There is an enormous opportunity for advisers in a post-FoFA world to re-establish relationships with inactive clients and engage them with good quality advice. The most effective way to do this is through understanding and following a four-step process.
The first fundamental step is to ‘know your why’ as a business. Be explicitly clear about what it is you do and why you’re in business, and then share that across your team so everyone in your business knows why you are in business.
Second, be very clear on your client value proposition, what kind of advice you offer and the specific kind of clients you deliver that advice to. Revisiting this process can help you understand what inactive clients you are going to target for re-engagement.
Third, establish contact with these inactive clients through a simple phone call. Our research tells us that these clients welcome the opportunity to re-engage with a view to discussing their financial future. While there will be some that choose not to do so, the vast majority are only too happy to come back in and rebuild that trusted advice relationship.
Fourth, as you bring these clients in and discuss their financial circumstances, avoid taking the approach of a practice that might rely on assets under advice. Instead, talk to the client about them and ask them to do one of a couple of things.
A simple but very effective approach is to ask them to draw a family tree. Whether it’s on a piece of paper or whiteboard, they should draw a map of the people who are important in their lives, and simply talk to you about these people. What comes from that is extraordinarily powerful, which is an understanding of what keeps clients up at night, what they’re stressed about or what makes them happy – this is what really matters in their lives. This provides you with a great insight into how you can re-engage with clients and then understand the services they might seek from your business.
The other way of re-engaging with the client is to ask them some simple questions about what success looks like in their lives now, and what it looks like five years from now across five areas: home life, friends, health, personal development and their community. If they can rate how things are in each of these areas in their lives now and talk to you about where they would like to be in the future, this is another great conversation starter about what is important to the client.
So these two approaches address the same issue, which is getting to know the real needs of the client. We have seen examples where our practices re-engage clients and have these conversations with them, and they lead to lead to extraordinary outcomes for both the client in getting their advice needs met, and extraordinary outcomes for the business in re-engaging inactive clients. For very little marketing cost and very little expenditure in terms of time, effort and energy, re-engaging inactive clients through these approaches is a great way to improve your business and its profitability.
