Insights Into Action
The obvious action step here is to offer your affluent clients truly comprehensive wealth management.
But what’s less obvious to many advisors is just what comprehensive wealth management is—what it looks like, and how to articulate it to clients and prospects.
Best advice: Use the following wealth management formula to guide your efforts in both building and positioning a wealth management offering. It’s a succinct description of wealth management that will be easily understood by partners, team members, clients and prospects.
Wealth Management = Investment Consulting + Advanced Planning + Relationship Management
The shorthand version looks like this: WM = IC + AP + RM
Investment consulting, of course, is the primary offering of most advisors. Asset management is table stakes—you have to have it, and it’s not a differentiator between you and all the other advisors out there.
Advanced planning addresses four key concerns of the affluent beyond investments: wealth enhancement, wealth transfer, wealth protection and charitable giving. This is where the enhanced value of true wealth management really kicks in and differentiates you from the pack.
Relationship management builds and fosters deep advisor-client relationships over time through a consultative process of working together. It also creates high-value relationships with other, specialized professionals to expertly address clients’ advanced planning needs.
A wealth management offering that is designed in this way will enable you to generate rock-solid client loyalty, because no matter what is happening in the markets, you’ll always be moving your clients closer to key financial goals that are important to them.
Listen to the full episode here.
Catherine McBreen and Paul Lofties are leading innovators in wealth management research.