Deep Discovery

The goal of Deep Discovery is to help you understand the person behind the wealth. People don't make financial decisions in a vacuum. And while traditional financial planning questions tell you what your client is doing, they don't answer why. We believe that finding out the why can dramatically improve not only the quality of your client relationships, but also the advice you provide them. The Deep Discovery interview is designed to help you understand your client's perceptions and misperceptions. Uncover your clients and prospects true financial needs and challenges. Diffuse anxiety by demonstrating your highly systematized approach to managing wealth. Introduce the sophisticated capability of your highly specialized team of financial professionals. Highlight your extensive professional network and how it integrates into your wealth management process. Position yourself as your client's CFO, who will help organize their complex financial lives, and finally build rapport by demonstrating you understand and care about your clients. But the key to getting the answers you need is to build trust.

We've written this introductory script to give you an example of how you could explain the Wealth Management process to your clients. Here's what it could sound like. The hallmark of our client engagement process is a radical focus on each individual client's unique journey. As a result of this commitment, we begin every relationship with an in-depth discovery process built to help us understand you, your family and your business, and how those dynamics might inform our recommendations. We then construct a comprehensive strategic plan that incorporates everything that we've learned in our discovery meeting with you and your family. Next, we design a customized portfolio that is meant to align directly with your personal strategic plan. We then have our chief of staff meet with you and your family to walk you through all of the opportunities and potential benefits of working with our financial professional team. And finally, we set up a comprehensive review schedule that is built to meet your expectations and needs. So that's our example script, but feel free to create your own.

When it comes to preparing for the discovery meeting, you're going to need a few things from your clients and prospects. Consider sending an email or a letter that asks your clients to bring the following documents. The most recent two years of income tax returns and bank statements, brokerage and mortgage statements, life insurance, and annuity policies, employee benefit, retirement and deferred compensation statements, wills, and trust documents. And also anything else you believe would be useful to gain a better understanding of your client's financial situation. Ahead of the meeting remember to send a reminder of your appointment and some of the topics you expect to cover in your meeting.

When it comes to capturing critical client insights, it's not only the questions you ask that are important, it's also the order in which you ask them. In order to break the ice and gain critical insights, consider starting with some personal and professional questions. For example, something along the lines of, is there anything going on in the next couple of years that may impact your financial future in any material way? Consider asking clients about personal values that could potentially inform how you manage their wealth, like what they consider to be their greatest accomplishments to date or what factors might have shaped their lives growing up. Next, you may want to ask some conventional questions, like how much wealth would it take to dissipate all of their financial concerns. Now, these types of questions help you establish the roadmap for this client's unique journey. Consider asking how they prefer to work with you, how often they'd like to meet or any other relationship expectations that they may have. And finally, consider finishing by getting a quick snapshot of the client's interests and passion. In our experience, asking questions from each of these categories in this specific order can enhance your client relationships.

When you're conducting Deep Discovery, you want to take detailed notes. Whether you use a pen and paper, a digital interface, or mind mapping software, we have created tables that you can use in any of those instances. The tables we've created offer you suggested questions in each of the following categories. Personal insights, professional insights, personal values, financial insights, relationship expectations, and of course, background and interests. They provide sample questions, but also explain context for why we believe each question is important to the relationship and we give you space to record your client's answers. These tables are all available in our Deep Discovery tool. And of course you can feel free to create your own system for recording these client notes. The critical action here is that you capture all of these insights and all this information and document it in your client relationship management system, for you and your team to act upon.

Thank you for your time. I hope you found it informative. If you have any questions or for more information on this or other programs from Invesco Global Consulting, please reach out to your senior advisor consultant. Thank you.