In today’s episode – “How AI is Changing the Referral Process” – we explore how AI is changing the way prospective clients evaluate advisors long before a first conversation ever takes place.
Joining us to break this down is Geoff Evans, Vice-President of Marketing and Communications at PPI. Before launching his own businesses, Social Media Coach and The Animation Studio, Geoff spent years in the insurance industry as an advisor, sales trainer, and business coach, helping advisors build stronger practices and grow their businesses. He later dedicated much of his career to coaching advisors on how to use digital technology more effectively, giving him a unique perspective on how new technologies are adopted and where advisors often miss the bigger opportunity.
Listen to the episode:
This transcript has been edited for clarity. This transcript may differ slightly from the original audio to provide a better reading experience.
[Geoff Evans, Vice President, Marketing Communications at PPI]
I’d like to welcome everyone to a new season of Advisor Talk. This episode is going to sound a little different because while I normally ask the questions today, I’m sitting on the other side of the microphone, and our host for this season of Advisor Talk is Mike Wills. So Mike, over to you.
[Mike Wills, Director, Business Development – Southwestern ON, PPI]
So I’ll be taking on the role as host this season. And we thought the best way to begin was to turn the tables and explore an area where Geoff has spent years helping advisors think differently, how technology can be used to build an advisor, practice. So, Geoff, you spent years helping advisors adopt new technologies social media, digital marketing, AI. But it seems like you’ve often been saying the same thing or using the technology wrong. What do you mean by that?
[Geoff Evans]
It’s interesting. My experience has been that every time a new platform comes along, it doesn’t matter what the platform is. Somehow, some way, it kind of gets hijacked by marketers. So I and I don’t know if it’s because they’re just the most enthusiastic or because they are marketers. They’re able to amplify their message better than anyone else can. But everything becomes all about, how do I market with this? How do I generate leads with this? How do I create more content with it? Doesn’t matter what it is. That’s ultimately the conversation that starts happening. And so these amazing technology tools that could probably do a whole slew of things in a business become just this one siloed function.
And social media to me is the prime example of that. And it’s kind of that the entire reason I started a business was because I saw in the very early days of social media that it wasn’t even referred to as social media. It was just referred to as Facebook. 2007, 2008. Very quickly, the entire conversation became how do I market myself on Facebook? Every conference in the insurance industry was, we need to find a social media marketer and get them on here and talk about Facebook marketing. And and that’s what the conversation became.
But for me, the the interesting thing was I had spent years previous to that training advisors like helping them learn how to build a practice from scratch, brand new advisors in the industry. So everything prospective networking, course marketing, referrals and the sales process and client, service. And so I guess every time I looked at a new platform, I was always thinking holistically because my brain was now wired that way because that’s how I was approaching an advisor business. I knew marketing was always just a tiny part of how any advisor was going to succeed. Tiny. And yet all of the attention was put. So yeah, that’s the the my experience has been that these platforms get hijacked by marketers.
That’s all we ever talk about. And I see the exact same thing happening today with AI.
[Mike Wills]
I was going to say that sounds very similar to what’s going on right now. So is that, kind of what eventually led you to start your own company?
[Geoff Evans]
It was it. It’s funny, I can remember. And what reference the company, but I was tasked with coming up with a Facebook strategy for advisors at this company, and I was tasked with it only because I had the slightest bit more experience using LinkedIn than everyone else on the team. They figured I must be the person to pursue it. So I can recall sitting around a boardroom table with the compliance team and the legal team and IT security and marketing in every department inside of a large insurance carrier you can imagine. And the conversation basically was social media is a distraction and it’s a waste of time.
And that was the perception that every business unit inside of this carrier had, because all they were thinking about it, the, they were thinking of it as a marketing tool, as a tool to amplify. And the fear of compliance is, well, what are advisors going to say? And the fear of legal what are they going to say? And I could see it as a platform where you didn’t have to say a single thing. It could literally be a platform to gather intelligence and just be more effective to help you identify connections that you might not have been able to see before.
Now they’re revealed to you through LinkedIn like there were so many things you could do and nothing to do with marketing. And so that’s why I started the business. I saw this huge opportunity, this huge gap in the marketplace, and I knew how to have the conversation around it. And so that’s what I did.
[Mike Wills]
Now, do you see kind of the same mistakes then happening with AI. And like do you see advisors making certain mistakes around this?
[Geoff Evans]
Yes. Now there’s a bit of a difference because I am hearing a lot more conversations with advisors about all the different ways it might be able to help them in their practice, but it still seems to be more administrative, like, how can I streamline a process? How can I transcribe a meeting? How can I automate the creation of notes and to do lists? Which is great, but still, I’d say 50% of the conversation is how do I use it to create content? How do I get it? To create a picture I can post on Facebook, which is fine, but I have yet to meet. And the successful advisor who generates most of their business through marketing activities just don’t.
