client experience Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

Ten Strategies for Encouraging Your Clients to Spread the Word About Your Business

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

We’ve often posted about the importance of creating an extraordinary client experience to make yourself more “buzzworthy” as an advisor your clients will want to discuss. You can’t even think about creating a compelling word-of-mouth buzz until you create the kind of service that feels personal, unique, and genuinely caring to your clients. That should be your primary focus.

However, beyond creating an extraordinary client experience, it’s essential to turn your clients into vocal advocates, like human billboards spreading the word about your business. While it does happen—having a delighted client go on and on about your service to a friend or colleague—most people are not naturally inclined to initiate a conversation like that without some help and encouragement.

Here are ten effective ideas to inspire your clients to spread the word and advocate for your business proactively.

The Elevator Repair Story

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

I met an Advisor at Merrill Lynch in Detroit who told me a very interesting story.

Listen to the audio episode or read the transcript below, adapted from the video, to learn an important lesson about client service.

‘Why Should I Do Business with You’: Crafting a Compelling Response to a Prospect’s Critical Question

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

For every financial advisor, the question, “Why should I do business with you?” hangs heavy in the air during initial consultations, whether spoken or not. It’s a pivotal moment, a crossroads where trust and value must intersect to convince the potential client to take the next step. While tempting to launch into a self-promotional monologue, a nuanced, client-centric approach is critical to unlocking that coveted “yes.”

It’s crucial to understand that a prepared, cookie-cutter approach, such as reciting your value proposition, won’t work. Every prospect is unique, so it’s essential to adapt your approach based on their specific circumstances and needs using the following framework:

Financial Advisor Branding—Elements to Focus On

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

One of the most significant challenges facing financial advisors trying to grow their practice is it takes time, resources, and a well-conceived marketing strategy to get their stories out to the right audiences. While it involves strategically utilizing digital marketing and producing targeted and relevant content, the path must be paved by building a solid brand and reputation.

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

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

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.

5 Ways You Should Be Asking for Feedback from Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Advisors who are in the dark about how their clients view their relationship or feel about the level of service they receive risk losing them to advisors who care about what they think. It’s not that you don’t care; it’s that your clients won’t know that you do if you don’t periodically ask them for their feedback.

Without direct and honest feedback from your clients, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. You could be perpetuating a less-than-remarkable client experience that could drive clients away. At the very least, you won’t know the reasons why you’re not getting referrals from your clients.

Want to know how you differentiate yourself? Be the advisor who demonstrates a sense of partnership and commitment to the relationship by proactively asking for your client’s feedback. When you do, it’s an opportunity to learn how to improve and grow your practice and make your clients appreciate that you value their opinion.

Here are five ways you can gather valuable insights from your clients while deepening your engagement with them.

Four Imperatives You Must Embrace to Achieve Sustainable Growth in Your Practice

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

As you might already know, the key to achieving sustainable growth in a financial advisory practice is to focus on your core business of business development and client management. From a practice management standpoint, that requires developing business processes that enable you and your team to gain greater efficiencies while increasing productivity by doing more with less. In other words, turning your practice into a well-oiled machine.

But what about you? As the guiding force of your practice, what are you doing individually to ensure its sustainable growth? Business processes are essential for scaling your business and expanding its capacity for growth. But there are certain things only you can do to drive its growth.

Here are four imperatives financial advisors must embrace to achieve sustainable growth for themselves and their businesses.

5 Things Prospects Need to Know About You from the First Meeting

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

Every initial meeting with a prospect is crucial. It took a lot to get them to finally agree to meet with you, and, in most cases, you only have one shot at making the right impression. If a prospect leaves the meeting still wanting critical information, you will not likely see them again. So, you carefully craft your initial meeting to ensure you check all the boxes, including:

– Your background and experience
– Understand your prospect’s needs and concerns
– Your process
– Your firm’s strengths and why you’re different
– Customer service expectations
– How you get paid
– Next Steps

As far as key information your prospect needs, that covers all the bases. It should also give you plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your competence and capacity to address your prospect’s needs and concerns.

What Advisors Need to Do to Help Set Client Goals

/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments

According to a Morningstar study, what clients want most from their financial advisors is to help them reach their financial goals. That should be good news for financial advisors because, generally, people with clearly defined goals and ambitions for the future have the conviction to adhere to a long-term plan to achieve them.

However, it could also spell disaster for advisors who fall short in helping their clients articulate their most important goals and fail to gain their commitment to achieving them. To inspire action, client goals must be well-defined and quantifiable with genuine intrinsic value. Anything less is a hopeful aspiration, and hope is not a strategy.

How Financial Advisors Can Stay Ahead of Industry Commoditization

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

In our second in a series of Critical Issues Facing Financial Advisors Right Now, we focus on perhaps the most significant threat to advisor success, much less survival—the commoditization of the advisory industry. The threat is significant because most advisors don’t even know it’s happening to them. In this extremely cluttered and highly competitive advisory landscape, advisors who don’t find ways to stand out in the crowd get swallowed by a sea of mediocrity, where clients dare not go.

Sound overly dramatic? In fact, it might be understating what is happening. Striving to be a knowledgeable, client-focused, and trusted advisor is no longer enough because that is what clients expect. Advisors must work each day at providing their clients with the unexpected. Otherwise, why should they choose you over any other typical financial advisor? Equally important is why should they stay with you when they can find so many others like you from which to choose?

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