After a year like 2015, it can be unnerving to prepare for annual client reviews. Even if you made it through the year with slight performance gains, there was enough world disaster and market volatility to make people wonder why they don’t just buy and hold low-cost vanilla investments. They may not be ready to stuff the money under their mattress, but they may start asking, what has the market (and you) done for me lately? Despite your emphasis on wealth management or planning, a solid long-term strategy doesn’t change much year to year, so ask yourself if the client has a point.

I’m not suggesting that you skirt performance entirely—clients count on us to educate them and hold ourselves accountable for decisions we make on their behalf. The truth is, it’s often difficult to convey the real value advisors bring to the table outside of economic and market swings. What are the tangible benefits of working with you as an advisor?

I’ve spent years doing consumer research about investors’ expectations and perceptions about our industry. Having talked to hundreds of successful, and struggling, advisors, as well as top brand and marketing strategists, it’s clear we can do a better job marketing our real value to clients. We’ve been serving investors for decades, so we know the value we provide, but does everyone else? One highly respected advertising executive advised the following:

“Your industry is terrible at marketing, but you are lucky because people want what you do, as vague as it is! I mean really, what do people get from working with an advisor? But lots of people do, so there must be a reason. Focus on that—and make it real. Vacuum sales people have to prove your house is dirty, so they show you the filth their machines pick up. You’re going to buy it—there’s a clear and tangible benefit of owning a vacuum! You need to tell/inform people how dirty their financial house would be without your help!”

Ask yourself, what’s the dirt we clean up that creates real and tangible benefit to clients? We save them time—because we’re working on their financial affairs, they have more time to do other things. We help them avoid mistakes and untangle messes. We don’t just help make them money, we help save them money sometimes. As you are preparing for your client meetings and building your agenda, consider these three ideas:

  1. Break down what clients get from working with you in a way that is measurable, concrete and independent of market fluctuations.

  2. Point to specific examples of how your work saved them from a mistake or created opportunities, and calculate the worth of those actions in dollars.

  3. Step away from percentages and benchmarks and identify simple, clear ways to show performance over time, and what those results mean in terms of their financial goals.

Make It Real

An advisor I know was worried about justifying his $20K fee for a client, given the lackluster portfolio returns. But he had completed an insurance review that saved his clients $30K in cash outflows by tapping into policy cash value to pay for premiums. That is real and tangible!

When you do tax harvesting, give a dollar estimate of what you’ve saved the client. If you have done estate planning work, remind the client that he or she is saving on legal fees because of your preparation work. Bring your services to life with specific examples of hours you’ve spent on their behalf and the cash impact of actions. Identify the many ways you earn your keep beyond beating benchmarks.

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