It’s referrals. It’s always referrals. Quality. The best source of new clients for any business. My business was the same way is referrals and so I think the mistake advisors are making right now is they’re thinking about what are the little things it can do in my practice, or what are the marketing things I can do in my practice. But they’re not thinking about how is this changing my client’s behavior? How is this impacting key strategies in my business, like referrals? So that’s not even on the radar right now. And I think that’s something they need to be thinking about.
[Mike Wills]
Right. Okay. So so you’re looking at I kind of differently as a tool. And we are seeing. So where do you see this leading into where they should really be focusing some of their attention on as an advisor.
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah. For years when websites suddenly became an important thing, we started talking about Google and search engine optimization, making sure that an advisor was discoverable, but more so if we’re talking about everything from a referral perspective. Your good friend tells you you need to go and talk with Geoff because he’ll be great. He can help you in your business or whatever it is. You don’t just pick up the phone and call him. But I mean, you trust your friend, you trust your family member, but there’s going to be this little stage of validation of, is this actually a person I want to call, or is this actually a person I want to spend time with?
So you’re going to do a little bit of research. You’re going to back in the day you would have gone to Google. You would have typed in the advisor’s name. You would have hopefully found their website, maybe find some article they’ve written in a local newspaper. And these things build the trust and give you the confidence that, yeah, I can reach out and call this person. Things are changing now, Michael, and I’ll even ask you, like have your behaviors around the use of Google changed since the advent of AI?
[Mike Wills]
Geoff 100%, yeah. So again, what is in your world? What has changed now? Well, I no longer google anything. I go directly to a ChatGPT or a Claude and ask the question there.
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah. And that’s what’s fascinating is now I was just reading a study in preparation for a presentation I’m going to be giving, and it said currently today, 37% of people will go to AI, ChatGPT, as the starting point to get an answer to the question. So they’re treating AI as answer answer engines because none of us, at least the 37% of us who are doing this actively today, we don’t want to go to Google and get a list of possible answers to our questions, and then having to navigate through all these different things. Well, what advisors need to understand is that clients are now doing the same thing.
They’re going to ChatGPT and they are saying, my friend has referred me to advisor X, tell me everything you know about this advisor. And given everything that you know about me, because like a lot of people, I am spending all of my time in AI telling every aspect of my life, getting questions to every problem I have. These AI systems know a lot about me, so I can say not only tell me everything about this advisor, but then ask the question, do you think this person would be a good fit based on everything you know about me? So now it truly is an answer engine giving me not just pointing me in the direction of answers. It’s trying to validate.
The the questions that I have. It’s trying to give me deep insight, which is a big change. Huge change. Yeah.
[Mike Wills]
So we’re going back to referrals. You keep on bringing up referrals. Have to has to be done. And if referrals are still the best source of new business for most advisors, where do you think they can? They can really kind of dig in and make that part of their process.
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah. In terms of AI, we’re talking in this case. The first step has to be figuring out what is what story is AI telling about you. So it’s not even something I think that advisors can do directly themselves through their own ChatGPT account, because ChatGPT will know everything about them. You almost have to ask members of your team, or a friend or a family member to go into ChatGPT and and ask some sort of question.
And the question could be something like, tell me everything you know about this advisor and what kind of area of focus they have in their practice and and who they work with best, and get them to ask that question across the different platforms on Claude, on ChatGPT, on Gemini, because each of them has learned differently, potentially through different sources. They might have different stories to tell. So it’s that’s kind of stage one is just figuring out what is the story that is being told about me, and is that in alignment with the story? I want clients to know about me? Is this how I want them to perceive me?
Is this helping me create that validation so that they will comfortably pick up the phone or send an email and say, yes, let’s let’s have a conversation.
[Mike Wills]
So step one, right. What is AI saying? Okay, so I haven’t done this yet okay. Have you.
[Geoff Evans]
I have and well here’s the thing I haven’t worried about doing it for myself, but I’ve done it on behalf of PPI in this case. Okay. Because if there are advisors out there who are thinking, well, I’m with an MGA, I want to find maybe a better solution for myself. I’m going to go to AI now. I’m not just going to Google and see what MGA is exist and try to navigate their website, because they’re all we’re all going to be selling you on what we offer. But you want some interpretation, some context. So you’re going to go to ChatGPT and you’re going to say this is my practice. This is the areas of focus.
