(L to R): Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the final part of a three part series, we look at the innovations advisers are introducing into their practices and how they see innovation changing the way they do business. (Read the first roundtable here, read the second roundtable here).

Who’s who

Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Winner, AFA Adviser of the Year

Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Winner, AFA Practice of the Year

Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Brad Fox, CEO of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

———-

AdviserVoice: How does innovation manifest itself in your business?

Catherine Robson

Catherine Robson: The challenge for me as a small business owner is not getting too distracted by the bright shiny idea. Innovation is fantastic but it’s absolutely useless without good implementation. So, I have an advisory board that does that for me, who’s like, “Yeah, yeah, sounds interesting. How are we going to implement it sustainably? How is it actually going to work?”

AdviserVoice: So, what are some of the ideas that they’ve said “yes” to?

Catherine Robson: The big challenge we’ve got at the moment is to build an international team for part of our administration capability and the opportunity to find really well-qualified people that really care about doing a good job. So, you know, for us, we’ll have one of our team in the Philippines and culturally it’s our obligation to make sure that she’s absolutely part of our team and she’s embedded with our values and she’s had the opportunity to spend time in Australia to understand what we do. So, it’s a very serious commitment for us.

I think one of the things that’s been brilliant for us in terms of having a team member who’s integral to our work that sits in a remote location is that your processes need to be absolutely spot-on because you can’t just wander over to their desk and go, “I didn’t really mean that, I meant this.” So, that has been excellent for us in terms of thinking about the scalability of our business because it’s put the acid on us to really explain properly and have discipline around what are the processes and how do we automate them.

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: From a technology perspective, we’re very fortunate we have some individual capabilities with our practice that are amazing and we have built some capabilities that are significantly better than XPLAN in regards to the way it produces material that makes it easy to understand. But the only reason we could do that is because we have absolute geeks who at night go home and play with Excel and they love it.

PJ Byrne: One of the best innovations we’ve put into the business is our online review system. So, we were doing the traditional send a letter out to invite someone for an annual review, do the checklist, and here’s a reply paid envelope, and that got sent off in a mail box and then I didn’t really know if it got there. And then, occasionally, a form would come back saying want to increase or decrease or whatever.

So, in February we started sending it out on email, and it’s awesome. It’s actually an invitation for review and they’ve got four buttons to choose from – “Yes, I’d like to catch up for review”. Another is “No, thanks. I don’t want a review this year. Happy with everything.”

PJ Byrne

From a compliance point, we get that straight back, straight into the database. Another button on there is, “Yes, please, investigate a claim,” because we want to re-wake them up to say, “Hey, if you’ve had any serious illness or injury let us know”.

Paul Forbes: For us, clients actually do like phone calls and they do like some physical sort of contact versus the social media.

We’re now moving to XPLAN and we’ve built templates all through that to make sure we remember to touch base after three months. It pops up at the start of the week to say ring these two people to say hello and make sure they’ve got everything, we haven’t spoken to them for three months. And, if they have, there’s a file note there that someone’s already spoken to them in the last three months. But it just keeps reminding us to touch base with these people because they don’t remember emails, they remember telephone calls.

Paul Forbes

Eleanor Dartnall: Along the technology side, I’m no geek. I’m the wrong generation. So, I pulled my son who is a geek out of his job and he worked with us full-time for six months. He built our websites and for Blueprint which is for our young people, we feed them all of their advice because they’re too busy to come in for a one-on-one meeting. They have a one-on-one journey right through to the statement of advice and giving us informed consent. From then on, they haven’t got time. So, if I want to know how they’re going, we don’t call them up; we text them.

The next thing, of course, is we’ve got all these clients who have to do corporate actions, so instead of getting it all out in the mail, they’ve all got to login to the website for their client advice that they get automatically that generates an email, “Please check, sign in, have a look at your advice,” and then they have to push a button, “Yes, we want to accept that corporate action or we don’t.” The default, if they don’t get back to us is we decline them. Can’t tell you how many hours that’s saved – huge. And compliance has signed off on it.

Chris Browne: My frustration is that we don’t have a big safety net under new entrants to the financial advice industry, so about two and a half months ago we launched a business called Club RT. It’s got three pillars. It’s got business coaching because, you know, you can get someone like [Catherine Robson] leaving the National Australia Bank as the best financial planner in Australia but what they forget is they don’t have the business acumen to run a business and know the right time to hire staff and how to indoctrinate them into the culture and they don’t consider the systems and processes. The second one is just licensing infrastructure, giving these new entrants access to Worksorted so they can do their commission and fee reconciliation.

Eleanor Dartnall

And the final pillar is the serviced office because, if I think about Chris Browne eight years ago, I was working down at the front bedroom of my house in Yarraville and it looks bad. So, rather than expecting new entrants to spend $36,000 a year on rent and getting an office out in Sunbury, we’re saying, “Well, work at home 50 percent of the time but, when you need to meet with the client, when you need to share a coffee with a mate to work out what went wrong in that last appointment or what went right, you’ve actually got an environment where you can do this.”

AdviserVoice: Okay. So, what’s the next big thing? We’re looking into the future, into our crystal balls. What does the next 12 months hold?

Brad Fox

Brad Fox: The next couple of years holds the most enormous opportunity for financial advice there has ever been. The demographic demand for advice is going to explode to around about 3,000 to 4,000 people a week retiring four years from now. The challenge for us is how well we want to meet the supply for advice and it’s got to be quality.

Chris Browne: I think the big change over the course of the next 12 months is that we need to raise the bar. It’s not just an accreditation like the CFP or AFA’s equivalent FChFP. It’s coupled with experience. I think that young advisers need to be sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with experienced advisers and they need to be in good businesses – you know, well-systematized businesses.

