Building Healthy Relationships with Clients – Six Steps Financial Advisors Should Take
As an advisor, how high you go is dependent on your ability to maintain long-term relationships. There’s no activity more crucial for the success of an advisor than relationship building. To help you evaluate your relationship building and management skills, I’d like to share a few of Don’s top podcasts on the topic. Hopefully, they’ll give you some food for thought and actionable steps you can take to improve your practice and create loyalty among clients.
First, learn what clients want.
We all know good service doesn’t sell. Great service sells. But how do we know what clients consider great service? Here’s a brief video where Don lists the ten things clients say they want from their advisors.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the video, click here.
Now, become what people want.
Now that you know what your clients want and how to make your service great, it’s time to also become what people want. Do you know what that is? Watch this brief video to see what people miss today in their busy schedules and how you, their Financial Advisor, can provide them with the comfort they seek.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the video, click here.
Next, learn how to build great relationships with clients.
Marvin Brown, a friend of Don’s, makes a great point. When a client takes you on, he or she is basically saying, “I’m comfortable getting into a long-term relationship with this person”.
If they don’t want to be around you long term, they’re not going to open the account because they know having a financial advisor is a long-term affair. So congratulations on getting the account, they’ve decided they’re comfortable with you. Now you have to build the great relationship that will keep them around.
Listen to this brief audio podcast where Don shares a couple of stories about building a great relationship with clients.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the audio, click here.
Make sure you have all your client’s assets.
When you have the type of great relationship with your clients we discussed, you can have the talk with them about why it’s important you have all their assets. Any client naturally wants to be diversified and has a tendency to put money in different firms. But at some point, if you’ve got the trust established with the client, you have the right to say to the client in a really intimate conversation that it’s better he puts all his assets in one firm.
Listen to this brief audio how that conversation should go.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the audio, click here.
Make sure the client doesn’t have an equity holding with sentimental value that does not fit their risk tolerance.
This is another conversation you can have with your client once you have built the great relationship we discussed earlier in the post. It’s not uncommon for a widow who inherited her husband’s IRA at another firm, to want to keep it there, even though she has no idea what’s in it and that it doesn’t fit her risk tolerance at all.
Listen to this brief audio with ideas on how you can broach the topic with a client, if you find yourself in a similar situation.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the audio, click here.
And finally – don’t overpromise.
Every time we overpromise we underperform. Overpromising is not necessary in our business.
Your parents and grandparents educated their kids, bought houses, took vacations, retired and they did all those things on a 5% return. Somehow in the nineties, a 30-40% tailwind return became a God-given tailwind. We don’t have to do that.
Listen to this brief audio why overpromising is often the biggest mistake Advisors make and how to avoid it, so you can enjoy better and healthier relationships with clients.
If you prefer reading the transcript of the audio, click here.
Building and managing the relationship with clients is key to your success as an Advisor.
You have to not only get clients, but you have to keep them. And you can’t do that without people skills – without the ability to gain trust, to offer outstanding service, to care more than people expect you to care.
If you are up for some more podcasts and honing all of your soft skills (storytelling, prospecting, presentation, networking, and more), consider joining Don Connelly 24/7.
See Membership Levels & Benefits
* All podcasts about managing the relationship, featured in this blog post, first appeared on the Don Connelly 24/7 learning center. See our 30-day trial offer.
