Can you simply articulate your process for clients, from the here and now to their ideal future? Have you found a way to engage with potential clients even when they’ve exited that first meeting?
If you’re an experienced adviser you’ll at the least have developed an informal procedure for a prospective client meeting. You’ll have the ability to get an understanding of a client’s needs, while also conveying your planning process so potential clients have a grasp of what you can do for them.
But is your potential client going to take everything in? That first meeting is often an overwhelming one.
When someone asks what I do, I often have to joke that I talk and listen for a living because if I couldn’t engage with clients, I couldn’t actually conduct any financial planning. The reality is, you may well be the most gifted and technically knowledgeable financial planner in the world, but you still need to be able to convey your advice process and how you’ll create value for the prospective client.
From a technical perspective, I’m confident that I and the advisers in our dealer group have the ability to create value for our clients through our technical knowledge. However, we’d often wondered could we all better communicate with clients and prospective clients by simplifying our process and offering an easy to follow guide to their journey.
So that’s what we did and our advisers couldn’t be happier.
Using our advisers’ collective wisdom, we distilled the financial planning process down to key basics. We highlighted the stages of the planning process using non-technical overviews that everyone can identify with and it’s easy to explain.
Six stages and a simple graphic now help break down barriers for prospective clients and allow them something to reference after they leave the meeting. From the perspective of the client, it’s an overview of their financial journey and from our perspective it’s an overview of our advice process.
The six stages we’ve identified also helped guide the redesign of our SOAs. So if prospective clients become clients, they then have a useful reference point to draw from when consulting SOAs and other advice documents we produce.
For advisers it means they have a concise overview that articulates our value proposition and how they help the client. It also offers the ability to drill down and expand on each stage.
The outcome has been improved communication and understanding for both the client and the adviser.
Peter is the managing director of FYG Planners. He is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) who started in the financial services industry in 1981. A specialist in business development, Peter’s role primarily focuses on providing strategic planning advice to FYG Planners on its future direction, improving the technical skill base of the group, identifying business growth opportunities and services that can be developed for use by FYG Planners Advisers.
