Managing the Relationship Archives - Page 2 of 16

In this category you will find blog posts about clients relationship management – including but not limited to establishing trust, building a relationship, ending an advisor-client relationship, and more.

Decoding Doubt: 6 Non-Verbal Cues Clients Might Be Giving You That Signal a Trust Deficit

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Trust is the bedrock of any successful financial advisor-client relationship. But how do you know if a client truly trusts you, especially when they might not explicitly say it? Beyond the spoken word, clients often communicate their feelings through non-verbal cues. Learning to recognize these subtle signals can help advisors address underlying concerns and build stronger, more trusting relationships.

Three Decisions People Make When Choosing an Advisor

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

When mom and dad sit down with you for the first time, they want to get to know you. They want to do business with someone they like and trust and someone who is making the right suggestions. They don’t want to do business with the Mr. or Ms. Financial Advisor you. They want to do business with the real you.

Watch this video episode or read the transcript below to learn what people want to know when making the decision to work with you or move on.

The Perils of Lacking Empathy: Why It Matters for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Nothing can form a human connection quite like the genuine expression of empathy. That human connection, which is the basis of trust in a relationship, is what clients want from their advisors. Failure to make that connection quickly can drive clients into the arms of a more empathic advisor.

Why empathy is so powerful

Empathy is the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, understand their emotions, and connect with them on a deeper level. But to your clients, it’s much more than that. When you express genuine empathy with a client, they feel like they are the most important person in your life at that moment. You took the time to step inside their shoes, walk around, and make them feel understood without judging them.

Should FAs Allow Clients’ Political Opinions to Influence Their Investment Decisions?

/ by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom, Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Here we are again—another presidential election year. If it’s like the last couple of elections, financial advisors are sure to see some clients wringing their hands over which candidate will win the White House and how that will impact the financial markets and their investments. At the very least, you’re likely to get an earful of some clients’ political viewpoints—which is fine if they don’t try to correlate them with how they should invest their money.

For decades, investors have tried to find some correlation between elections and investment performance, hoping it will foretell how a particular outcome will impact their portfolio so they can adjust their investment strategy appropriately.

Of course, if you search far enough, you might be able to uncover data that supports such a link. But you’re not going to find any that decisively shows a causal relationship or enough of one to warrant serious consideration for changing investment strategies based on election results. Still, some clients have such strong political views that they see a connection in all aspects of their lives, including how they invest their money.

Steps to Take When Ending a Client Relationship

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

For everything it takes to secure a new client, it seems counterintuitive that a financial advisor would fire one. But, under certain circumstances, that’s precisely what you must do to keep your practice on the right growth trajectory while keeping your sanity.

Holding on to clients who stray outside your profile of an ideal client, or when they become too demanding or no longer follow your advice, can weigh you down. Your time is too valuable to spend it with clients who aren’t a good fit for you.

So, you need to fire them. But how? Ending a client relationship is a delicate process, but it doesn’t have to be awkward for you or the client when handled with care and professionalism. Much like a structured onboarding process, you should also have a clearly defined “deboarding” process to make it easier on everyone. Here are some steps to consider when ending a client relationship.

Get More from an Advisory Relationship with Client-Centric Investing

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

With the 2008 global financial crisis fading in the rearview mirror, investors are slowly regaining their confidence in the stock market with a halting willingness to take on more risk. However, many still find it challenging to overcome the trust deficit created by financial advisors who view them as assets to be managed rather than people with life ambitions.

To those advisors, the market indices and benchmarks mattered most. However, to the client, it was all about their financial future. All too often, advisors focused on standard deviation, Monte Carlo analysis, and risk-return lose sight of the emotional characteristics that drive investor behavior. They then become perplexed when their clients decide to break from a perfectly good investment strategy to follow the herd over a cliff near a market bottom.

Winning Over the Children of Wealthy Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

As evidenced by the great wealth transfer of $30 trillion currently underway from the baby boomers to the next generations, wealth is generational, with far-reaching impacts beyond any one client. For financial advisors, it could be an unprecedented opportunity to grow assets or the greatest threat to their survival.

Why the disparity in outlook? Because some advisors will be better positioned than others to capture the attention and trust of the next generations. Advisors who fail to connect with the children of their baby boomer clients stand a better than even chance they will lose the assets upon their transfer.

The failure to realize that, when working with a client, you are also working with everyone dependent on them leads to advisors losing an average of 70% to 80% of a client’s assets following their death.

Prospect Red Flags Financial Advisors Shouldn’t Ignore

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship, Prospecting / 0 comments

Almost every financial advisor starts in the same place—with a lot of time on their hands and not many clients. That’s when the criteria for selecting which prospects to work with is at its broadest—essentially, anyone willing to pay me anything.

It’s not until your business expands, reaching the point when you’re servicing 50 or more randomly chosen clients, that your time starts to become much more valuable. Eventually, you reach your capacity for new clients, and your revenue stops growing. Worse, you’re not enjoying your work as much as you hoped.

That’s when you realize it shouldn’t be about the number of new clients you take on; it should be about the quality. It’s about saying ‘no’ to prospects who don’t meet your criteria for the type of client you want to work with, which isn’t easy if you’re still chasing growth. But ultimately, saying no to prospects who are not a solid fit is good for you and them.

Here are some major prospect red flags warning you to move on.

How to Help Clients Through Their Financial Anxiety

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Who among us has never had worries about money? You can expect that many of your clients have experienced money worries from time to time. We know that clients can become stressed during periods of increasing market volatility or economic distress. And we’ve shared how financial advisors can help clients deal with that stress and confront fears to prevent their emotions from controlling their decisions.

But what about financial anxiety? Not only is that different from stress, but it can be much more debilitating to the psyche, causing mental paralysis in the face of important financial decisions. While stress is typically caused by external factors, such as a crashing market or rising unemployment, anxiety tends to rise internally over fears or unhealthy attitudes about the world around us.

How to Become Your Client’s Trusted Confidant

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

We’ve frequently stressed the importance of building deep and trusting relationships with clients. Practically speaking, the stronger and more enduring your client relationships, the greater their lifetime value to you in terms of repeat business, growing assets under management, referrals, and family legacies. For financial advisors, the profit truly is in the relationship.

The most successful advisors seek to take the relationship even deeper—to the point where they become a trusted confidant of their clients. They want to be the first person their clients think of when any significant issue arises, be it a family milestone (i.e., birth, college graduation, engagement), family tragedy (i.e., divorce, death), career change, or any major family decision (i.e., new home purchase).

To some, that may seem like going above and beyond. After all, isn’t it enough to have the family’s trust to act in their best interests in helping them manage their money? Is it appropriate to try to insert ourselves into every aspect of their lives? What do we gain from that? What does the client gain? Why would a client want their financial advisor as a trusted confidant?

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