Give your advice with more conviction so your clients implement and stop leaving that money on the table and underserving your clients.
4. Referrals.
The research on this subject is consistent over my almost 30 years in this business: Most clients are willing to refer and most advisors don't ask.
My informal research indicates that most people have between 200 and 500 contacts programmed into their mobile phones. (The smallest number I've heard is 67 and the largest is 2,500.) When your clients come to your office, they each bring their mobile phones. Subtract the overlapping contacts in each of their phones, the automobile club and their favorite Chinese takeout and you have two people sitting in your office at every client meeting with dozens, maybe hundreds, of names with contact information of people you could be profitably helping.
You owe it to yourself to ask for referrals, get warm introductions and become effective at converting referrals into appointments.
How is it good for your clients for you to build your business by referral? Because all other forms of client acquisition are more expensive and time-consuming. You incur expenses that you have to pass on to your clients or take time away from serving your clients due to excessive time spent prospecting and marketing. You end up spending time with extra clients you have to take on to pay for your expensive prospecting and marketing methods (e.g., advertising, direct mail, seminars, dinner meetings, etc.).
By not developing a way to ask for referrals and orchestrating a warm introduction, you are leaving money on the table and underserving your clients. Stop it!
5. Wasting time.
Yes, time is money. Work time that is. And wasted work time is wasted money. There's a big difference between being in the office and working. Working is being productive. There are the obvious time wasters like doing $15-per-hour admin work and watching too much finance TV. There are also many less-obvious time wasters like failing to outsource the writing of the plan or more effective use of turnkey asset management programs rather than personally designing asset allocation strategies, selecting investments and dropping tickets. Do even a small amount of soul searching as to where you spend your time and you will come up with many personal examples of how your time can be more productive.
Two very powerful ways to shift your client relationship to a higher level where they will be more willing to pay for your advice, consolidate all of their assets with you, more quickly act on your advice and introduce you to their friends, family and colleagues are:
1. Add more value.
2. Deepen the relationship to a greater level of trust.
Adding value can often be accomplished by doing more of the fundamentals of financial planning that most financial advisors don't do. For example, what if you created an action item for all of your clients to review their personal umbrella liability insurance policy to be sure that it exceeds the value of their assets? The typical asset-gathering investment advisor might react to this suggestion by saying, "That's not what I do and I don't get paid for that." I suppose that's one reason the typical asset-gathering investment advisor only gets some of their client's money to manage. Don't be typical! The conversation could sound something like: