You can work with a seven. And by soliciting that valuable feedback, you’ve co-created a way to do it.
3. Tend to relationships. Most of Laila Pence’s clients knew when her mother passed away. That’s because Laila puts such a big emphasis on creating real relationships and being a part of her clients’ lives. She friends them on Facebook. She sends them Christmas and birthday cards. She takes them to dinner, baseball games, plays.
And, in return, as the sad news got around, Laila received over 300 sympathy cards.
“I was overwhelmed with the amount of love I received back,” Laila says, “and I think in this business whatever you put out, you get back someday.”
Laila’s family fled war-torn Egypt when she was still a child. She honed her customer service skills, and her incredible work ethic, by waitressing her way through college and then pounding the pavement as a young advisor. These experiences taught Laila that attracting and retaining clients was really a matter of connecting with people. Today, as she’s running a billion-dollar firm, Laila focuses her valuable time exclusively on nurturing her relationships with prospects and clients.
“Unless you build these strong relationships, you really don’t get the clients, you don’t get that commitment,” Laila says. “Once you become a friend, clients never fire a friend. They refer to them. And so I learned that you can’t just go out with them and fake it. You have to be really interested in these clients and you have to build relationships.”
Again, any advisor can show your client a market history chart and tell them, “This too shall pass.” But those of us who believe in Life-Centered Planning know our clients better than that. We know their goals and their challenges. We know their hopes and concerns. And we know what they want their lives to be like once we get through this pandemic and start refocusing on getting back to a sense of normalcy.
Social distancing has underscored just how much people need to feel connected with other people. If they can’t do it face-to-face, they’ll use the phone, Zoom and social media to keep those connections alive. You can make yourself an important part of that support network for your clients. Be responsive to what they need. Be thoughtful and purposeful about how you communicate.
And, above all, be human. You don’t have all the answers right now. Nobody does. But the conversations you have in the weeks ahead, the adjustments you make, the bad decisions you prevent, are things your clients will remember long after this outbreak has passed. And the client experience you develop as you focus on these human touches now will benefit your business for years to come.
Steve Sanduski, CFP, is the founder of Belay Advisor; the CEO of ROL Advisor, a discovery process technology system; a New York Times bestselling author; host of the Between Now and Success podcast and a financial advisor business coach.