Building Stronger Client Relationships

In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, it’s not enough to be adept at technical and tactical skills such as getting appointments, making presentations, and closing deals. To really succeed, you need to develop and apply relational skills—also known as emotional intelligence—to connect with people, recognize customer wants and needs, and build strong, lasting relationships.

Based on his popular book, Selling with Emotional Intelligence, Mitch shows participants how emotional intelligence relates to professional and sales performance. Participants will learn what emotional intelligence is, and how to apply the concepts to improve their own success.

Selling with Emotional Intelligence introduces client-facing professionals to the five essential steps to sales success, known as ARROW™:

Step 1: Awareness: Tuning into your natural strengths and weaknesses.

Step 2: Restraint: Identifying negative emotions that can damage relationships, inflict pain, and cost money.

Step 3: Resilience: Learning to develop an optimistic, persistent nature.

Step 4: Others (Empathy towards Others): Discerning feelings and motives; learning to be a better listener and observer.

Step 5: Working with Others (Building Rapport with Others): Communicating; learning to relate to and lead other.

More than 20 years ago, Mitch broke through the ceiling of retirement planning with his groundbreaking book, The New Retirementality. He changed the conversation about retirement from one focused solely on money to one focused on purpose. In The E.P.I.C. Retirement, Mitch moves that conversation to the next level by challenging advisors to step up, broaden their capacity, and embrace a new role: Retirement Coach. Retirement coaching is the future of retirement planning—this unique approach represents the value proposition that will separate successful advisors from the rest.

Advisors making the transition to retirement coaching understand the characteristics of an E.P.I.C. retirement:

• Engagement: If you don’t use your body or your brain, you lose them.
• Purpose: Money can fund purpose, but it cannot create purpose.
• Integration: There needs to be a balance between vacation and vocation.
• Challenge: Physical, intellectual, and spiritual challenges are the hallmarks of those who continue to thrive as they age.

Whether an audience member is an advisor or an advisor’s client, Mitch will inspire and ignite participants as he challenges them.

When we think of risk tolerance, we immediately think of investments, as if that is the only risk clients face. The reality is, investment risk is just one of the many risks that clients face and should not be the first priority in solving the risk puzzle.

Across the financial services landscape, risk conversations are too constricted, too compartmentalized, too product-driven, and improperly prioritized. Insurance professionals talk about catastrophic risk, bankers talk about debt risk, advisors talk about investment risk, but the biggest risk of all––event risk—barely receives a mention. Event risk matters because our money goes in motion when our life goes in transition.

In PREPARE OR REPAIR? THE HOLISTIC RISK CONVERSATION, Mitch introduces a life-centered conversation that covers the four bases of risk in the proper order:

• Catastrophic risk
• Spending risk
• Investment risk
• Event risk

Advisors will learn to frame the risk conversation with clients in a philosophically sound order:

• Catastrophic risk: Providing for our family in case of tragedy;
• Spending risk: Not creating greater risk with our financial choices;
• Investment risk: Investing wisely; and
• Event risk: Planning for life’s changes and transitions.

Advisors will become more adept at safeguarding their clients’ futures, and clients will learn that it is better to PREPARE than to REPAIR!

Based on Mitch’s breakthrough book, Your Client’s Story, this presentation focuses on how advisors can begin to move their practices toward the financial life planning model—where every product and service is tied directly to the life transitions and goals of the client.

Financial Life Planning (FLP) is a discovery process that focuses on who the client is instead of the assets he or she has. By using the FLP model, advisors can demonstrate to clients how every aspect of their lives has an impact on their wealth-building or wealth-protecting process.

Mitch will discuss the four areas of client discovery that are key to the Financial Life Planning process:

• Client history
• Current and approaching life transitions
• The importance of making goals tangible
• The principles that guide clients’ lives and money

Based on Mitch’s timeless classic, advisors will walk away with a fresh sense of confidence that they are asking the right questions and building their relationships on the right foundation.