This is what I care about, which MGA is the right fit for me. That’s what people are doing now. And so if you don’t know what Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini are saying, if you don’t know what their perceptions of you are, you’re going to end up. There’s some stories being told is not at all in alignment with how you are trying to position yourself in the marketplace, or what is even relevant to you today.
[Mike Wills]
And so you can kind of start directing that into, into a, into a certain direction that you would want.
[Geoff Evans]
You can try. So this is the interesting thing is this is such new technology. We are still trying to understand how AI is learning the stories that it’s creating for us. The only way I know right now is to ask AI, how did you get this? So this is what I literally did in the case of MGA was how did you get this information? How is this your understanding of our organization? Give me the list of resources that you’re drawing from to assimilate this particular answer. And so it goes through a whole slew of sources that it draws from. And trust me, our website is one of the smallest sources it is drawing from.
It is looking for all sorts of other credible, trustworthy sources. And that’s the challenge.
[Mike Wills]
Interesting, Okay, so. So all these referrals, you’re still looking for referrals. You are now knowing as an advisor that people aren’t just going on to Google and looking for your website. They are now going to an AI system and asking it, tell me about Geoff Evans. And right now we don’t even know really how to how to push that story in one direction.
[Geoff Evans]
We have ideas about what influences it. It’s it’s early days, but I would say now is the time to be making some effort to try to influence what’s happening there. Otherwise you get so far behind. I don’t know how long it takes to influence the AI story that gets told, but I do know if you’re doing nothing, then other people are influencing the story that is being told, and so any action is better than the no action that most people are taking at this moment in time. And there are small things like there are simple things we’ve just learned about.
You can just a little file you can add to your website, and this is where you would go to your webmaster. I’m not going to pretend on this in this conversation to explain the technology, but there are simple things you can do to add to your website to more fulsomely tell the story that you want. I don’t know, that’s one thing you can do.
A lot of the things that we’re doing here are with the intention of creating more credible sources for AI to draw from, so podcasts, you don’t have to have your own podcast, but being a guest on a podcast is a huge way to create valuable content that is perceived to be credible and trustworthy, that will feed the story. Having an app is something we launched. I don’t expect advisors are going to be able to create apps necessarily, although it is incredibly cheap to do it today. There’s a lot of creative ways you can do it to create credibility. Now writing articles for newspapers, getting press releases like there’s a lot of different sources.
I would say to any advisor listening, go to your preferred AI system and ask it if I want to influence the story that is being told about me, where should I be getting my story out there? How should I be publishing it? What sources are you going to draw from and get an action plan from the.
[Mike Wills]
Yeah, that’s actually a really great idea because you’re not so so are blogs still doing the same? Like, do they still have the same impact because it was always like, okay, create a blog, put in your, your keywords, and this will help bring you up in the search engine.
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah, but we’re no longer there’s no search engine anymore. It literally is an asking engine. Yeah. And a reply. Yeah.
[Mike Wills]
So, how what should is there a couple things that advisors should be looking for when they start to ask those questions?
[Geoff Evans]
I think it’s important to recognize that you don’t want to necessarily just drop everything else you’re doing, because they might have different purposes anyway, like the value of a blog might be visibility in the Google search engine, but that’s the lowest level of value there. I think the greater value of having that blog is if you have a mailing list for clients, you’re sending a link to that blog. You’re giving it directly into the hands of the people who need it, or you’re sharing it through social media. The odds of your blog. Of the 90,000 blogs that are currently being written, I’m sure by advisors, the odds of yours being the answer that a random person finds very low.
But if you are proactively using it as a tool to stay front of mind, as a tool to get a single idea into the the brains of your 100 people on your mailing list, or thousand people on your mailing list. That’s its effectiveness. So I wouldn’t say, you know, drop the things you’re doing. It’s just reevaluate what is its true function and purpose. In my business, maybe it if it only needs to exist for I influence. I don’t know the degree to which a blog is as influential as it used to be, but,
[Mike Wills]
so then so for advisors like they have specialties, they have these little niches and they have stories. Would that be something that would be better to create and to share? Your, your, your own story, what what clients you’re looking for, what you’re doing in the community. You know, with that, then most likely create a really good answer, start building a good answer for A.
[Geoff Evans]
And I would say that that is the answer everyone should have pursued with social media. My experience is a lot of business owners, not advisors necessarily. Business owners are afraid to identify a specialty for fear of will suddenly that no one else is ever going to knock on my door. I’ve limited myself to a really small number of potential clients. That’s bad for business, but the reality is, I want to know that you, as an advisor, are going to be able to meet my specific needs. I don’t want to go to the general practitioner who may or may not know what I need.
