37 (Easily Fixable) Things That Annoy Affluent Clients

I recommend for financial advisorswho are in the retail side. In other words,

advisors that coordinate the finances for

individuals and families.

What the goal should be is to consistently exceed

your clients expectations. So.

Ah, so the goal is what? Consistently meet client expectations?

No, to consistently exceed client expectations.

And I actually have a lot of training on this. The point

I wanted to get with on this video is,

the first question is, where do I start?

So let’s say you’re a financial advisor. You’ve made

a decision that you’re going to offer comprehensive financial

services to highly affluent clients. Okay, great.

The goal is to consistently exceed the expectations

of those affluent clients. Do you start

just by knocking their socks off?

What are we supposed to do to do that? Okay. There’s quite a

bit of training to this. It’s a process, and I’m happy

to share it all with you. But let me start with where you

begin. You don’t begin by knocking their socks off.

You begin by fixing things that

unintentionally annoy them.

So I’ve done the work for you. I’ve gone through lots

of research for affluent clients,

and I’ve come up with a piece of content called 37

easily fixable things that annoy affluent clients.

And I’ll put a link to it in the

description below. There are 37 common financial

advisor practices that successful affluent

clients just absolutely hate. But they may never tell you

that they hate it. That’s the problem. But what’s

happening is because you’re doing things that

might annoy them. It’s kind of like a bank account.

So you hire someone in

your professional life, an accountant, a lawyer, or something like that,

a professional in your life, and you

assume they have above average technical competence.

So you give them a little slack. They do something that annoys

you. Okay. They put it in the client’s bank account.

I can live with that. Okay. It’s annoying, but I can live with that.

Because they’re above average technical competence. Then they do

something else annoying, and then something else annoying. And before you

know it, at some point, there is a line. There is a line over

which you step where you’ve done a cumulative

effect of enough things that irritate the client.

Well, now, all of a sudden, they are open to

talking to other professionals, and they may take their business elsewhere.

So I recommend starting by assessing

all the procedures that you’ve currently got in

place with your clients. Now,

when I say procedure, I mean process.

Now, am I saying for you to review all your documented processes

that affect clients? Yes,

but I’m not expecting that all your processes

right now, at the moment, are documented.

Now that is something that we do recommend. As a matter of fact,

the best way to assure that

you have a consistent process that knocks your client’s

socks off is to document every process that touches

a client. But for right now, just make a list.

Because if there are things that you do routinely for your clients that

are not documented, but you do things a certain way

over and over, let’s call that a process

or a procedure at the moment, and just make a list of everything you can

think of. It could be we

send out a client meeting,

email confirmation, or it’s that

the day before a meeting, my assistant calls and leaves a voicemail

on the client’s mobile device, just reminding

them of the date and time and location of the meeting and so forth.

Those are all processes. So make a list of all that kind of thing.

It could be reports that you and your office

prepare for clients. When they come into your office for a client progress meeting,

you may have developed certain reports that you think

the client loves, and so write down

all of those reports. These are part of your process for serving

clients. I’m saying literally anything that a client

either touches or consumes, you need to put it

on the list as a process so that you can assess it.

And once you’ve got your list, then I want you to go consume

this thing that I’ve created called the 37 easily fixable things that

annoy affluent clients. Now, it’s a recording.

Literally what I did was I went through research.

There are quite a few research studies where they’ve

gone out and they’ve asked affluent or highly

affluent people, tell us what it is that

annoys you the most about your financial advisor. I mean, these surveys

do exist, or they go out and they ask successful

affluent people, is there anything your financial advisor

does that really grates on you, that annoys you?

And so I went through a lot of research

on that sort of thing, and I

came up with what you’re going to hear. It’s going to be 37

common practices that financial advisors do

that, lo and behold, the clients dislike.

And so you can go listen to that,

or I’ve got the link below, or you can download the

transcript. So you can either read it or listen to it.

But what I want you to do, as you’re going through it, I want you

to assess your current procedures and

see if there’s anything that you’re doing that you could adjust

slightly. And even if it’s not

something that the client dislikes, can you flip it and make it

something that impresses the client? So the goal is not just

a low bar. It’s not that we’re just trying to avoid doing

things that irritate our clients. No. As you’re going

through this, things will start to occur to you. And I’m going

to give you some ideas here in a minute of how to think of this.

But you’re going to get some ideas of ways that

maybe it’s some neutral procedure, that you think the client either

appreciates it or they could care less. But it’s the way you have done

things. But you start to think of it in terms of what could I

do to change our procedures to where the clients

are actually impressed?

And so that’s the goal. Now, I did notice a

few things that ran like golden threads through

this research about things that annoy clients.

And this is something that I

figured out, that this is something in the client’s mind.

