Work-related research Redtail’s Director of Training Rick Williamson has done over the past year or so has led him to consider some of the remarkable similarities between the mission of our national parks and the mission of financial advisors. At the same time, he’s realized they have to fight against many of the same cognitive biases when trying to fulfill those missions, and he shares his thoughts in a recent piece at Advisor Perspectives.

REDTAIL TECHNOLOGY AWARDED CATEGORY WINNER FOR CRM SOLUTION PROVIDER IN THE US CATEGORIES AT THE WEALTHBRIEFING WEALTHTECH AMERICAS AWARDS 2022

Redtail Technology is honored to have won the CRM Solution Provider award in the US categories at the WealthTech Americas Awards 2022.

Showcasing ‘best of breed’ in the Americas, the awards have been designed to recognise outstanding organisations grouped by specialism and geography which the prestigious panel of an independent advisory board deemed to have ‘demonstrated innovation and excellence during the last year’.

You can read the Acclaim winner magazine which features interviews with all winners here; an interview with Rick Williamson, Redtail’s Director of Training, appears on page 51 of the magazine.

Redtail’s monthly newsletter arrives in subscriber inboxes on the first Tuesday of each month, delivering Redtail and industry news, solution updates, practice management information, and more. Our March 2022 newsletter, delivered today to subscribers, includes an Advisorpedia interview with Redtail CEO Brian McLaughlin about the launch of our new Redtail Speak application, an article from Redtail’s Director of Training Rick Williamson on lessons advisors can learn from the rules of Zombieland, the February winner(s) of our Best Paw Forward Photo Challenge, an ongoing series on Managing your CRM, two new integrations, and more! Even if you aren’t a subscriber though, you can still check out the March issue here.

To become a subscriber and make sure you never miss an issue, sign up here.

Our Director of Training, Rick Williamson, recently had a piece published at WealthManagement.com that considers one of the most important rules from the film Zombieland and how that rule can be applied by advisors to help them overcome some cognitive biases that many of us fall prey to. You can read that piece here:

Leadership Lessons From Zombieland: Know Yourself and Your True Strengths

This certainly isn’t the first time Rick has shared his thoughts on either Zombieland or on cognitive biases. If you’d like to read another piece on cognitive biases he penned for WealthManagement.com last year, you can read that here:

Three Cognitive Biases That Could Be Hacking Your Culture

Or, if Zombieland is your jam, you can view Rick’s presentation from last year’s Fearless Investing Summit here:

Rules for Advisors to Survive Zombieland

Riskalyze’s Fearless Week 2021 has passed, but we are excited to be able to share the Rules for Advisors to Survive Zombieland session that our very own Rick Williamson (aka Ricky Redtail) presented to conference participants. As usual with Rick, it’s chock full of movie references, helpful practice management tips, and his own particular brand of mayhem, all adding up to an entertaining and informative session with lots of takeaways!

Editor’s note: an edited version of this was originally published on Advisor Perspectives’ website here.

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Hug a teacher today (even if only virtually)! Whether you are interested in changing the world, learning a new skill, or mastering a piece of software, those who stand up to provide instruction are opening doors to you that might otherwise remain closed.

Education and training, regardless of your career path, are important. Period. They stand as core pillars of my approach to helping advisors create successes in their business with our software. Creating a common, foundational understanding of how to use our services is a huge part of what my team works on each and every day, as we understand our efforts can potentially help alleviate some commonly recognized industry problems under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

The wealth management and financial advice industry is a difficult one to break into. Advisor trainee failure rates are high in our industry to begin with, regardless of an advisor’s race or gender, but a 2020 Cerulli survey found that there are more barriers to entry for women and BIPOC advisors. So, as you can imagine, those potential stumbling blocks at this stage in an advisor’s career can feel insurmountable for the individual while at the same time contributing to the perpetuation (and possible widening) of the existing diversity problem throughout our industry. Education and training can play a huge role in breaching those barriers to help ensure the diversity among financial advisors better matches the clients they serve.

