Interview with Derek Notman Founder & CEO of Couplr

0:00Welcome to influential entrepreneurs bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host Mike Saunders Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Derek Notman who's the founder and CEO of CUPLAR. Derek welcome to the program. Thank you Mike. Great to be with you today. Really appreciate it. Hey you're welcome first and foremost before we dive into who you are and why you do what you do. Let's define what is CUPLAR. Think of CUPLAR as the find an advisor fixer. We fix the find an advisor tool for wealth management firms financial advisors. You name it. If you want to have a little bit of fun with it or use a dating analogy, think of it as like the e-harmini or bumble for insurance and wealth

1:00management. So I love it. I love analogies. You know your wife and my wife would probably be rolling their eyes going, okay another analogy. Guys love analogies. You know, but I like that because it really is like, oh at the at the crux of the matter, we need to stand out. If it's a dating app analogy, how am I going to stand out in the right way? But what makes the CUPLAR help an advisor stand out in that find a advisor? What does that actually look like? So we are competing with a lot of other advisors and at the end of the day a lot of us have the same credentials. We can sell the same products and services and so forth. So those are I would not argue are differentiators really at all anymore. And what it really comes down to is the human connection. You know, I've been an advisor, Mike, for over 20 years myself. I have multiple credentials. I was a New York life career agent before I went fully independent and I own my own RIA now too. And at the end of the day,

2:02the best client relationships are the ones where we have a human connection first. The client buys the advisor. Does the advisor understand? And do they have shared commonalities interests? Does the advisor understand me because we have these deeper human connections? And so CUPLAR helps do that. We connect on a human level. And by doing so now the advisor and the client that were always meant to be together actually get together. And that's where great stuff can happen because if the client loves the advisor and vice versa, now you have a much better and deeper exchange of information, if you will, because the advisor is only going to be as good as the information the client shares. And if the client doesn't want to share everything because they don't trust the advisor, then you know how that ends. Yeah. You know, you brought up a great point there and it reminded me of an example, not an analogy, but an example of in business school, you know, I learned like, hey, what's the best selling Nike shoe of all time? And it's the Air Jordan.

3:06Well, why was that? Because his personal brand was behind that. People thought of him, not some canvas shoe or not some rubber shoe or whatever, but it's the personality. And you bring up such a huge point because facts tell and stories sell. So the personality, the stories we tell, the connection we have. And what's that Maya Angelou quote? People will forget the way that you what you said to them, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel and all of that ties together, right? Yes, 100%. That's exactly right. Yep. And that's crucial for a long-term client advisor relationship. So here's, I guess you hinted at it, but here's kind of where where my mind goes. Correct. There's a big chasm between everything I want as an advisor to know about that client and everything, but that client doesn't want to tell the advisor either in the first mini-second mini-third mini or ever. So how do you close that gap? It comes back to establishing rapport and trust.

4:14And if you don't have those, which are foundational to a successful client advisor relationship, then none of that other data exchange is ever going to flow. The client will never share their hopes, dreams and goals, their financial skeletons, what keeps them up at night, because they won't feel comfortable, because money is personal and money is private. Yeah. It's connected on those levels. Isn't it sort of like what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, that whole mindset of, you're safe here, do whatever you want. No one's going to find out, which, ha ha, you know, that's not the case. But if you can engender that feeling of trust in that relationship, now they're going to open up kind of like the attorney client privilege or hippo with where doctors can't disclose. People know that so they feel comfortable disclosing, well, what, you know, how do you get there? Like I agree, I'll check the box. Yes, I agree. You need to have that trust within that relationship. What is your tool to help create that and solve that? Yeah, good question, Mike.

5:17So it's about experience. I'm sure virtually everyone of your listeners, including yourself, has had the experience where they fill out a form online or something, because they want to get a quote for insurance or whatever. And the next thing they know, their phone and their inbox are blowing up. Yeah. Terrible client experience instills absolutely no trust and really has basically just boiled me down to another transaction, which feels icky. And so what Cubpler does is that we actually empower the consumer. We went upstream and we said, okay, if we can make the consumer experience the best in the world, then that will flow down to the firms and advisors that ultimately get the leads. And so with Cubpler, we let them know like, hey, you're here to get matched with the right advisor for you on a variety of levels. They go through a quiz. And by the way, this quiz to go through, they don't have to give me their net worth. They're 401k balance, their email address,

