The proven process of
the adviser-client relationship provides a great blueprint to help firms
optimize their work
July 15, 2020 By Eric Clarke
By this
point in our remote-service reality, we should know which parts of our
businesses are thriving and which need help. Advisers who have recovered from
the considerable shock of the past few months have devoted a lot of sweat
equity to the problem areas of their practices. It’s a good start, but it is
still only a start.
When
someone adopts new technology, our advice has always been to go beyond
replicating old workflows. New tools are a chance to look at the big picture
and push natural limits.
It’s time
for advisers to be just as intentional about their businesses as a whole. How
do your tools and resources come together to meet your business goals and give
your clients the best possible service? It’s a hard question to ask in a
volatile time when resources might be a little more scarce. But in my
experience, the proven process of the adviser-client relationship provides a
great blueprint to help advisers optimize their work.
The
adviser-client relationship isn’t just the core of what you do, it is a clear
pattern that can be iterated on and improved. First, advisers look for
prospects who need their help, people who will help their business grow in
return. Then they work with those potential clients to build financial plans
tailored to their financial goals. They execute on investment strategies in
alignment with their financial plan in an effort to put them on the right path.
Then they share their results, check to see if their clients’ needs have
changed, and search for new opportunities. We have distilled the process into
four broad stages: Prospect, Plan, Invest and Achieve.
Each of
these categories invites advisers to look at how their resources and priorities
stack up to what their clients demand: a tech-enabled fiduciary process to
strengthen client relationships and future-proof their businesses.
Prospect. Many of
our clients admit they struggle to promote their work as financial advisers.
They became advisers to help people, not to be marketers. A lack of resources
and experience only adds to the challenge of attracting prospects. Without a
dedicated marketing team, third-party help or purpose-built technology, you’re
probably left cobbling
together a marketing strategy between client appointments.
In a
remote-work world, that’s not enough. What can you do to connect your
prospecting efforts directly to your planning capabilities? Do your campaigns
spur prospects to act immediately, and can you capture and measure those first
steps in a seamless client experience?
Plan. Here’s
something we don’t talk about enough: Is your planning process engaging? Not
just effective, but actually enjoyable for your client? Too many of us want to
be exhaustive in our planning approach, and just end up exhausting our clients
instead. Your goal should be to have a plan for everyone you work with, to earn
more wallet share and help your clients strive for financial independence.
You’ll know you’re on the right track when you see them logging more time in
their planning tools than checking their balances and fretting over returns.
But it’s a tall order if your planning does not speak to the reasons why your
prospects came to you in the first place.
Invest: Effective
investment management means more than walking clients through a questionnaire
to establish risk tolerance. Do you find yourself having to justify to clients
why their assets aren’t beating benchmarks and indices? Or have
you built a rapport that lets you connect their investments to
their specific goals and planning needs? You can’t get there without an arsenal
of technology solutions that are not only accurate and efficient, but also
connect the entire adviser-client relationship in an intuitive way.
Achieve: When I
say “achieve,” I mean bringing the entire process together and showing the
results to your clients. Our industry does a poor job of telling clients
exactly how we’ve helped them. To bridge this gap, advisers need to tie their
reporting back to achieving a client’s planning goals. Business intelligence
and analytics connected to the proven process of the adviser-client
relationship allow you to follow through on the promises you made while
prospecting. When these tools work in lockstep with the other three pillars,
you’ll know … because you’ll be sharing the kind of success stories with
clients that excite them enough to refer you to their friends.
Of
course, this is much easier said than done. None of us are perfect, and none of
us have operated under ideal conditions for the last few months. But the
headwinds of this year challenged us like never before to invest wisely in our
businesses.
If advisers can find a way to seamlessly attract new clients; connect
goals more meaningfully to investment strategies and outcomes; and ultimately
track progress toward each investor’s unique definition of financial success,
they’ll be in a great position to strengthen their client relationships, gain a
competitive edge in a crowded marketplace and build strong, profitable
businesses.
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