The specific barriers the survey discusses affect both recruiting and retention, and a lack of emphasis on teaching/training often means nothing more than lip service is being paid toward addressing these issues. As providers of solutions in this industry, we would like to convey benefit to everyone who uses them. Challenges and barriers exist for those who have been in the industry for decades as well as for the newcomers, even if those challenges present in a different form. New technologies can be intimidating for the advisor who has been tied to file cabinets and notepads over the course of a long career, even if those technologies offer the promise over time of making their work lives easier. Expecting seasoned advisors or those just entering the profession to simply pick up and run with ANY new (to them) tool or technology without a little assistance and training is setting a huge percentage of them up to run their practices at less than maximum efficiency or effectiveness.

We know it’s important that we check our egos at the door when it comes to client service. It’s a nice thought to believe that advisors and clients will be motivated enough to fully understand your software or tech offering to read the manual in their spare time, (what is spare time? Asking for a friend) and teach themselves how to use it with little or no direction from the company who sold it to them. But a nice thought is about all that is.

Given the above context, we have found great success in providing a fun, energetic learning environment to meet the needs and diverse goals of each office and advisor we encounter through deep consideration of the following three things: diverse learning styles, varying experience levels, and the importance of repetition.

Diverse learning styles

Did you know there are seven primary learning styles that many teachers aim to use when teaching a classroom?  Shout out to those educators who are responsible for engaging students’ minds with auditory, verbal, visual, tactile, social, independent, and logical teaching styles throughout their lesson plans to serve their students equitably and better ensure everyone understands. As primarily a logical type of learner myself, I have nonetheless benefitted from the shift toward an educational future where more emphasis has been placed on each of these learning techniques in classroom spaces; for example, virtual spaces like webinars run by my dedicated and highly knowledgeable colleagues both at Redtail Technology and at other financial service and technology companies with whom we work in collaboration. As learning is opened up to all through these different approaches, we find participation grows and we in turn learn more from those we are there to teach than we would otherwise, which is a huge win for all parties involved.

Varying experience levels

Beyond learning styles, there is also each student’s experience level to consider. Often teachers have classes where students have varied skills sets, and catering to this to make content engaging for students at all levels is an important part of making sure the material lands. Making education scalable to the student’s comprehension level is key to being inclusive.

One way that we address this at Redtail University (RTU) is by creating two separate tracks for our newer users and our more experienced users. For newer users, we keep it to the nuts-and-bolts. For our more experienced users, we focus on how to strategically tackle common situations with our CRM. And, once a year we also offer the RTU Masters’ course, which is best suited for Redtail power users looking to dive deep.

Since we offer these two learning tracks as well as RTU Masters, students don’t need to worry that they’ll be either bored by information they’ve heard many times over or, conversely, looking for a life raft as they swim in a sea of high-level nerd speak.

Repetition is key

You know how when you watch a movie for a second or third (or 50^th) time you may catch details of the story you missed on previous viewings? Surprisingly, sometimes a previously missed detail is integral to the storyline. The same goes for teaching financial advisors about software. Throughout my career teaching advisors, we’ve found that repetition is often key, which is why we make available similar lessons on a recurring basis for all our users, rather than just those who are new to our platform.

Our users say they learn something new every time they take a class with us, and because each session is attended by different groups of people the questions and topics for discussion are never static. For example, a more data-driven advisor may share with us that they appreciated the opportunity to understand the backend and context behind how our CRM works, whereas an advisor focused on client communication may be more excited to refresh their practice management skills by paying attention to the parts of our service that have the greatest impact on client service.

A focus on education is a step toward making the wealth of our world available to more people by advancing and implementing inclusive learning strategies that meet the vast range of advisor needs across all identities, backgrounds, and perspectives. By focusing on the above and dedicating resources to facilitate greater understanding of the solutions they offer, fintech providers can be confident that every advisor they serve is equipped with the information they need to leverage that solution to their benefit and the benefit of their business.­

Technology in today’s environment has shifted how clients find financial advisors, how they interact with them, and even how they collaborate to create financial plans. Join Joel Bruckenstein and a panel of guests including Rick Williamson, Redtail’s Director of Training, for a dynamic panel discussion to hear how advisors are using technology to run their businesses.