Chris Browne

Paul Forbes: I think the unintended consequence of FOFA is really moving everything away from product to advice. It’s a much safer world to live in. We’re going to see naked pricing, we’re going to see rebates gone, we’re going to see people actively using rebates to reduce prices to clients, and that’s when we can sit back and say to the client, “That’s what I’ll charge you. That’s all there is to it.”

Catherine Robson: I love the technology. It’s beautiful and it really does some sensational things around helping you manage your behaviour. So, I think, as an industry, we need to recognize that we could be wrong footed really easily by something like a beautiful solution to finances. If we’re not really clear on what value we add we could find ourselves being irrelevant dinosaurs.

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall: If you see a shift in changing remuneration or pricing models, particularly with insurance, and it gets back to the quality of advice that’s actually being given, there are a lot of advisers who won’t be able to survive in that world because currently their proposition is “I’ll shop around next year and wait for the best prices”. And so, it’s going to come back to that: how are you packaging up that value of advice discussion and, if someone does it on technology, that’s a massive game-changer.

———-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards gave separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners were announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

The post Roundtable part 3: Innovation appeared first on AdviserVoice.

(L to R): Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the second of a three part series, we look at the reputation of financial advisers in the broader community and what can be done to improve it. (Read the first roundtable here, read the third roundtable here).

Who’s who

Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist in AFA Adviser of the Year

Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Winner, AFA Adviser of the Year

Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist in AFA Practice of the Year

Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Winner, AFA Practice of the Year

Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Brad Fox, CEO of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)

Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

 ———-

AdviserVoice: How do you think that advisers are perceived now compared to, say, 12 months ago or 24 months ago?

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: It’s declined, because if you Google “financial planning” now, you’ll get snippets of what happened to Commonwealth Bank and Macquarie and blah blah blah. So, really, with what’s happened recently, it probably has tarnished our industry a little bit.

Paul Forbes: Advisers are the meat in the sandwich in the campaign between instos and industry funds and that’s really hurt us. It’s got nothing to do with advice. Industry funds keep coming out and saying “we don’t pay advisers or we don’t pay commissions” – of course they don’t, they don’t do advice. So, every time I see social media jump up and all the responses come up from advisers and they shred each other. Wake up to yourselves for goodness sake. This has nothing to do with us.

Brad Fox: We’ve been on the record a number of times as reminding the industry funds that they’re a product provider. The challenge is with how they’re developing their models at the moment. They want to be an advice provider but they want to do it without meeting the same best interest test that other advisers do.

AdviserVoice: Do you think that there are any other wedge drivers? Any other manipulators of image?

Paul Forbes

Chris Browne: Ease of entry. I saw Ray White is moving into financial planning. I look at that and I think if I wasn’t in the industry, my perception of the industry would lower again. I think there needs to be more rigor to be a financial planner – education and shoulder-to-shoulder experience.

Catherine Robson: I think, as an industry, we need to move from advocacy about ourselves to advocacy on our behalf by consumers because we’re doing such as good job. It’s got to be us as an industry being judged by our actions, not our words.

Catherine Robson

But I think there’s also power in actually advocating for other advisers. Part of what this forum is all about to me is the connection the advisers make with each other. And having had the opportunity to get to know Eleanor [Dartnall] so well over the last 12 months, there’s another adviser that I would trust with my own family. So when there’s a client that I can’t look after, it’s fantastic to have that, and also to be able to tell the story about why another adviser is fantastic. And, as a community of advisers, I think that’s a really good investment for us to make.

Brad Fox: When we talk about being profession, that’s what professions do, they don’t tear each other apart.

Catherine Robson: Just because you’re a profession doesn’t make everyone fantastic, but I think you raise the bar to the point where you feel comfortable that there are people that you genuinely trust.

AdviserVoice: What’s one idea that you have at the top of your head that could help turn the reputation around?

Chris Browne

Michael Nowak: I’d start with mainstream journalists. We need to educate them. I believe that they’re starting with a very low level of knowledge about what advisers do and the benefits that we provide, and we could make some huge inroads if we just engage them over time and if they’re aware of how we help Australians.

Chris Browne: I think we’ve just got to roll out the right advisers to them, you know? It’s got to be people of this calibre as opposed to anyone.

Michael Nowak

Brad Fox: Just imagine we got half the advisers in Australia next week, say 8,000 of them, to tell one true recent claim story to a thousand people: we just communicated to 8 million Australians – a third of the population – in a week about what you do. It’s not hard.

Catherine Robson: Being part of an industry body is such an important value add for me, particularly as a business owner, because you get the opportunity to meet advisers and hear what they’re doing. Why do you think there aren’t more advisers who are joining the industry bodies and being part of it?

Brad Fox: There is no motivation in their mind to need to do it, and that can be an experienced adviser who thinks they already have the work that they need or it might be someone that just doesn’t earn enough to want to spend $500 on a membership. It seems quite ridiculous but they’re the sorts of responses that you get.

AdviserVoice: What’s the proportion of advisers who are members of a body?

Brad Fox: Well, 16,000 to 18,000 advisers is the commonly used number and about half of them. There’s a risk that they might water down a great culture. So, we’ve actually got to manage that as we’re going to go through the announcements that have been made over the last six weeks by different bodies and different licensees about going towards compulsory membership of a professional body. We’ve got to make sure that we get to interact face-to-face with those advisers to bring them into our culture rather than let them think it’s a tick-a-box exercise – “I’m now a better adviser.”

Brad Fox

Chris Browne: To indoctrinate them into the AFA culture, I reckon we should actually create accreditation around ethics – train people around ethical issues.

Brad Fox: We actually have one, Chris. It’s one of the four units for the Fellow Chartered Financial Practitioner FChFP. When you’ve done that one unit, it’s all ethics, you qualify for the entry level designation Associated Chartered Financial Practitioner AChFP.