It’s a perspective that the client has that

you probably know about or you’ve thought about it,

but I’m asking you for this project to put it foremost in your mind,

and here it is. So when a client hires a financial

advisor, it may not be said out loud,

but what the client is secretly hoping is

that somehow, some way, you’re going to

make their life easier.

They’re thinking in their head,

I don’t know how, but in some magical way, I’m hoping

that this advisor and the team are

going to make things more convenient for me. So whatever I’m currently

doing with my financial affairs, it’s going to be easier,

or it’s going to be more convenient because I’ve hired you.

All right? So I

want you to think about the fact that these clients of yours,

they have things in life that they care about

more than they care about you. And believe it

or not, there are things in their life that they care about more than money.

And it’s a pretty short list.

What is it for you? People tend to care about their family,

their friends. People tend to care about their fitness

and their health. They tend to care about their faith. So there are,

I think we can all agree there are things in life that are more important

than money. And what they’re hoping is in

this relationship with you, that of the hours

that they invest each week devoted to those

things that matter more to them than money, they’re secretly

hoping that whatever time they’re spending on those important

things, that because they’ve hired you, you’re going

to create time for them. To do more of that.

All right, so a relationship with an advisor

like you is going to end up being one of two things. It’s either going

to create time for clients to go do other

things that matter more to them, or it’s going to take away

from that time. And you

want to create a reputation in every

process, every procedure. Anytime you touch a client, and whether

it’s you or your assistant or anybody on your team interacting

with your client, you want the reputation to be growing

that, oh, my gosh, you need to work with this advisor.

My advisor and their team make my life easier. They make my life

so convenient. They create time for me to

go do things that really matter the most to me in life.

So I want you to go through your list of procedures with that

in mind, and I’ll give you an example of how this came to my

attention in my own office. So I’ll

tell you candidly what I encountered when

I did this same exercise I’m asking you to do.

And this goes back a few years, but you’ll catch on to

what the project is when I go through this.

So I met with an older client,

and he asked me a question which made me want to

go back and really assess all of our internal processes when

it came to confirming meetings

in my office. So here’s the situation.

This is a few years ago, we had just purchased a new

online software service where clients

could very easily drag files

on their computer into a folder

at our firm, and it would just magically

transfer documents that we need from them

over to our file. Simple and easy.

Once they upload all this stuff to the cloud, they’re done.

I’ve got access to what I need now to back it up a

little bit. The way our office recommends

that you do things is that when

a client has some information in their head, or they’ve got

some documents that only they possess, and you need access

in order to do your job, to either information or documents

that the client has possession of. We create

a little checklist for the client called

items still needed. Okay,

so we become aware of some information

or documents we need. We create this checklist for the client called

items still needed, and we give it to them at the meeting.

Now, here’s what happened that was unbeknownst to me.

My team had put in place a process

where ten days before the client progress meeting,

they would call up the client if they had

not noticed that all the items that we had given them on

the checklist had not yet been uploaded to our system.

You follow me. So what

they would do is call the client up and say, basically,

hey, we noticed that you haven’t had time to upload those

documents that we had put on your item. Still needed checklist.

And so let’s cancel the meeting

for next week and reschedule it.

How much time do you need in order to get that document

and upload it to us? And so then they

would kind of negotiate with the client, and they’d book the meeting two or three

weeks further out. All right, how did I

find out about this? This cute, elderly,

old retired guy is holding a statement in his

hand, and he said,

I just talked to your staff and I

wanted to see if I could just bring this by. Like, can I just

give it to you right now? And I said, sure you can.

And I took the statements, and I said, what made you think you couldn’t?

And he explained to me, well, your assistant called me

a couple of days ago, and we had to reschedule my meeting

for next week with you. And all because these

statements right here, I wasn’t able to figure out how to upload

them to your new system because that would have required,

what? I’ve got to scan them, something. How do

I even do that? And then I can upload them to you. Anyway,

I just got the impression that it was not okay for

me to just drop these off. And I said, well, of course it is.

So I sit down with my staff, and this was what you might

call a wake up call for them. All right? So I

said, first of all, you do realize, and this is to my staff,

I said, you do realize that we work for the client.

The client doesn’t work for us. So we have

been hired to make their life easier.

We have been hired to make their life more convenient.

So first, you don’t tell clients they have

to get us information or documents using some

particular method. You work for

them. So rather than calling up this old gentleman

and saying, hey, we’re canceling your meeting because you don’t give

us your papers properly. No.

Rather than cancel and reschedule the meeting, I think it’s okay

that you called him ten days in advance, but why couldn’t

you just say, look, you’re one of the best clients at

our firm? If it would be easier, on my way home, could I drop

by your house and just pick up that statement and then save you from

having to do anything? Do you start to catch on? This is what

clients are hoping for. Their life is easier because we are

in their life by you requiring them

to use a system that, first of all, he didn’t understand.

