Most advisors who have been around for a while and are serious about the business have collected at least one designation - look at the business card of some advisors and you'd think they were saving letters for their next game of scrabble. With the alphabet soup of designations out there (CFA, CFP, CHFC, ChP, CIM and CLU are only the ones that start with the letter C), it's little wonder that advisors find that their credentials seem to have little benefit or credibility-building impact.

Unlike being able to say that you have a CA or LLB, recognized designations that bestow instant credibility, the proliferation of designations for financial advisors means that none has emerged as the standard that investors recognize.If your reason for getting a designation was simply a reflection of your commitment to the business and a reaffirmation of your professionalism, this may not matter to you. If on the other hand at least part of the reason for the time, effort and expense of getting that extra designation was to help grow your business, it's a problem.

At some point in the future, there may be a unified designation for financial advisors that investors will equate with professionalism and commitment to the business. Until that happens, it's not clients' fault for failing to see the value in the designations we've earned, it's ours - to get mileage from your designation, you need to link the expertise it represents to a concrete benefit for clients.

That doesn't mean you should drone on about the many hours of study which getting that latest designation entailed. It does mean, however, that you need to develop a concise, one or two sentence summary of what your designation represents and why it matters to clients. You typically want to talk to clients about your designations when you begin working together and update them on new designations in your annual reviews. And be sure to let clients know about your investment in continuing education - clients want to feel their advisors are current and offer state of the art advice.

On June 9, I am co hosting a conference in Toronto, featuring top performing advisors from a variety of different backgrounds. Among the speakers will be Dodee Frost Crockett from Merrill Lynch in Dallas, where she heads a team with $1 billion under management. (There's still time to sign up for this - for info go to www.topadvisorsummit.com).

In taking a hard look at her business a couple of years back, Dodee realized that a significant number of new clients who'd come on board over the past while were women going through a divorce. Dodee also knew that this target was becoming increasingly hotly contested by other advisors in the Dallas marketplace.

After some digging, she identified the designation of Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (offered by the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts) as something that would expand her knowledge in this area and also provide credibility and a point of difference. While primarily intended to give advisors the ability to provide litigation support during trials, Dodee found that this paid off in a very different way. Many of the women who came to her arrived through referrals from their lawyers and accountants; in her conversations with these professionals, Dodee was able to talk about her higher level of expertise in working with divorcees and her focus in this area. As proof, she described the program of study she had undergone to qualify for the designation of Certified Divorce Financial Analyst.

The result? She has become the go to advisor in Dallas for women emerging from marriages and has increased her referrals (already high) to women going through a divorce.

This was one advisor's experience - and won't fit for you. The principle does apply though. Ask yourself if there's a particular client demographic you want to focus on in your practice (seniors? business owners? retailers? people interested in leaving bequests to charity?) and if there's a specific course of study you can pursue to enhance your capability and qualifications to serve that group. Just remember, doing the work to get a designation is only the first step - to make accreditations pay off you have to clearly communicate why they're significant and how they translate into clear benefits for clients.