Chris Browne: Well, I think it needs to sit in a silo and it needs to tackle things like pricing, it needs to tackle things like churning, it needs to roll out people like us because I’ve sat down with countless young advisers who have got their first job with a bloke out in Boronia who’s a pretty average adviser and they actually think that they’re doing the right thing. They actually think that (behaviour like) churning is okay.

Brad Fox: That’s one of the options the board is considering is to how we land on that and when can we land on that.

Tapel Cafer: We need a multi-prong approach. We talked about the younger generation we need to educate, but when you’ve got the older group who are educating young advisers in the old style we need to tackle them as well. There’s so many fires here we’ve got to tackle from so many angles, it’s an intergenerational thing.

———-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards gave separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners were announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

The post Roundtable part 2: Reputation of advisers appeared first on AdviserVoice.

Chris Browne, Catherine Robson, Paul Forbes, Michael Nowak, Eleanor Dartnall, Brad Fox, PJ Byrne, Tapel Cafer, Andy Marshall

On the eve of the Finalist showcase, AdviserVoice gathered together all of the finalists for the AFA Adviser of the Year and Practice of the Year Awards along with awards partner Zurich for a round table discussion to share ideas and canvass industry issues.

Here in the first of a three part series, we look at their view of the state of financial literacy and what financial advisers are doing to help raise standards of financial literacy within the community. (Read the second roundtable here, read the third roundtable here).

Who’s who

• Catherine Robson, Affinity Private – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• PJ Byrne, Mr Insurance – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• Eleanor Dartnall, Dartnall Advisers – Finalist, AFA Adviser of the Year
• Paul Forbes, Robina Financial Solutions – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Chris Browne, Rising Tide – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Tapel Cafer, Complete Financial Balance – Finalist, AFA Practice of the Year
• Michael Nowak, Joe Nowak Financial Services Group and National President of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)
• Brad Fox, CEO, Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)
• Andy Marshall, Head of Sales Strategies and Research for Zurich’s retail risk business

——————–

AdviserVoice: First of all, I’d like to hear from you all how you’d rate your own clients’ financial literacy, specifically in relation to insurance issues.

Catherine Robson

Catherine Robson: We deal with professional people who are often very highly educated and take notice of financial issues. While they know their facts and figures, they find it difficult to apply that to themselves and their own behaviour, and so that’s why they need an adviser. And I think one of the blind spots for them is insurance because while, theoretically, they know that it’s a good idea, somehow, they think they are exempt from the laws of the universe and it’s not going to happen to them.

PJ Byrne: We have a client base that spreads across the Australian demographic so we do mums and dads through to business owners. In terms of clients’ literacy, it’s just about encouraging them to invest the time to

PJ Byrne

understand what they need to understand and get it right the first time, and that’s where advisers can make a difference – to tell them that you do get what you pay for.

Paul Forbes: I think people actually understand the broader context but I don’t think they understand how it applies to them. So, if I look at the people who come to us, some of them will understand it. They will have done quite well in their lives. But one of the questions they really don’t get is “How much is enough?” They actually don’t know when they can retire.

Chris Browne: We spend a lot of time in the early days just bringing them up to speed. We don’t talk about

Paul Forbes

insurance; we talk about “What’s your Plan B?” and I think that’s talking in their language as opposed to our language, and I think that’s really, really important. And, also, it’s important to know that there is no silver bullet and we need to consider things like internet clips on YouTube. We need to think about going out and educating people in their work places, and we need to think about the wider media.

Eleanor Dartnall: We had a huge financial literacy issue with self-funded

Chris Browne

retirees. Most of those clients were professional. You had to insist that they brought their spouse with them because the assets were also in their name, and I had quite a journey to get them to realize that I needed to teach their wives. You know, I had to use very mundane language. I would say “if you’re a 70-year-old engineer, it’s a monty that you’re going to go first and your wife’s going to be vulnerable to the first bit of rubbish advice she gets”. And then, they’ll say, “Well, will you teach her?”

AdviserVoice: What are the barriers to better financial literacy?

Tapel Cafer: When we’re talking about the younger generation, this is a serious topic that they actually haven’t listened to because it’s not really going to apply to them. So, you’ve got to find different ways to relate to them. You could be using comic sketch via social media to get to get to that audience.

Eleanor Dartnall

Chris Browne: The important piece is just meeting clients where they want to be met. I think, too often, we dictate how they interact with our business. You know, it’s the big board room or it’s the stiff meeting room and all that sort of stuff. Some people don’t care about stuff like that.

Brad Fox: I think technology is an enabler. We have to change how we reach out and social media can be part of that, but also reaching different audiences, choosing different language for different audiences, different communication means. We need to change the whole perception about insurance – from a discretionary purchase item in an Australian household to an essential purchase item.

Tapel Cafer

Tapel Cafer: One of the best forms of marketing we have found is actually peer to peer. We’re very big in the medical space and we do a lot of sponsorships at conferences and it’s an educational process. We have a large number of orthopaedic surgeons as clients and registrars as clients, they come in and speak on our behalf. Not only endorsing our company but endorsing the insurance industry because they now truly value the insurance industry because they have lived it. They have lived the trauma of someone being diagnosed or having the accident. They’ve also learned the insurance industry does actually pay – not watching a video, this is actually hearing it from their mouths.

AdviserVoice: How do you get to the people before they come in your door? How do get them to come in your door?

Brad Fox

Brad Fox: Whenever you’re trying to create mass influence, you’ve got to find where the gatekeepers are and how do we influence the influencers which are those gatekeepers. You know school teachers are the classic ones to meet kids.

Chris Browne: Over the course of the last twelve months, we’ve done 18 wealth workshops in small businesses and, sometimes, the person of influence – the CEO of that business – does an introduction and says,  “Bring in the team, they look after my financial affairs. I’m really, really pleased so I’ve invited them in to do a lunchtime session with you”. We’ve found that the amount of traction that we get with that audience is far superior to the opportunities where we’re invited in, we’re doing the presentation but we don’t get the endorsement from the CEO. We might get 50 percent that come along and meet with us, but it’s not the 90 percent that we would with the endorsement from the CEO.

