A Value Proposition

Brett Van Bortel is a director at Invesco Consulting, the management consulting unit of Atlanta-based Invesco asset management. He works with leading financial advisors, helping them build sizable, client-centered practices that serve high-net-worth clients. In the following interview, Van Bortel explains how Invesco Consulting helps advisors attract clients and grow their practices.

Prince: Let’s begin by having you describe Invesco Consulting.

Van Bortel: We started the group in 1997 at Van Kampen Funds. When Invesco acquired Van Kampen in 2010, they decided to keep and support the consulting group. We were one of the originators of what’s today known as value-added wholesaling.

Invesco Consulting is led by Scott West and provides a variety of programs designed to help financial advisors become dramatically more successful—our tagline is succinct: “Get. Keep. Grow.” The focus of Invesco Consulting is on helping financial advisors convert their challenges into opportunities through proprietary research and clear, implementable ideas.

Aside from the programs oriented to the high-net-worth market, some of the other highly successful programs we deliver are The New Word Order Franchise, Showtime and Preferrals. The [first] is designed to help advisors identify and implement the right language to use with clients on myriad topics to maximize communication—Gary DeMoss is one of its architects, as well as Showtime. Showtime is designed to help advisors create and present their stories and win new clients. Preferrals is designed to help financial advisors proactively pursue and acquire referrals from their clients. What’s really interesting is that the vast majority of advisors consider their clientele to be their number one source of new clients. But an even greater majority never ask for [referrals], for a host of reasons. Preferrals solves this paradox. Highly trained and experienced presenters and coaches deliver all our programs.

Prince: What is value-added wholesaling?

Van Bortel: While Invesco has a wide variety of high-quality investment solutions, we believe it’s important to both get the attention of financial advisors and help them succeed in addition to being able to offer them exceptional products. That’s where value-added wholesaling comes in. It’s additional—value-added—to traditional wholesaling, and creates a powerful value proposition for Invesco.

We know that financial advisors do what’s best for their clients, including what financial products they select for them, and we think this is essential. Our intent is to help them better serve their clients and to make their practices more successful. When there are Invesco products that make sense for their clients, we would like them to consider them.

Prince: What programs do you offer financial advisors interested in working with high-net-worth clients?

Van Bortel: This is my area of specialization at Invesco Consulting. We’ve developed a number of what are now time-tested methodologies that have been proven effective for assisting financial advisors to do more with their wealthy clients and build significant high-net-worth practices. Three of the powerful programs in high demand are Wealth Mapping, Nine Lives and RainMaker. All programs are based on extensive empirical studies and enhanced by solid fieldwork coupled with considerable attention to getting bottom-line results.

Prince: Could you describe a few of the programs?

Van Bortel: We’ve been delivering Wealth Mapping for almost a decade. Over the years, with continued research and in-the-trenches involvement, we’ve continuously refined the program. It’s one of the most capable ways of bringing in new assets, providing an array of financial products and generating new client referrals for financial advisors. What’s more important from our perspective is that Wealth Mapping often enables financial advisors to be incrementally more client centered. And it’s by being so intensely client centered that they easily achieve greater business achievements. This creates a broad-based value proposition for the advisor that is a winning formula.

Wealth Mapping is an extremely systematic approach used by financial advisors to develop a deep understanding of their high-net-worth clients. Based on in-depth profiling, financial advisors are positioned to identify what are usually many other ways they can provide considerable value to their wealthy clients. This entails opportunities to manage more of their money as well as offer other products, such as life insurance and credit. What’s more, financial advisors can use the Wealth Mapping methodology to set the stage to garner excellent client referrals from their high-net-worth clients.