Four steps to elevate client engagement

4 Steps Designed to Elevate Client Engagements

Every business/practice in the United States has two fundamental components: structure and people. The business structure comprises systems, processes and technology; the more thoughtful and elegant, the easier the business is to manage and grow. The people must be aligned within that structure to leverage their unique talents and skills for the greatest impact on the enterprise and the clientele. We use the metaphor of a house to illustrate the basic structure of your practice. In our view, that house, your practice, has four rooms: the New Business Development Room, the Wealth Management Room, the Client Service Room and the Practice Management Room. At any point during the day, you and/or your team members are in one of those four rooms doing something.

Your clients, however, will likely judge you and your practice based on how you perform in the Wealth Management and Client Service Rooms, which when combined, make up your client engagement strategy. Your ability to attract and retain high-net-worth clients is often dependent on your ability to implement a comprehensive wealth management strategy and to provide an exceptional and highly personalized level of service and recognition.

We developed a program with four actionable steps designed to help you in this endeavor.

Step 1 Benchmarking the Four Rooms of Your Practice

In this first step, you will analyze the four fundamental components (rooms) that compose every practice: new business development, wealth analysis and management, client service and practice management. To get an accurate appraisal of where your practice currently stands, we believe it is critical that all team members complete this form in order to incorporate their unique positions and perspectives on the team. You will then be in a position to conduct a team meeting in which you work to reconcile any disparities between individual team members and arrive at a final benchmark that accurately reflects your current business model.

Step 2 Enhancing Your Structural Capability to Execute for Your Clientele

A. Personal Client Intake Form

This form acts as a complement to and provides context for your traditional wealth management/financial planning discovery tool provided by your firm. The latter provides all the financial data ON your client, while the former provides all the personal insights FROM your client, both of which we believe are necessary to provide the best advice TO your client.

B. Wealth Management Implementation Checklist

Many financial professionals claim that they provide comprehensive wealth management, but we have found that oftentimes financial professionals don’t fully deliver on that claim. The vertical version of this tool is built to allow you to look at the services provided to each client individually. The horizontal version is built to allow you to look at your entire clientele. The former becomes an individual roadmap for each client meant to help get them to their individual goals, while the latter is designed to help you uncover overall gaps that you can batch process as a team.

C. Client Segmentation Tool

When you think about the characteristics that would define your “ideal client,” there are both quantitative (assets, revenue, etc.) and qualitative (COI, time consumption, etc.) components that we believe must be captured in order to get an accurate picture of the overall impact of that relationship on you, your team and your practice.

D. Stratified Client Service Matrix

Once you’ve segmented your clientele both qualitatively and quantitatively, it’s time to stratify your service levels in an effort to reflect that segmentation. Do treat your clients “fair but not equal.” We suggest devoting the most time, energy and resources to those that not only sustain your business today but will also help you grow for years to come.

E. Comprehensive Client Review Template

In our view, managing your client’s assets begins by helping your clients manage their emotions. It’s your client’s perceptions and misperceptions, fears and phobias, exacerbated by a 24-hour news cycle and the crisis of the moment that often stands between you and your clients’ long-term financial success. The focus of our comprehensive client review is twofold: to ensure you complete the client’s wealth management journey and provide the context necessary to keep them “buckled-in” to your overarching investment structure and strategy.

Step 3 Optimizing the Talents of Your Team

A. Expanding Your Human Capacity

We have found that the most productive people spend 60–70% of their weeks doing the 3–5 things that only they “can and should” do for the greatest impact on the business. By the way, just because you can do something better than anyone on your team, doesn’t mean that you should be the one doing it. This tool is designed to help you work collaboratively with each individual member of your team to determine what those 3–5 highest impact activities are, remove obstacles standing in their way and create an action plan to incrementally move towards that 60–70% allocation of time.

B. Aligning Roles and Responsibilities in the “Four Rooms”

After completing the previous steps, you are likely equipped to begin to align your roles and responsibilities between your various internal and external team members for the greatest impact on your practice. We have provided the most common roles, delineated in each of the “four rooms” of your practice that we believe are necessary to serve your high-net-worth clientele.

Step 4 Implementation and Impact Report

This tool combines the critical activities within each room we believe are necessary to fully implement the previous three steps and the actual impact that implementation has on your bottom-line results.

Access our Tools and Resources site for detailed action plan.