Andy Marshall

Andy Marshall: I did a presentation this week and asked the audience if they knew the Risk Store stats on how many claims were paid out last year? The audience were financial advisers, it was a room of 125 people and no one knew. No-one, that’s appalling because you should know that but it’s also what you then do with that stat because with that stat you can actually make it real and say, “What that actually means, Mr. and Mrs. Client, is that 170-plus families got X million dollars paid out a day.” That would join the dots. They know bad stuff happens but it’s about the reassurance piece and I think what we need to factor is how do you reassure people that there’s something really positive from interacting with an adviser?

———————-

The Association of Financial Advisers Awards will give separate recognition to the best individual adviser and to best advice practice for the first time this year. The winners will be announced at the AFA National Adviser Conference, to be held in Cairns, October 12-14. Zurich has proudly partnered with the Adviser of the Year Award since its inception in 2003 and now also for the inaugural Practice of the Year Award.

The post Roundtable part 1: Financial literacy featuring the AFA Practice of the Year and Adviser of the Year finalists appeared first on AdviserVoice.

(Click here to read the first instalment in this series and click here to read the second instalment.)

Making a ‘selfie’ video

Making a ‘selfie’ video It’s only natural for some people to recoil at the thought of having to appear in a video however, the really very simple rule is to just be you – don’t try to be something or someone you are not – just think about it as a conversation with another person. While you might find that you feel uncomfortable when you begin filming a video of yourself and you might look very ‘wooden’, just keep the camera rolling and it’s very likely that when you start talking about topics that you are passionate and knowledgeable about, you might almost forget about the camera and the ‘real’ you begins to show-up in the vision.
To help you to relax a little more it can help to not look at the camera but rather look to someone who is sitting next to the camera. That person could genuinely ask the questions – interview you – or you could simply pretend the question has been asked and you are responding by talking to that person.  For many people, talking to another person – speaking naturally – will be far more natural and far easier to do than reading to camera from a prepared script.

Context

That said you do need to think of the context of the scene you are creating. If you want to be seen to speak directly to the person who has ‘clicked’ on the video on your website, for example, you will need to look and speak directly to the camera.

However, if you want the scene to be more akin to the viewer watching you have a conversation with another person – or be seen to be interviewed by someone else – simply look just off to one side of the camera.

Plan the production

You need to plan ahead when you film your video and be prepared with a range of topics or issues you wish to address in the video. However, it’s important to avoid scripting your dialogue because it can come across as very disingenuous and do more harm than good. (recall some of the most disliked television commercials over time)

Editing – the ‘polish’ on the end product

There are various applications and software that you can access to assist with editing your vision and audio. Editing really can improve the raw footage and can bring a video to life full of the best aspects of your filming minus the not so beneficial sections.

However…

If you experiment with some video production and no matter how well prepared you were – no matter how hard you worked at editing it, if you don’t look comfortable on camera when you watch the final footage back – don’t use it.

It almost goes without saying but you are far better not having video footage of you than footage that highlights your nervousness or other problems. In short, bad footage could just you turn people away from your site – away from your business. If, for whatever reason, your video looks stilted, scripted or so nervous as to be seen as disingenuous, do not use video of you to promote your business on your site or other areas.

Your clients

In addition to or instead of you filming yourself, you could also shoot some video of your clients or even your centres of influence talking about you. Video testimonials from real life clients are very powerful and they are the most effective when your clients talk about their story and the impact your advice has had on their lives as opposed to them saying simply how great they think you are.

It’s in the can! What’s next?

With a video(s) completed you now need to upload it somewhere where it can be ‘hosted’. This can be on your website via – for example – an embedded link back to YouTube. To state the seemingly obvious, videos can be very big files so you emailing them to other people is very often not an option.
You can upload the videos to Youtube or Vimeo or host them on a paid site like sproutvideo.com. Each option has its merits that are subjects in their own right.
Once loaded to a service like YouTube or Vimeo, you can then display your videos on your website; on your company Facebook page and the LinkedIn profiles for you and your business’ LinkedIn profile.  If you’re really adept at producing videos you could start a Youtube ‘channel’ for your business.

Some final thoughts on videos. Try to remember that the ‘traditional’ computer screen is now just one of several choices of where your clients and potential clients can watch your videos. Smartphones, tablets and very lightweight laptop computers have revolutionised the way in which consumers access information about you. Be sure to consider how your video vision and audio will appear on various devices.

It really is – or should be – all about them!

Recall that clients want to build rapport with you and they want to know that you genuinely understand their situation and needs. They seek advice that is tailored and customised solely for them. Clients want to know that they’re be treated as individuals and that you are treating their financial affairs with as much attention as you would your own. This may seem obvious but you might be surprised how easy it is to overlook in the day-to-day bedlam that running a business can sometimes be.
The moment a client senses that she is just a number to you is the moment that any trust you may have been accorded by the client to that point will begin to erode.
Let’s recap a point from an earlier article. This tip does not negate the need for creating standard processes in your business.  Nor are we suggesting that you should templates should not be part of your document preparation. Your procedures and your templates can actually enable you to customise your advice to each client in a more efficient and consistent way rather than leaving it to the chance that you will find the time to ‘re-invent the wheel’. Note however that this is only effective if you use templates well.
So let’s look at a few tips on how to make sure that your clients do not feel that they are just numbers.  In person, on the phone and in their Statement of Advice (SoA), you should present all your recommendations and discussions in the client’s terminology using words and phraseology that will resonate with them.

