/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
A critical aspect of advising clients is to ascertain their financial goals correctly. If you or your clients don’t genuinely understand the goal, your advice could be dangerously off base, and you could lose your client’s confidence.
Clients typically come to financial advisors with various goals, but they might articulate them in nuanced ways, reflecting their concerns, values, and life circumstances. Your role as a financial advisor is to listen carefully, ask probing questions, and translate these expressions into actionable plans created around their biggest concerns, preferences, and priorities.
Here are five common financial goals clients have and how they might express them differently:
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To Better Understand Your Client’s Goals, Listen Carefully to How They Express Them
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
A critical aspect of advising clients is to ascertain their financial goals correctly. If you or your clients don’t genuinely understand the goal, your advice could be dangerously off base, and you could lose your client’s confidence.
Clients typically come to financial advisors with various goals, but they might articulate them in nuanced ways, reflecting their concerns, values, and life circumstances. Your role as a financial advisor is to listen carefully, ask probing questions, and translate these expressions into actionable plans created around their biggest concerns, preferences, and priorities.
Here are five common financial goals clients have and how they might express them differently:
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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.
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Keep Your Clients Focused on What’s Knowable and Important
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
The media has always run rampant with scary headlines. That’s how they increase readership or website traffic. However, in this period of increased market volatility, economic uncertainty, geopolitical upheaval, mixed COVID signals, and deepening political divisions, the headlines can be incredibly overwhelming or, at the very least, extremely distracting.
Trying to consume all the news coming at us 24/7 is like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s critical to understand that the barrage of bad news and hype around market events can trigger emotional reactions that often lead to making costly decisions around their finances.
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Three Situations when Analogies Can Help Allay Clients’ Concerns
/ by Don Connelly / Storytelling, analogies and power phrases / 0 comments
As their advisor it’s your job to stop clients from worrying unnecessarily and making bad decisions. You need to find a way to check their behaviors and reassure them that they should follow your lead.
Analogies are a great way to allay clients’ concerns and get across why what you say makes perfect sense. Here are three situations where it will pay you to use analogies to keep things on track.
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4 Things Clients Need to Know about Volatility
/ by Don Connelly / Investing Wisdom / 0 comments
When markets are volatile investors can get spooked and start to question their investment strategies. Especially if they’re new to the process of investing. This could prompt them to withdraw from the market and wait on the sidelines until things get better.
As their financial advisor you’re there to help them see things in perspective. By helping them understand the nature of volatility they will find it easier to stick to their plan.
Here are four things about volatility you need to explain to them right away.
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3 Things You Should Never Do in Volatile Markets
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
It’s your job as a financial advisor to stop your clients acting on emotion. You need to get across the fact that the financial plan you created is valid in all types of markets. To manage that, there are some things you should never do…
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When to Call Clients to Keep Your Relationship Strong
/ by Don Connelly / Managing the Relationship / 0 comments
It can be tricky determining how often to contact your clients. While regular communication is key to maintaining a healthy relationship, calling clients every week or month probably isn’t feasible.
At the outset, aim to understand each client’s preferences and their expectations communication-wise and make sure it fits your business plan. Some clients will be more interested in the investment process per se and will want to hear your thoughts and recommendations on a more regular basis. You may also find that as time goes on and your clients learn to trust you, they will be more relaxed and require fewer calls.
However, there are certain times when calling your clients is the right thing to do regardless of any prior agreement. Here are some key occasions when you should pick up the phone and speak to clients.
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