6:17their phone number, none of that stuff. And then they actually get matched with the top three advisors for them. And again, we don't gate that. We want them to control this experience and feel good about the process. They get to review those advisors, each advisor in Cubpler gets a deep rich profile where that really lets them tell their story professionally and personally. And so now the lead, the consumer gets a very deep, but quick, like, reaction almost like, do I like them advisors I was matched with? I like all three, but man, I really like Mike. We have similar situations, he understands me, he works with people like me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we take it even further, right? This is where it's cool. Is it instead of now selling that lead to one or multiple advisors at the same time where we've taken again control away from the consumer, we actually empower the consumer to make the first move. So they have to initiate

7:21contact with the advisor of their choice. That's where we ask for a little bit of commitment, like, hey, prove your human, give us your email address at least and verify. But that's it. And then now they get to send a note to the advisor. So like, hey, Mike, we just got matched. Looks like you help people like me, we have similar backgrounds, we'd love to find a time to meet. And so now that experience has been amazing for the consumer, they felt good, they were in control, and because of that, now the advisor has a warm inbound lead that has already vetted them and has reached out to them. So unless the advisor, like, doesn't follow up or has a terrible sales process or can't close, they're going to write that business. And so now the whole experience has been flipped and it's so much better all the way through that value channel. Let's talk a little bit about something that as a marketer is ingenious with what you just

8:21said, gated content. And I think that becomes something that it kind of reminds me back in the day. I'm sure you've heard of Seth Godin, the marketer, permission marketing. It's like, people don't want the spam emails. They don't want the, you know, megaphone in their face. I want what I want when I want it. So when you have permission and when you have that gated content, the client or the prospect feels in control and in charge. And then that that outreach becomes really genuine. And there's going to be less no show and less, you know, skepticism and all of that. I love it. Is there any analytic? Because my marketer mind goes to hearing what you said there and goes, okay, it's similar to like how many people visited a landing page compared to how many people converted and fill out the information. So with a non gated approach, how many people are

9:22actually taking that step? Or is there any way to quantify that? There is now it's going to be different per firm. So coupler is primarily a white label solution where we will embed in with a firm or even a marketing channel partner. And we have tested this and we've done this live. And I can reference to one, we did this for a very large wealth management company, where by simply replacing the call to action from, hey, enter your postal code and hear all these advisors that you have to pick from and reach out to or lose, you know, give your contact info to instead of use coupler. In that instance, we increased the conversions from going all the way through to getting matched with an advisor. Those conversions increased over 525%. Wow. We also, you've heard of bank rate, we did a test with bank rate, where our experience, which even said it was an ad, which was this is hilarious, it even said it was an ad on their thing. This is how we did it.

10:23We still were more than three times more conversions than their own native application. Wow. So we know it works. People like it, they want it. For the reasons we set, we just recently discussed, right? So we know it works. Have you ever heard of this quote? People loved to buy, but they don't want to be sold. Bingo. That's it. And that's what we're doing with this. That's that's exactly what where I was going with that. I originally heard that quote from Jeffrey Gittimer, the sales trainer. I'm sure he got it from someone who got it from someone. But the point is, when we teach and educate, people don't feel pushed. And that's very similar to the chat homes, you know, ultimate sales machine approach of selling and sales. It's like, don't push and buy a deadline and go, go, go, how about let me teach you what you need to understand about this? Well, in your scenario here, this non-gated warm approach, now when people are reaching out to that advisor, they're doing it and they feel like they're doing it on their own accord,

11:24because they are. And now the connection is that much warmer. So that, to me, is the ultimate mic drop to lead generation versus lead conversion. It's not going to be 100%. The advisor still has to be knowledgeable nice and all of that. But those barriers, I feel like you've really taken a huge step to removing a lot of those barriers. We really have. You know, as a set of advisor for 20 years, and I didn't sign up to become a prospecting ninja and all that kind of stuff, I just wanted to sit with people at the kitchen table and help them with their money. And I had to have a relationship with them to do that. So I'm like, why can't we figure out a way to use technology to help do us do more of that? Because also as an advisor, you know, awful it feels when I'm part of a lead generation program where I know the lead was sold to other advisors. Yeah, right. I have to compete for it. Or I know that the information on that lead was data scraped without telling the lead. And now it's kind of creepy, you know, like there's this, it feels really kind of gross as an

12:27advisor. Yeah. And it was a lot of my time and money. So, you know, yes, I wanted the consumer experience to be better, deeper, more in control. But if we do that, let's also improve the advisor experience so we can be the best advisor possible. So then where does coupler sit? It's a white label that integrates in with what your own website or directory listings you're on. Where, what does that look like? Yeah, the, like an ideal use case would be like a large RIA or a wirehouse insurance broker dealer, whatever, there's lots of places we can do it. We will power the find and advisor experience in that instance. Okay. So we will, you click that button and everything from there on, I'll fully embed it on the website. So it's your brand, your logo, everything. But now we power the matching engine, we power all of the advisor profiles, everything done right there. And we even integrate with wealth box and red tail so we can push the leads in there too.