So I think there’s an evolution in people’s expectations, and I think AI is going to contribute to that substantially because it’s going to know each of us so well. It’s going to be able to very explicitly say, yeah, this advisor doesn’t seem to do anything related to what your priorities are. So I think it is incumbent on us to start figuring out what is our niche and be willing to have those conversations to really own a space.
[Mike Wills]
Right. So there’s a lot of generic advisors. Yep. Don’t be generic. Tell your story, be you.
[Geoff Evans]
Well that’s it. And I don’t think it’s even that necessarily generic, but I understand exactly what you’re saying. They’re probably sharing generic content, but they are very uniquely themselves. And that’s the only thing that distinguishes them from the other 90,000, 100,000 advisors in this country is their story, their journey, how they build relationships, the that’s what is unique. And if that’s not the story you’re sharing online, then you’re just adding noise, which is what everyone else is doing.
[Mike Wills]
Yeah. And your stories are probably going to pull the kind of clients that you do actually want.
[Geoff Evans]
That’s it. And it doesn’t preclude you from working with other people. It it’s just enabling this to be amplified in a meaningful way.
[Mike Wills]
Right. So like you spent years helping advisors use technology. What’s the biggest mistake that advisors make, when trying to improve their online visibility? And has it changed,
[Geoff Evans]
you know, the mistake is constant and I don’t know if this will ever change. It’s I had the same, same experience running my own business for so many years is you have a limited number of hours in the day to do anything. And so when you have to think about AI or you have to think about social media, you’re trying to find ways to be as efficient as possible so that you’re not it’s not a second full time job marketing yourself. But what I what I knew instinctively, but what I observed very clearly is efficiency does not equal effectiveness in any way, shape or form.
I would rather see an advisor dramatically scale back what they’re trying to do to create one piece of really compelling content, then just sheer, endless posts every single day that is so meaningless. It’s not even breaking through the algorithm. So I would my philosophy in life has always been slow down, to go faster, slow down, make one really great piece of content, let that break through and you don’t have to just pepper everyone with endless content. That’s not success.
[Mike Wills]
So you’re talking about, advisors actually creating, you know, one really good piece of content. Do you have a couple examples of what that piece of content could be?
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah, I think I’ve what people do on LinkedIn, for example, they might create a find a generic image. A lot of people used to just go to Google Image search and copy paste an image and a simple thought or simple idea that’s so generic it’s not even going to break through the algorithm. So what is much more compelling is having an advisor take 60s 90s to share an idea. Just it could be a case where you just had a meeting with a client. You’re not going to share any client information, of course, but it could be just I just came from a meeting with a client and I was reflecting on this idea.
And let me just share this one small idea with you. I don’t have the idea. I don’t know what that idea should be, but I know every advisor out there probably has all of these moments and these little nuggets and rather than just some text and a generic image, let it be their face. Let it be a little moment of thought leadership that they post to LinkedIn. They post to Instagram. It’s it’s the original perspectives that you bring. Because what is there’s nothing new in this industry really. It’s been the same types of products, the same basic everything. I’ve been connected to this industry for 30 years. Nothing has changed.
But what is changed are the people that are talking about it and their stories and their journeys. And Mike, I’ve heard you talk about your journey multiple times, and it’s a fascinating story. And that is what’s interesting. And so I know every single advisor out there has their own unique, interesting, fascinating journey. And that’s what a client is going to connect to. It’s that person will get me because we’ve had similar journeys. We’ve had similar challenges, roadblocks. They don’t want to hear about term insurance and whole life insurance. They don’t care. That’s not what they’re concerned about.
They want to know that someone who cares and who can understand them, and who can relate to them, can have a meaningful conversation with them. And so that’s how you break through the noise,
[Mike Wills]
right? Authenticity.
[Geoff Evans]
Amen. Telling who you are and what you believe in. Yes, yes and yes.
[Mike Wills]
I have one last question for you. Okay. If you could leave advisors with just one thought when it comes to AI and technology, what would it be?
[Geoff Evans]
And this is difficult. I would say first and foremost, I would just like them to remove one thought process from their brains for the rest forever, which is anytime a new technology comes along, a new platform. Do not lead with the question, how can I use this for marketing? Lead with the question, how can I use this to help me save time, save money, make money in my practice period? Because it could be any part of your practice. I go back to the original conversation of prospecting, networking, referrals, gathering intelligence to be more effective in the sales meeting, uncovering clients hot buttons and buying motivations through the social media post.
Just stop leading and stopping with a thought process built around marketing. Be holistic in how you approach every piece of technology, and I think that will change how you are able to integrate these things in more meaningful ways into your practice.
[Mike Wills]
Thanks so much for sharing anything. I think advisors will, you know, pull something out of like they with it. So hopefully someone will help us something out of it.
[Geoff Evans]
Yeah.