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.

Steps to Take When Ending a Client Relationship

Steps to Take When Ending a Client Relationship

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.

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Get More from an Advisory Relationship with Client-Centric Investing

Get More from an Advisory Relationship with Client-Centric Investing

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.

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How to Help Clients Through Their Financial Anxiety

How to Help Clients Through Their Financial Anxiety

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.

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How to Become Your Client’s Trusted Confidant

How to Become Your Client's Trusted Confidant

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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How to Bring Back Face-to-Face Meetings with Clients

How to Bring Back Face-to-Face Meetings with Clients

A survey by YCharts in December 2019 found that clients didn’t feel engaged and wanted more personalized communications. We’ve posted several times that, pre- and post-pandemic, the frequency and style of advisors’ communication directly impact client trust and confidence in their advisor, financial plan, and their likelihood of keeping their advisor.

A more recent report, post-pandemic, found that, though virtual meetings had taken hold as a viable form of communication for advisors forced to limit in-person meetings, it’s likely that the decrease in face-to-face contact contributed to client feelings of reduced communication. That’s a direct threat to the strength of the advisor-client relationship.

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How to Regain the Trust of a Client After a Disagreement

How to Regain the Trust of a Client After a Disagreement

Can you think of any relationship that has never experienced conflict—where two people with the best of intentions fail to see eye to eye on an issue? Such is the nature of relationships, even where there is a track record of trust. You expect it in a marriage and even among colleagues—so why not between a financial advisor and their client?

It happens more than you might think. Financial advisors are wired to be analytical, while clients are often driven by emotion, which sets the stage for many “reality vs. perception” standoffs.

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Your Best Practices Checklist for Resolving Client Complaints

Your Best Practices Checklist for Resolving Client Complaints

Client complaints—it happens to the best of us. Some financial advisors go for years without receiving a client complaint. But it will happen, and when it does, it can seemingly come out of left field. Most client complaints are unexpected, which is why advisors must be able to quickly shift into rapid response gear or risk losing a client.

We’ve posted in the past about the importance of having a systematic communications strategy in developing solid, trusted, and enduring client relationships. As part of that strategy, advisors need a well-conceived, written process for responding to client complaints. The hope is that you will never need to use it, the same way pilots hope never to have to execute emergency landing procedures—but they know the procedure inside and out.

While losing a client’s trust is not nearly as consequential, it can be avoided, even strengthened, if you adhere to your own procedural checklist of best practices for effectively handling your next client complaint.

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The Significance of Ethical Practices in Maintaining Trust and Integrity

The Significance of Ethical Practices in Maintaining Trust and Integrity

Most financial advisors consciously try to do the right thing always. However, most people are sometimes prone to error, which is only human. The reality is that advisors, through no fault of their own, sometimes find themselves in situations where conflicts between ethical principles, client interests, and regulatory requirements can create ethical dilemmas.

The challenge for advisors is that they have to overcome a huge trust deficit with clients and prospects. To earn and keep their trust, they must constantly be hyper-aware of their actions and how they may be perceived, whether an ethical breach is intentional or not. That requires having a conscious and deliberate strategy to resolve any potential conflict.

Here are the most common ethical dilemmas faced by financial advisors.

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