13:31So what we've found, Mike, is that a lot of these firms, even advisors, they don't have a marketing problem. Yeah, they're already doing marketing at some level. And they also, they're already there as the advisor to service that client. But when they're pushing all these people with intent from the market inside into a tool that doesn't convert or has such a terrible experience that almost no one converts like the old like zip code based thing or fill out this former and we'll get in touch with you. Yeah. That's the major disconnect between the intent and the advisor wanting to serve. Yeah. That's why the company's called coupler. We're coupling those two sides together. I love it. It's just spectacular. I think this is something that people really, really need to, you know, it's like it's it's almost like you got this use of football analogy. Here we are coming up a football season. You got at the ball to the one year like now you're just punch it in. And it's like that last piece, you know, that last piece of credibility trust, all of that just ties

14:33right into there. So in reality, if an advisor is listening to this going, I need that. It's not something they reach out and go give it to me unless they can then go to their all the direct relistings that they're on. This is more like raising awareness to get some of the bigger players to go. Let's put this on for our larger group. Yeah. I mean, any firm with a you even 10 advisors would definitely want to look at something like this. But as an individual advisor, you also can take advantage of this. We have a direct product. And then we also have a partnership with the American College of Financial Services. So if you have a designation and good standing with them, you can come on through that channel. And in all cases though, one other thing that we have done is we have gone done extensive work on optimizing for how search is now done in today's day and age, specifically AEO and AI citations. And it's funny. So I'm in the middle or at the end

15:33of doing an audit of over 400 firms and finding advisor tools. And virtually, I would say out of or 400, maybe less than five are actually optimized to be found in AI citation. And there are some large national companies that actually block it entirely. And so it's not that the AI citation is getting giving a bad answer to consumers. It's giving no answer. The advisors literally cannot be found. And so if you come to a couple of direct and sign up, you can be included in that because we've optimized for it. You know, I think what you just said there, we could spend about three hours on right there is the age of AI. And it's and a lot of people think, oh, I'm all about AI. I use Chatshipy T to write my blog post in my. No, right? Nope. It is it is a whole world out there on the AEO, the answer engine optimization because yes, I feel like Google will never, ever, ever go away. People still it's the default. Let me Google it. Let me go look there. But there

16:35is a rising dramatically rising amount of people out there that start their search on AI. And I saw a stat recently that said 25% of a fluent retiree, a pre retirees or fluent people are starting their search for an advisor on AI. And what is AI going to say about you if people are going, hey, let me look for a retirement specialist in my area. Huge question. That's it. That's it. That is what is happening, whether they do it in a normal Google browser because the first answer there is an AI citation now or write in chat, GPT or whatever your preferences for a tool. If you're not there, if you're not being able to show up, then you're going to you're going to miss that stuff. You know, it's the whole I don't know who ever said this Mike. Maybe you do. But like one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book is go where people are and be present. And people are on AI now.

17:36Like I read somewhere Google sets on like there are over a billion searches now. We're already happening in an AI directly. So like you should probably be there, you know. Yeah. Well, I've heard people say, hey, man, 50% of my marketing is working like a gangbusters. I just don't know which 50% it is. So you got to you got to know your numbers. You got to have the right things in place. And there's never some switch that you flip and hallelujah. You know, here comes a flood of people every single day. They're all closing. We know that. But if you can polish a little here, polish little there. It's like Darren Hardy says in his book, The Compound Effect. If you can just tweak and improve small percentage points in multiple areas, you have that compound effect. So I think this is just spectacular. Derek. It's really amazing to see how this is really, really coming together for advisors to really warm up those connections. So I love hearing all the things you're doing. If someone is interested in reaching out and connecting with you and learning more, what's the best way they can do that? Yeah. I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's how you and I

18:38found each other. You know, through some of another podcast with Jeremy. I did. And so definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just don't spam me. Don't try to sell me like a roll over or something. You know, just send me a happy happy to connect. I'm human. Let's be real. Let's be real. Real. Real. Yeah. Don't use AI to send me some spammy message. Yeah. Yeah. LinkedIn's perfect. And then also just you can always check out coupler directly at that just coupler dot AI. Love it. Well, Derek, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Mike. Really appreciate it. So a fun conversation.