This might sound obvious but you might be surprised at just how many advisers use a templated SoA that has pre-formatted text with comments such as (in the client’s objectives section):

“You wish to travel.”

If an objective of the client is to travel then you need to gain a deeper understanding of where they want to go and why. What significance does travel hold for the client and then refer to specifics in the SoA– destinations and timing – when you are discussing the subject with her.

Financial planning advice ‘101’ – correlate objectives with recommendations

Yes – this is incredibly obvious but we have to say it: Ensure that your recommendations actually deliver on the client’s objectives.  When presenting your recommendations explain how they match what the client is seeking – or how they feel about a subject.  However, if it is not possible for recommendations to deliver on objectives then you must say so and explain why.
Another example. Simply recommending a ‘salary sacrifice’ superannuation strategy because it saves the client tax will not be as meaningful as if you then explain how that tax, re-purposed, will be a core tool to enable them to achieve (what she is specifically wanting to achieve)
You can force yourself to do this by making sure your templates require you to fill in the key areas, such as names and addresses, objectives, assets etc.

Extreme Care!

More than one adviser has accidentally delivered an SOA with their previous clients‘ name in it, because they have failed to make proper use of a template.

Mapping

A great strategy that can really demonstrate a thorough understanding of a client, and enable them to see their life on a page, is to use mind maps in the discovery phase of your client relationship, then regularly update the clients mind map at their review meetings.

A visual representation of your clients‘ affairs will help you ensure you’ve captured all their information and also help confirm to them that, to you as a professional person, they are not ‘numbers’.

Packaging services

You can also customise your ongoing service offer for each client. When you establish your pricing model and determine the ongoing services you can provide for clients, it can be more efficient to create set packages or at least determine minimum price bands based on a pre-defined set of services including the number of contacts per year – meetings and phone calls etc.  When presenting a recommended service package to your client, you can present it in such a way as to demonstrate that the ongoing contact level is designed specifically to suit their needs.

Newsletter tagging

Newsletters are often a part of advisers‘ communication strategy with their clients, to keep them connected to the firm between meetings. An old style hard-copy newsletter can be expensive and time consuming and provide limited value to clients when it is a standard document with the same topics for every client. An alternative is to use a solution that customises the article content to your clients.

Use of CRM and email marketing systems enables you to tag your content and create rules around what articles are used for different sections of your client base. If you have a multi-generational firm, you wouldn’t send articles on retirement villages to your 30-year-old entrepreneur clients. When your newsletters are created electronically they can save both time and printing costs and drive people to your website more often.

Network

Get involved with your clients’ other professional advisers. If they have an accountant contact the accountant and discuss the client’s situation and, if relevant, send the accountant any information that might assist with preparation of the mutual client’s tax returns.  By mentioning to your client that you have spoken with their accountant – after gaining the client’s authorisation – it serves to reinforce with the client that you have considered the impact of your advice beyond their professional relationship with you and gives clients a sense of comfort that you are prepared to liaise with their accountant.

Social media

Yes – we know you are constantly being told you need to use social media. But with an increasing weight of evidence as to the reach and power of it, we can only recommend that you get involved with it.

Social media is much more than just a way to advertise your business to new clients. Used properly, it is a way for people to get to know you and your business better and for you to communicate with your clients between the times that they see you in person.
You can use Twitter to source and ‘Tweet’ links to articles that would interest your clients.
People can either just ‘Follow’ you and enjoy the resources you connect them with, or they may even tweet back to you and have short conversations so you can interact – albeit limited to 140 characters.
If you hold client functions you can also keep people updated on dates and venues etc by using Twitter and Facebook for example.
Your company Facebook page or Pinterest board can keep clients in the touch with what’s happening in your office – pictures of your office move, your events or even your staff karaoke night will allow them to feel like they are a part of your life. Even better, you could invite your clients to post their holiday pictures, or their retirement pictures to your Facebook page or comment on your page when they’re enjoying one of the goals you helped them achieve.
You can use LinkedIn to engage in conversations in various groups that might interest your clients. You could be an advocate for them, or also show that you are interested in what’s important to them outside your office. Of course, this works best when you’re working in a particular client niche, so you don’t need to follow matters in 1,000 different groups!
You might decide to write a blog – either about financial matters, or perhaps something totally unrelated, and yet important to many of your clients.
If the large majority of your clients are retirees who love to travel you could do a great blog on Life Begins at Retirement.
Or you could blog about things that are of interest to you outside of financial matters. Your clients and others will be able to use the blog to connect with you on a non-business level.

Care!

A couple of final comments on social media. To be successfully engaged in it requires substantial time and effort.  Done well it can be a highly effective tool in bringing new clients to your business and retaining existing clients. However, if left unattended for lengthy periods, your audience can disengage from your sporadic posts and tweets. Notwithstanding, we believe that social media will increasingly become a vital way for financial services businesses to market to both new and existing clients.

In this 3 part series of articles we have addressed five ways that you can deepen your client relationships and improve your engagement with them. We have addressed:

• Embedding processes into your practice to achieve continuity
• How to can make the potential new client’s first impression of you really positive and how to start building your client relationship before they meet you
• Using video to really engage with your prospective and existing clients
• How to deliver high levels of personal, tailored, service and that your focus really is on the client
• Some ways to use Social Media to create and deepen your client relationships.

Note: The accreditation for this CPD article is no longer current. Please visit our CPD section for current CPD quizzes. 

The post 5 ways to improve client engagement and intimacy appeared first on AdviserVoice.

(Click here to read the first instalment in this series and click here to read the third and final instalment.)

First Contact! Managing the interaction

The scene: a potential new client has made contact with your business by phone or, for example, a ‘Contact us’ email from your website. That’s a great start but what comes next is crucial to transforming an enquiry to a fully-fledged client.

So ask yourself – do you have a process to manage this aspect of your business’ operations?

