A Time For Change (Part 2) – Change The Way You Manage Relationships

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

If you are going to make changes in your busi­ness, why not start with the most impor­tant fac­tor – your client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment processes.

Finan­cial advi­sors, in gen­eral, do a pretty poor job of man­ag­ing client rela­tion­ships.  That is both a prob­lem and an oppor­tu­nity.  We will look at both in this article.

Your clients are the lifeblood of your busi­ness.  At work­shops I have deliv­ered over the past 14 years, I have fre­quently made the com­ment, “you are not in the invest­ment busi­ness, you are in the rela­tion­ship man­age­ment business”.

I recently changed that to “you are not in the invest­ment busi­ness, you are in the client project man­age­ment busi­ness”.  I will dis­cuss this in more detail in a future blog.

The prob­lem with my orig­i­nal state­ment is that cur­rent meth­ods of man­ag­ing rela­tion­ships are right out of sales school.  We used to do a ses­sion where we asked par­tic­i­pants about what they did to cre­ate WOW expe­ri­ences for clients.  The responses were gen­er­ally pretty sim­i­lar:
 
 
 

• Bak­ing cook­ies in the office to cre­ate a pleas­ant aroma
• Send­ing Thanks­giv­ing cards
• Phon­ing clients on their birth­days or anniversaries

As a typ­i­cal Baby Boomer, I seek a very pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ship with advi­sors I work with.  I look for peo­ple who are com­pe­tent and pro­fes­sional, who are pleas­ant to deal with and have a good sense of humor, who under­stand my pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties and who I feel are 100% com­mit­ted to help­ing me achieve the best outcome.

Hon­estly, I could care less if your office smells like cook­ies and I def­i­nitely do not want to receive a birth­day card and espe­cially not one of those elec­tronic ver­sions with music and bal­loons.  If you sent me a Thanks­giv­ing card, I would ask to be taken off your list.  I hate mail and get too many e-mail.  I do not want to receive paper state­ments – they drive me crazy.

I want to know when we are going to meet and when I am going to hear from you for the next 12 to 24 months and expect that you will respect me enough to always be on time.  I want every meet­ing to have an agenda and I don’t want to be baf­fled by num­bers and BS.  I never want to feel like I am being sold some­thing.  I want meet­ings to be effi­cient so that I can min­i­mize the amount of time I spend on wealth man­age­ment.  If you invite me to a client appre­ci­a­tion event, I will not come unless I can bring one of my adult chil­dren but I might come if it is a sport­ing event.  I want you to check in with me reg­u­larly to find out whether I am sat­is­fied and I will respond honestly.

If we are work­ing on retire­ment plan­ning, I care that we are work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively, based on my pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties and that we have a plan in place to grow through reg­u­lar con­tri­bu­tions and that you are keep­ing me account­able and rec­om­mend­ing invest­ments that pro­vide me with the high­est rate of return at an appro­pri­ate risk level.  I care more about pre­serv­ing wealth than build­ing wealth.  I want to man­age my money based on a goals-based approach where each pur­pose is iden­ti­fied and a port­fo­lio devel­oped and per­for­mance reported for each.  If we did a finan­cial plan and we did not plan and imple­ment the rec­om­men­da­tions of the plan, I would be very frus­trated and would seek another advisor.

I want to know that we are in a sec­u­lar bear mar­ket so my expec­ta­tions are real­is­tic and I want detailed infor­ma­tion about who is man­ag­ing my money (you or invest­ment man­agers), how they are qual­i­fied to man­age it and how they are invest­ing it.  I do not sim­ply want to  focus on the results.

I want to use tech­nol­ogy – tech­nol­ogy to con­duct meet­ings so I do not have to travel to your office to meet face-to-face.  I am too busy for that.  I want my per­sonal affairs to very well orga­nized.  I’d pre­fer an online work­space where I can col­lab­o­rate with my advi­sor, share doc­u­ments and that links me to infor­ma­tion about my wealth plan and invest­ments – not just the num­bers but how and why the invest­ment man­ager is man­ag­ing my money.  (Shame­less plug – Watch our Client Roadmap video to see how to do this)

I do want to feel like my advi­sor under­stands my inter­ests and cares about me.  I like things that are per­sonal and that I feel are done for me based on my inter­ests.  Cards are too imper­sonal.  I can see my advi­sor sign­ing a bunch of them at a time and hav­ing them sent out.  Per­sonal sup­port makes me feel spe­cial and will lead me to rec­om­mend my friends and colleagues.

How is poor rela­tion­ship man­age­ment by advi­sors an advan­tage?  If peo­ple, in gen­eral, are frus­trated with their rela­tion­ship man­age­ment pro­grams with advi­sors, your busi­ness devel­op­ment efforts will be more pro­duc­tive if you have good prac­tices that deliver results.

I’m really sur­prised that most advi­sors do not have a process for iden­ti­fy­ing their clients’ pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties.  You can com­plete one that we devel­oped by click­ing on the link below:

Pref­er­ences and Priorities Survey

Every client has unique pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties.  If you are deal­ing with Depres­sion or War Babies instead of Baby Boomers, you will get com­pletely dif­fer­ent responses and will need to use less tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to obtain them.   The impor­tant thing is to iden­tify them and develop a plan based on them.  The only way to get high lev­els of client sat­is­fac­tion is to iden­tify each client’s unique pref­er­ences and pri­or­i­ties and deliver pro­grams based on them.

If you want to build a great busi­ness, you need to have great rela­tion­ship man­age­ment processes.

This is the sec­ond in a series of arti­cles writ­ten by Bob Simp­son, Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Future arti­cles will address strate­gies and tac­tics to make pos­i­tive changes to your busi­ness model so you can thrive in a world of change.

About Bob Simpson

Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sult­ing has been coach­ing finan­cial advi­sors since 1998.

Bob Simp­son, pres­i­dent and founder of Syn­chronic­ity has been involved, directly or indi­rectly in the finan­cial ser­vices indus­try since 1981. He has been a very suc­cess­ful finan­cial advi­sor with Nes­bitt Thom­son Inc., a major Cana­dian finan­cial insti­tu­tion. Between 1981 and 1989, he built a busi­ness with more than $120 mil­lion in assets under man­age­ment and was one of the first Cana­dian advi­sors to build a team.

You can fol­low Bob Simp­son via:

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Tags: Anniversaries, Baby Boomer, Birthday Card, Client Relationship Management, Client Relationships, E Mail, Electronic Versions, Financial Advisors, Good Sense Of Humor, Investment Business, Lifeblood, Management Processes, Managing Relationships, Paper Statements, Poor Job, Professional Relationship, Project Management Business, Sense Of Humor, Thanksgiving Card, Thanksgiving Cards
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