Preston Cherry thinks it’s essential for advisors to make personal and deep connections with their clients if they want to establish meaningful and dynamic relationships.
Cherry, the founder and president of Green Bay, Wis.-based Concurrent Financial Planning, spoke this week on Suzanne Siracuse’s podcast, “The Big Reveal” (available on Financial Advisor magazine’s podcast platform). There he spoke about the importance of connecting with a client in the early stages of a relationship. He criticized those who manipulate or force those relationships, asserting that they must be genuine.
“You really have to learn about a person and people will feel that,” he said. “Then it encourages them to share their story.”
When a person wants or needs financial help, they are telling a story, and gathering up those details is an essential aspect of developing a relationship with a client, Cherry said.
Before he meets with someone, he asks them to respond to several simple clickable questions on his website, a questionnaire that takes no more than 90 seconds to answer. These details tell him not only about a client’s finances but also about their emotional state—what their worry level might be about their finances, how often they speak with their spouse about money and other things.
“If you’re speaking with someone who can relate to that and have a story and swap a story, then it really elevates that relationship,” he said.
Cherry focuses on Generation X clients. As a Gen Xer himself, he understands what they are dealing with and their stage of life. They also get his movie references, he joked.
Siracuse echoed the sentiments about relating to a client on a personal level.
“You have to identify,” she said. “You have to have something in common and also identify what you’re going through in that particular life stage.”
The relationships are significant in financial advice, said Cherry, because money goes to the root of who a person is and their life ambitions.
“Money is the human condition,” he said. “Not only do life skills and input from other human beings build us up as far as the human condition … so does the education of money and the amount of money that we have.”
Money enables people to buy access, funds their well-being, provides them comfort, reduces uncertainty, and allows people to have aspirations, he said.
The deep emotional connection is necessary with clients because advisors have to be there for them in good times and bad. In anticipation of the bad times, it benefits an advisor to prepare clients beforehand and develop a strategy. That way, they know the plan and can rely on it, Cherry explained.
“Pretty much everyone knows these times are going to happen and they’re going to prepare themselves, but that doesn’t mean ... the emotions are less now,” he said.
Siracuse agreed that it’s important to prepare clients to anticipate future stress and reduce it.
“That work that you have to do before the markets go down or before volatility is critical to the way that clients react when the markets do go down,” she said.
During the turbulent times, advisors should keep in regular contact with their clients, said Cherry, who posts webinars and phones clients to gauge their emotional temperature and determines if any changes need to be made to their portfolios.
In these instances, he said, advisors have to be flexible and willing to modify a plan if the current economic environment or the client’s emotional state demands it. Clients do not want to hear the same tired line like “stay the course” or “don’t panic,” he added. They want to hear creative solutions to what is going on.
One of the more difficult things for advisors to do is market themselves to attract and retain clients. The most effective way to market yourself is through consistency, Cherry said.
That means sharing information through social media, podcasts, news articles and other media. Getting that name recognition can validate an advisor’s work, he said. Finally, an advisor needs a website that is inviting and welcoming. It should be simple to navigate so a client or potential client can easily connect with the advisor.