Think about these questions in relation to your business:

• When a potential new client phones your office who will she speak to about making an appointment to see you? Is that person your receptionist – your assistant – or does the person speak to you to make an appointment – or – is it whoever picks up the phone?

• Will this person get a sense that your business (at the end of the day, you) cares about them and is prepared to understand their needs in providing professional advice?

• Or do they get a sense that you are too busy for them or that you are really only interested in making a ‘sale’?

• Is the process formal yet welcoming? Or is it so casual that it conveys an impression of a carefree approach to the way you conduct your business?

• When they make their appointment, do you follow-up with written information to keep building on the contact they have had with your firm so far?

• Do they know what to bring to the meeting?  Do they know what to expect in the meeting or will a lack of information make them apprehensive about the first meeting?

If you have handled your initial interaction well, by the time they first meet with you the client should feel like they know you already something more about you than just your name. When they attend the appointment, overall, the discussion should be much less about you and much more about them.
The manner in which you conduct that first meeting in person will be the major influence on whether or not the potential client formally engages you as their adviser.  Please note – it is this first meeting that will set the tone for the remainder of your professional relationship if there is to be one.
During this meeting, your primary objective should be to ask meaningful questions and listening – very carefully – to the answers.  And of course, a good listener knows that the answer to one question very often leads to another question and so on.  Enabling your client to comfortably and securely explain their situation and needs is critical to creating an atmosphere of trust.

Questions – answers – listening – questions . . .

You should be aiming to get to know their financial situation on terms much deeper than their balance sheet and taxation return. Questions, listening and more questions will allow people to feel safe in disclosing more about their goals, their fears and their personality than your website or LinkedIn profile can.

As you might have experienced, some people have not actively considered what they want from life and what they truly want to achieve with their financial resources. A successful first meeting – for the client – should be that your questions and listening helped them to more easily articulate what it is they want to achieve.

Some advisers conduct their initial meetings with clients in a way that explores their personal values and lifestyle more than simply their financial affairs.  Some advisers use systems such as the American Bill Bacharach’s ‘Values-based’ financial planning techniques and yet there are others who do not follow a ‘script’ but who do keep their initial meetings with clients to qualitative aspects of the client’s life, in addition to their financial details.  Such advisers do not ‘sell’ themselves or go into solution mode at that point; they are simply taking in all the information – the spoken and unspoken – the client is providing and beginning to build a deep understanding of the client.

Listen – hear! Seven listening tips

1. Don’t speak when the client is speaking
2. Put the client at ease with your body language – e.g don’t fold your arms – open the palms of your hands – lean forward a little
3. Show you want to listen – look at the person speaking not through them
4. Remove things in your environment which can distract you from what clients will say – e.g. visual and auditory distractions (people walking past your office, noises/voices outside your office)
5. Show empathy with your eyes – some clients have difficult situations and events in their lives and they need to see that you have heard them
6. Be patient – take your time in listening and allow the information to come forward
7. Ask questions and keep listening to what is being said

The Family Tree

A method used by some advisers to stimulate discussion with clients and assist them to more fully understand their potential new client is to write the client’s family tree on a whiteboard in your office.  A whiteboard for some or written notes for others – the medium is not that important.  Rather, the manner in which you ask questions and what you do with the information are the critical issues.
Such a conversation should move the discussion beyond the level of superannuation held and the value and type other assets and liabilities, important though they are, to other important things in their life, like family. List the names and ages of all members of the family and, through delicate, considered, questions try to gain more insight into the client.
The information that emerges from that type of enquiry might allow you to foresee financial issues that could arise in the future such as parents going into a nursing home, risk insurance needs of children or siblings, perhaps even financial implications of becoming care-givers to grandchildren or nieces/nephews

Branching out

Let’s look at this example of a family tree – the clients here are husband and wife, Bob and Mary have three children and their siblings and parents are as follows:

Take a few moments to look at the family tree – what sort of potential life events or issues can you foresee with Bob and Mary?

Quite noticeably the family’s youngest member is Liz’s daughter Molly and the question here is who would care for her if Liz were to die? As a single parent, Liz would likely hope that her parents, Bob and Mary, would support Molly along with the financial implications such a situation would entail. This is clearly something for which the family might prepare in terms of managing the financial risks. While Bob and Mary might decide they could financially support Molly they might also need to implement an insurance policy on Liz’s life.

With Mavis aged 81 the question is what is her health like? Is she still living at home or is she in a nursing home or is that on the horizon? Similar questions apply to Dot and Jim and then there is Lewis and his younger wife.  What plans are in place to care for Joshua if something was to happen to Lewis and Ayla? Who would take care of him? And what are the financial implications of such events?
By drawing the family tree with the clients it enables a discussion around issues which the family might have not previously considered and opens up additional avenues to get to know your clients better and for them to get to know you better through the way in which you listen to their answers.  Importantly, it can help to identify possible future issues and the association risks that might require contingency planning.

If you have asked the right questions and carefully listened to the answers provided, by the end of the first meeting, you should have a good sense of whether or not you can help them and make suggestions as to how to progress the advice process from that point.  Similarly, by the end of that meeting, the client will have seen and heard enough to help them reach a decision on whether or not you are the trustworthy professional person they were hoping you would be.

We’re ‘engaged’ – now what?

If the client says, or you get the sense from their comments, that they wish to engage you, it might be appropriate to seek to arrange the next appointment prior to them leaving your office. Note that it is at this point vital to have a process in place to ensure that you – or the designated staff member – can gather any outstanding information that you will need to prepare your recommendations – the Statement of Advice – and to do so in a timely manner.
During the intervening period between appointments, what processes do you have in place to keep the client connected? If it we look to post implementation phase, what communications process do you have in place to reduce the chance of ‘buyer’s remorse’ emerging?  And looking even further ahead, how will you build on the relationship such as it is at that point?
In the early stages – the time before the clients formally engage your firm as advisers – it really is quite important not to rush the development of the relationship.  Never assume that you have a fully-fledged new client until such time as the agreement, or engagement document, is signed by the client.  In those early meetings and conversations it is wise not to use words that ‘jump ahead’ to an assumption that the client will engage you. The decision is entirely the potential client’s to make – not yours – and as a professional person you need to give them the time, space and authority, to engage you when and if they are happy to.  Read – take it slowly.

