Financial Presentation

Your Financial Seminar Presentation —Product or Concept

You have two basic choices when giving a seminar presentation —it can be focused around product or concept. At the risk of over-simplifying, product seminar presentations work best with a lower-end audience, and concept seminar presentations work best with a high-end audience. I will arbitrarily define lower-end as people with investment portfolios less than 5200,000 and higher-end as those with more than $500,000. To be even more simplistic, we can label these two groups inexperienced and experienced . Let’s look at some examples of various financial presentations.

If you want to sell annuities, you can successfully use a seminar presentation to a lower-end audience who will make investments in the $10,000 to $40,000 range. These people have a product orientation, are not looking for an “advisor” and just want a “good investment.” To such a group, you can present at them for 90 minutes about product features and provide a financial presentation about simple concepts like tax deferral, risk vs. reward and compounding.

So if you look to make product sales, this approach will work.

If you seek to develop a high-end audience who puts money under management, is willing to pay you a fee and is looking to bond with an advisor, you cannot give financial product presentations. Such prospects will leave the financial seminar with little or no respect for you because in most cases:

• They already understand the basic features of many investments and insurance products
• They do not want to be sold a product
• They understand basic concepts such as tax deferral and will feel that you are junior league

To this group, you must have a concept seminar presentation, ideas such as asset allocation, estate planning, providing for grandchildren, six ways to reduce income taxes, socially conscious investing, using debt to create wealth, ways to dispose of real estate without tax, etc. All of these financial concepts can lead to lucrative relationships where you may indeed sell products or services. But the product will be the tool to implement the concept. The product must be subordinate to the concept.

If your seminar results have not been as expected , do you deliver the right message to the wrong market (i.e. a financial presentation on products rather than concepts)?

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