Topics will include:
• Maximizing your client journey for ultimate scalability
• How to get a deep understanding of your clients to provide more personalized and valuable advice
• Delivering an intuitive advisor and client experience
• Lead generation tools and tactics that convert leads to clients
• A glimpse of T3 Advisor and T3 Enterprise Conferences

Moderator: Joel Bruckenstein

Panelists:
• Rick Williamson, Director of Training, Redtail
• Sarah Rasmuss, Chief Product Office, CircleBlack
• Andrew Rogers, Senior Product Manager, Carson Group
• Diana Cabrices, VP of Enterprise Development, Snappy Kraken
• Matt Thompson, Head of Training, MoneyGuide

Register now to watch a replay of this discussion here.

Redtail’s monthly newsletter arrives in subscriber inboxes on the first Tuesday of each month, delivering Redtail and industry news, solution updates, practice management information, and more. Our August 2021 newsletter, delivered today to subscribers, includes updates to the Redtail CRM contact record, the July winner(s) of our Best Paw Forward Photo Challenge, an ongoing series on Managing your CRM, an update from our Training Team, best practice pieces from Ricky Redtail, and more! Even if you aren’t a subscriber though, you can still check out the August issue here.

To become a subscriber and make sure you never miss an issue, sign up here.

I was excited to see wealthmanagement.com publish a piece I put together recently, Three Cognitive Biases That Could Be Hacking Your Culture, for a number of reasons. Primarily though my excitement stems from the opportunity to open up more productive discussions about the things we do that hold us back in our lives and in our businesses. We can implement every technological solution in the world, but the fact remains that if our heads aren’t in the right place, we are unlikely to live up to our potential, or to help those around us live up to theirs. As Redtail’s Director of Training, I’ll be encouraging Redtail subscribers as well as my co-workers to face head-on the things that may be holding them back – this will be an animating force in the educational campaigns we design and deliver.

With the above in mind, I wanted to share a bit more about the three cognitive biases I discussed in that post over at Wealth Management. I believe we all struggle with these biases to some extent but, by exposing them to the light of day, we can take them out of the shadows and lessen their influence on our decisions and actions.

False Consensus Effect

As a reminder, this particular cognitive bias is the tendency to overestimate how much others agree with your own beliefs, behaviors, attitudes and values. Perhaps the worst thing about the false consensus effect is just how EASY it is to fall prey to this type of thinking.

Researchers suggest that the false consensus effect is driven by three primary factors:
1. Those in our immediate circles (family, friends, etc.) are typically similar to us, with a shared set of beliefs and experiences.
2. Our self-esteem gets a boost from the belief that other people think and act the same way we do. We feel good about ourselves and are motivated to continue in our beliefs and actions because those around us behave the same. It’s the old, “Hey, everybody’s doing it, I can’t be wrong!”
3. Our familiarity with our own beliefs allows us to recognize similar beliefs more easily in those we encounter, at the expense of challenging ourselves with even the possibility of differences from outside our own perspectives.

False consensus, simply put: “Well, this is MY experience, and it’s shared by the people closest around me, therefore it must be common amongst everyone.” It’s easy, it’s safe, and it makes us feel good while doing the minimal amount of mental work. Perspective, or lack thereof, plays a huge part; we collect a very small amount of sample data from a very narrow group of people and then treat it as near-universal fact.

Imagine if, as a financial advisor, you didn’t do any research into a new client’s situation. You just took what you know to have worked previously for an altogether different client and applied it to the way you handle the new client’s portfolio or financial planning. That kind of approach would be unthinkable, for reasons so obvious I don’t even need to expand upon them here.

We all experience and absorb life’s lessons in so many different ways; to fail to understand that, to fail to have that perspective, can lead to narrow-mindedness and, ultimately, ineffectuality.

Self-Serving Bias

This one is the tendency for people to give themselves credit for successes but lay the blame for failures on outside causes. One of the things I try to push myself on, and, frankly, one of the things that I pride myself on, is being real with myself. I try to be very aware of my weaknesses and my strengths and try to shore up those weaknesses where I can.