If you are looking for an enduring professional relationship with clients it is important to design your processes so that your potential clients get to know you in a series of meetings and contact points.

This brings us to the third element of building a deeper connection with your clients – video.

It’s powerful, it’s massive and it’s very effective

You might be surprised to learn that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and for financial services businesses it is another very powerful medium that you can use to enhance client engagement, especially at the point of first contact. There are over 800 million unique users of YouTube each month and as an initial marketing tool, YouTube videos can help ‘break the ice’ for people who want to know more about you before they meet you.
In initial marketing, you can enable clients to get to know you and do their research in a visual medium that is far more effective than just reading words. As part of your ongoing relationships with your clients, you can also use video to connect with them in a personal way between your meetings and phone calls.

Using video in your initial marketing

When people search for information on businesses or individuals, they will often start with Google then click on the YouTube video links in the search results.
As mentioned earlier, people are looking for a financial adviser with whom they can feel comfortable and can trust and as such it follows that they might respond well to a medium in which they can use their auditory and visual senses to process information rather than simply cognitive in reading the written word.  A potential client will likely gain a better insight to you by watching and hearing you speak than just through reading information about you and your business.
However, if you choose to create a promotional video, be careful not to simply record a copy of your marketing brochure, or the like, as we have seen on some occasions.  The very best promotional videos about you focus on who you are and why you do what you do with a very low emphasis on what you do.

Using video post engagement

You can also use video to enhance your relationships with your clients after they engage you. The most powerful time for you to build your relationship with your client is the time you spend face-to-face. And yet the human brain can only take in so much at any given time. Your clients could be totally engaged in what you are saying, and engaged with their financial plan, but when they leave the office, other aspects of their lives take precedent and before you (and they) know it, it will be twelve months since you last met with them.
Some advisers are using video to help keep clients engaged between meetings. For example, you might choose to record some technical or educational videos to help clients understand some of the strategies you are deploying for them. Many advisers have great ways of explaining certain concepts and find themselves sometimes repeating the explanation several times. While some clients prefer an in-person explanation, others might – if given the opportunity – prefer to be able to view the information in a format such as video which they can replay from home.
By recording your explanation on video it will both enable your clients to refresh their understanding of the technical concepts of the recommendations explained by you.
On a more personal level, you can also record messages to individual clients using video. Imagine your client has just left your office after having their financial planning review meeting – a meeting that was heavy with content and detail and you have additional matters to work on before they return to your office for the next meeting.  In regard the detail at the most recent meeting, one option is to video record yourself presenting the information again – to camera – recapping briefly what you discussed in the meeting, explaining what happens next and remind them of what they need to do before the next meeting.
You can do this very simply using a webcam or an inexpensive video camera in the same office you met with them.

Remember this

In a study at the University of Texas, Metcalf, T. (1997) concluded that the level of information retention in human being is largely dependent upon the sensory receptors, or combination thereof, through which they gain the information.

In the study Metcalf identified that the highest level of retention was achieved when people received information both aurally and visually – hearing and sight.  This research suggests that the use of video presentation is a perfect match for increasing the level of information retention by both potential clients and actual clients.

In our third and final article in this mini-series, we will guide you through how to produce your own to-camera videos and where to post them so potential clients can find them. We’ll also take a look at social media and how it might help you and we’ll finish off with ways to ensure your clients can receive service that really is about them.

Note: The accreditation for this CPD article is no longer current. Please visit our CPD section for current CPD quizzes. 

The post 5 Ways to Create, Strengthen and Retain Client Relationships (Part 2) appeared first on AdviserVoice.

This mini-series is centred on 5 key components to establishing, building and retaining client relationships. In part 1 we examine how you can make the process of establishing client relationships more consistent while also backtracking to the point of making sure a client’s first impression of you is likely to build good rapport.

(Click here to read the second instalment in this series and click here to read the third and final instalment.)

For decades now the financial services sector has been faced with constant change and advancement on several fronts. There has been a veritable barrage of change in areas like legislation, technology and service delivery.  Amid it all however, it would be very easy for advisers to lose sight of some of the fundamental aspects that create, build and retain professional relationships with clients.  To this end it’s instructive to recall an old French proverb: ‘The more things change – the more they stay the same’.

While technology to improve efficiency is now in abundance it is important to remember what clients are really looking for in a professional relationship with an adviser. They want to have strong rapport with you and they want to receive tailored, unbiased, advice from you. Clients also want to know that you have genuinely understood them and that you sincerely care about them. These are needs that can be aided by technology however it is the ‘human’ components, that are interwoven with technology use, which fortify client engagement with their adviser. Building stronger, longer and closer professional relationships with your clients will see both you and clients profit and we have identified five key strategies which can help you.

1. Process

The very best professional adviser-client relationships do not happen by accident – they are most often the result of implementing a process, no matter how sophisticated or otherwise, it might be. If you do not already run an effective, process-driven, client acquisition and retention process in your business then there is a process for you to follow to get there.  And if you do already have established client management processes in place then what follows might still assist you in, for example, cross-referencing what you are already doing.

Firstly, you need to decide on the client experience you want to give to clients.

Consider what you would like your clients to experience from their first interaction with you and your business and then write it down. What experience do you want them to have from when they first meet you (or have first contact with your business such as via your website), through to hearing and reading your strategy recommendations, to signing documentation; right through to their ongoing relationship with you and your firm. Now think about how will you maintain that experience and your important role in your clients’ lives?

