With the clock winding down on 2025, now is the time to set your sights on new business development in the new year. The sales and marketing spadework you do now could lay the foundation for a record-breaking year for your business in 2026.
Here are five strategies to consider as you formulate your sales and marketing plan for the new year and beyond.
Don’t neglect workshops and seminars.
These are consistently listed by advisors as the most successful tool for generating qualified new leads and growing their book of business. Dinner seminars — in which qualified prospects are invited to dinner at a restaurant where you explain how you can help them meet a unique financial challenge — consistently generate a positive return on investment for advisors.
These events are one of the best ways to build credibility and trust with highly qualified prospects. They offer the highest potential close rate and the shortest potential timeframe from lead to client — as fast as two or three meetings from seminar to close. Out of 50 prospects who register for a dinner seminar, it’s not unusual for half to attend, half of these attendees to schedule an appointment and half of the appointments to close.
Tarkenton Financial’s proprietary Retire Ready Workshops make the whole process simple and easy. We provide fully customized and automated digital marketing campaigns that target ideal prospects in your market area, along with marketing materials and coaching to help you prepare your presentation. We’ve also perfected the meal offering – no more high-dollar steakhouses. The right restaurant/venue selection keeps your food cost manageable and minimizes plate-lickers! Over half of our Top 10 and Top 25 advisors use these workshops, including a Top 5 advisor who has increased his annuity production by 43% so far this year.
Take advantage of lead generation and brand awareness campaigns.
These campaigns can be used to supplement your Retire Ready workshops. For example, if you host a workshop once a quarter, you could run a lead generation program during the off-seminar months. One of the advantages of this strategy is that the campaigns run in the background, requiring no direct effort on your part.
Tarkenton Financial offers plug-and-play lead generation tools that help you generate high-intent, real time leads, as well as turnkey systems that provide the content you need to easily market to your qualified prospect list. For example, our turnkey Long-Term Care Client Sales Campaign and forthcoming Roth Conversion Client Sales Campaign includes everything you need to help your clients discuss these hot topics and make decisions that lead to sales.
We also offer a library of resources and sales tools you can use to execute an email “drip” marketing campaign to stay in touch with your prospect list on a regular basis. The idea is to send value-added resources, such as year-end planning guides and whiteboard videos, to your database via email instead of bombarding them with self-serving promotional plugs.
Maximize your online and digital presence.
Your website serves as your business storefront — it’s the first encounter many clients and prospects will have with your firm. So it’s critical to make sure they have a good first impression when visiting your site.
Tarkenton Financial offers digital marketing services that can help you maximize your online presence while driving traffic to your website and retargeting these online visitors. Our services include website design and analysis, digital business profile optimization, programmatic display advertising, and more to equip your firm for success in an increasingly digital marketplace.
Our programmatic display ad program allows you to target high-intent, high-interest annuity, life insurance and retirement clients in your market across the internet’s most trafficked properties (think Forbes, ESPN, Yahoo, YouTube and many more). We do all the work and you can sit back and reap the benefits of effective digital advertising, knowing that for a modest ongoing budget, hundreds of your targeted prospects are visiting your website every month AND being retargeted with your ads after they visit!
Tap into local media to build your brand.
Local media can be a powerful but often neglected advisor marketing tool. Tarkenton Financial’s “Advisors in the News” program makes it easy to tap into the power of local media by positioning you as a go-to financial professional in your market area.
Through this program, we will get you booked in local media segments and provide all the tools needed to make your media appearances successful. Through regular placements, these three-to-five-minute interviews can get you in front of new audiences, boosting your local visibility. Best of all, once you lock in a spot with us, you can become one of the featured financial professionals on your local news station. Ask your marketer about how you can qualify!
Maintain the personal touch.
While digital technology and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing marketing in the 21st century, it’s important to remember that the human connection is irreplaceable when it comes to clients trusting their crucial financial decisions to an advisor. According to Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning & Progress Study, 53% of Americans would rather a human devise a tailored financial plan for them while only 15% prefer AI for this task.
Even Generation Z and Millennial clients prefer the human touch: 54% of these Americans prefer to work with an advisor who uses AI as a tool to enhance human judgement.
To maintain the human touch in 2026, I recommend composing a personal message from both your “financial mind” and your “human heart” and sending it out monthly to your active client and prospect lists. Or to take it a step further, video record your message on your phone, selfie style, and post this weekly on your social media channels. Keep it casual and give people your honest thoughts.
Remember: Technology is just a tool to free you up to be more human with the people who matter most: your clients.
Give me a call at 404-364-2598 or shoot me an email if you have questions or need help with you sales and marketing plan for 2026 and beyond.