You see a lot of self-serving bias in sports fans, speaking as an Arizonian heavily invested in the Suns’ fortunes in this year’s NBA Finals. For many sports fans, a win means excellent execution and top-notch play. Meanwhile, a loss is because the referees had it out for them, or because the league wants the other team to win, or because there’s some other great conspiracy theory to explain away the simple fact that your team got outplayed.

Outside of the sports fan arena, where this bias is largely harmless (though it can be annoying to those around you), this may be one of the more insidious cognitive biases; not only does it inflate the part of ourselves that breeds irrational confidence, but it simultaneously masks our ability to recognize areas for potential self-improvement.

If we only take credit for our successes without being real about our failures, how can we possibly hope to improve our own condition, much less the condition of the people we have a responsibility toward, such as our staff or our clients?

The Bandwagon Effect

This one’s kind of a cousin to the False Consensus Effect, in that we do something primarily because other people are doing it, regardless of our own beliefs or experiences.

You might think of this in relation to the stock market – “OH NO, THERE’S A SELL OFF – WE BETTER SELL TOO!” – though with open eyes you’ll likely be able to acknowledge that we all jump aboard one bandwagon or another from time to time. And, unfortunately, making those jumps can be to our own detriment or to the detriment of those around us.

Regardless of the cognitive bias under consideration, they each require EFFORT to combat. It can be a real struggle not to fall prey to these systematic errors in thinking and subsequently use them as our basis for decision-making. We must be conscious, aware, and willing to sometimes fight against our own thoughts and feelings to avoid the stumbling blocks cognitive biases often strew in our paths.

It gets easier over time, sure, as with anything we put the work into. Repetition and practice will make it easier, will make you sharper, just like working out will make you stronger. But, we have to be willing to put in the work.

Final thought: the company name “Redtail Technology” is synonymous with dedicated client service; that is among the reasons our customers choose us. Another thing we’re known for, and a piece of that fantastic client service, is our training programs. Part of what sets apart our training sessions is that we make a conscious effort to account for people’s biases (and how these may impact their learning) as much as we can. My hope is that some of the above may have hit home for you in terms of how you might address cognitive biases that could be affecting your training efforts, your business relationships, and your company culture as well.

SACRAMENTO, Calif, July 14, 2021 /BUSINESS WIRE/ (original press release here)  — After more than a year of successful RTU Online training sessions for Redtail Technology users, those interested in attending these entertaining, educational offerings in person can get ready to mark their calendars. Redtail University Live is returning in 2022, led by the company’s new Director of Training, Rick Williamson – better known as the charismatic, dynamic financial advisory CRM guru “Ricky Redtail.”

Rick, who was previously Managing Training Team Lead at the fintech company, has been given his own department to lead after a decade of dedicated service in training. Redtail is focusing more deeply on providing its lauded customer service and educational content to advisors in whichever manner suits each individual best, whether that be via video, in-person training, documentation/blog, or virtual experience.

“One of the things that has set Redtail Technology’s training sessions apart from others is that we creatively tap into pop culture in ways that we can take a seemingly complex topic and make it relatable,” Rick said. “Using popular movies like Back to the Future as a theme and inserting references to that theme throughout makes the information we share more familiar while also making it stick with a person longer.”

Rick and his team led a dozen RTU Online sessions since March of last year and have two more slated before the summer’s end. Since Redtail University’s first session in 2008, there have been more than 105 in-person learning opportunities through these events around the country.

Redtail has more than 18 years of experience providing top-notch fintech coupled with renowned customer service; the firm now works with more than 30,000 advisory firms and over 100,000 users.

Keep an eye out for Redtail University 2022 session registration here.

 

About Redtail Technology

Founded in 2003, Redtail Technology is a leading provider of web-based Client Relationship Management (CRM), compliant text messaging solutions (Redtail Speak), paperless office, and email archiving solutions in the financial services industry. The company is dedicated to helping advisors efficiently grow their firms by providing them with the core technologies that drive their day-to-day operations, offering low cost and easy to implement applications and integrating with many of the industry’s most widely used applications. As a pioneer in the financial technology industry, Redtail is committed to providing advisors exceptional customer service and strives to contribute in meaningful ways to its local communities in California, Arizona and Georgia. For more information, visit www.redtailtechnology.com.

SOURCE BUSINESS WIRE

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