Successful processes can only be so if other people can replicate the tasks and actions within them with relative ease. In this regard if you have staff members who are great at their job get them to document how they carry out all of their tasks in your business.  For example, what they do when they book a client meeting; how they administer investment/insurance lodgements and so on.

The point here is that while many businesses have outstanding support employees, the business owners can be blind to the over-dependence on such employees. It’s a risk that too often is overlooked by business owners in all types of business. This over-dependence and the embedded risk are sometimes only identified when someone, who has been with the firm for many years, leaves and the business subsequently struggles. Service delivery and quality fall away simply because there was no written record of what that key person actually did in the business.

Take note however that in making a request to your employees to document what they do in carrying out their roles, you need to explain the reasons behind making the request. It’s not uncommon for staff to feel threatened or worried that they may be out of a job if they remove the ‘mystique’ of what they do.

Align then automate the on-boarding

Subsequent to a detailed written account of each employee’s role is the need to align the current processes with the type of client experience you want to deliver. By doing this with your administration support team, you will better understand where you have inefficiencies in your workflows.  And when you identify weaknesses or inefficiencies ask the people involved for help in solving the problems. They will see things you cannot see – the good and the bad – and the final outcome will very often be better for their input to devising a solution.

Once you have documented your processes it is important to automate them as much as possible either using ‘threads’ in software such as XPlan and the like or ‘workflows’ if you are using a CRM program.  Essentially this means the process is input to a series of the tasks that can be automatically delegated, diarised and flagged for completion.

For example in the case of the written ‘new client on-boarding process’, the staff member who receives the first enquiry has responsibility for activating the process.  After the first step is carried out by a staff member (e.g. received initial enquiry by phone), that person initiates the thread and the subsequent tasks are allocated.  Your support person might receive a task to send out a ‘Welcome Pack’ to the potential client and then another task on the day before the client meeting to contact the client and confirm the appointment. This person, for example, also might receive an automated task to prepare a new client file in readiness for your meeting with the potential new client the following day.

At first glance it might seem counterintuitive that in order to deliver a customised, very personal, service you need to automate and document processes into a standardised format.  However, automation serves to ensure the key tasks actually get done and done efficiently.

2. First impressions and beyond

The second stage of a plan to increase client engagement centres on your on-boarding process for new clients; the process you deploy from the moment of first contact with a potential new client.

Your capacity to successfully engage with potential clients in a very personal way will be greatly influenced by their very first introduction to you; this influence could even be at play before they meet you in person.  Getting the first impressions right can lay the foundations for a long and fruitful professional relationship with clients.

Take a moment to list all the ways a potential new client might become aware of you and your business. Start with the obvious, your website but then think beyond that to advertising, your business card handed to someone by another client, your brochures and so on. Try to be objective – what sort of impression do these items give?

Back to on-boarding and, ideally, you should be aiming to ensure that your on-boarding process is designed to remove, or at least reduce, fears that potential new clients will have.  This step should begin to place your clients on a footing of trust, right from the outset, regardless of whether they have been personally referred to you or found you from their own enquiries.  Be careful though – in the twenty teens – consumers are more and more ‘hard-wired’ to be suspicious of claims made by financial services people. Many will treat with, great suspicion, written or spoken claims of an adviser being ‘trustworthy’. It is the old saying of ‘actions speak louder than words’ situation.

Now think again about how your new clients currently find their way to you?  Do the current pathways for new clients begin to engender an atmosphere of trust? Your website? Your referral sources? Your other marketing? Note – this is not about even mentioning the word trust or its derivatives.  Rather, it’s about the overall impression generated by the sum of all that is presented – written and spoken and physical (your reception area, for example) – in representing you and your business.

For a potential new client, at every contact with you and your business in the early weeks and months, she is running the ‘trust radar’ to confirm that you really are trustworthy. After committing to, for example, engaging you to prepare a Statement of Advice, she is looking for that document – and the way you present it – to confirm her initial trust in you. The same can be said at the plan implementation stage and so on.  Trust is not a set and forget aspect of a professional relationship – it must be ever present in your every action for and on behalf of clients.

Your internet presence

What will a prospective client see if they search for you on the Internet?  If they view your website, your LinkedIn profile, or your business Facebook page, what will they learn about you?  How do all these sites ‘position’ you in the eyes of someone who hasn’t met you?  When you read the information about you on your website or LinkedIn profile, for example, how does it ‘sound’?  Try to explore your online presence as a client – with fresh eyes – and consider if these give potential clients a genuine sense of who you are, why you do what you do and your areas of advice expertise. If you don’t think you can ‘trust’ yourself to be objective, ask a friend or another professional person to give you a full and frank critique of what they see.

All of these things can be very powerful tools in enabling your potential clients and clients to get to know you.  Conversely, the reality is that if they do not position you well in the eyes of a potential client, you might never get to meet them – they might not even contact you.

In addition, when used with your existing clients they can be a great way to communicate ideas, inform them about financial concepts and keep them in touch with you and your business.  You can also utilise them to keep clients in touch with key issues and the economy and markets – even if that’s only to get comfort that you are keeping an eye on investment markets.

Be careful though.  This doesn’t mean you should publish an academic style thesis to show people how clever you are.  Rather, by simply sharing client stories, publishing comments on issues of interest and allowing people to get a sense that you are someone who can really help them, you will enhance the propensity for people to gain and retain trust in you.

In Part 2 of this series we will examine how to manage the interaction at the point of ‘First Contact’ and explore ways of creating the right first impression using the world’s second largest search engine.

Note: The accreditation for this CPD article is no longer current. Please visit our CPD section for current CPD quizzes. 

The post 5 Ways to Create, Strengthen and Retain Client Relationships (Part 1) appeared first on AdviserVoice.