And you just kept saying over and over to him, oh, it’s easy.

I can show you how to do it. Well, had it occurred to you that

he doesn’t want to have to learn how to scan documents and upload them to

you? He just wants to get these things

off his plate and give them to us to deal with for him.

Okay, so don’t tell clients how to get

us anything. They can get us the documents any way they want. They want

to drop them off? They can drop them off.

They want to mail

them to us. You offer to send them a self address stamped

envelope and they could just pop it in the mail and get it back to

us that way if that’s what they want. I mean, some of our clients are

older,

and yes, if they want to upload the files

to us using this fancy new system that we’ve got, that’s fine,

too. Whatever’s easier for them. That’s number one,

let me tell you. Number two, you don’t ever call a

client up ten days before the meeting and cancel because

they didn’t finish your homework assignment for them.

That’s never going to happen. You just call them up,

remind them of the items still needed checklist,

go through it with them if they need you to email it to them again

if they ask for it. But in the end, just encourage them

to come to the meeting with what they can.

And so when they get here, I will assess

whether for anything that’s still missing off that list. Is it

because they were unwilling to give it to us or is it because they

were unable to figure out how to get it to us? I mean,

has it occurred to you that maybe they’ve lost some of these things

and you keep hammering them to upload them to the system when what

we should be doing is offering to write a letter to the

institution on their behalf, to replace the missing document

and just have them sign the letter, and we’ll even send the letter off

for them. So our job is to make their life easier,

make their life more convenient. Now, when you go through these

37 things, you’ll get lots of ideas of how to make the

client’s life easier. But don’t mistake and think it’s

things like I’m just describing. There are all

kinds of issues among these 37 things. For example,

things as simple as meeting frequency.

So how often do you meet with clients?

Well, if you can believe it, on the study that I was

looking at, it showed up twice on the top five

things that annoy clients most about their financial advisors.

So the two things that showed up on the top five list is

I never know when I’m going to be meeting with my financial advisor next.

It’s a big complaint, valid complaint, I’d say.

And the other complaint that’s on the top five list is

I meet too frequently with my financial advisor. I get in there and we

talk about nothing. Like there’s not enough going on in my situation

to warrant a meeting that frequently. So you have to

kind of dig beneath that. So I’m thinking, how on earth could these

two things be on the top five list? Turns out they are different

clients with different advisors. Each advisor has a

different problem. In the one case, they have a

meeting schedule that’s too frequent, maybe quarterly,

and there’s just not enough to discuss to make it a robust,

meaningful meeting. So they’re meeting too frequently. Big complaint.

The client who says, I don’t know when I’m meeting with my

advisor next, I think we can all agree that’s a valid complaint,

so don’t let that happen.

You should have a meeting frequency. Don’t just sit there

quietly and don’t call the client. No, we recommend,

and if you ever get into our training, we’ll go through this more thoroughly.

We recommend and we’ve developed something called the three meeting process.

You’re meeting with the client every four months and

you book all meetings for the next twelve months out,

twelve months at a time. So every client not only

knows when they’re meeting with you, but they know when they’re meeting with you

over the next year, they know that they’ve got three meetings on the schedule,

and if they need more, they can call you.

So the objective of the meeting

should be, and this will tick off a few other complaints on the

37 things that annoy affluent clients,

but you should have a robust meeting agenda. You should

never call a meeting if there’s nothing to talk about.

The objective for every client progress meeting needs

to be that both spouses leave

the meeting with a smile on their face and

they’re saying to each other, man, that was

a great meeting. I’m glad I didn’t miss that meeting.

I was needed in this meeting. My contribution

was required. And this is both spouses saying this.

So the idea of creating a more robust agenda often

comes up when you go through the 37 things that

annoy clients. We even teach in our

program, and I’ll just share this with you, that you should open every

client progress meeting with a statement that sounds something like this.

So I’m glad this time worked out for us to

meet. And let me tell you the objective of today’s meeting.

The goal of the meeting today is for you, both of you, to walk

out of this meeting with an overwhelming sense of

confidence that you’re making progress towards

your goals. Now, talk about setting a high bar.

Now, the question is, how do you create the agenda that will ensure that

outcome? I’m just saying these

are the things that you can fix. Things that if

you’re not having a robust agenda when you meet with clients,

you can fix that. So I’m going to leave it there. I’m giving you some

examples of what I’m talking about.

I leave it up to you to go make the commitment to yourself that you’re

going to go through all your current processes and procedures and

then go through my 37 easily fixable things

that annoy affluent clients. And you’re going to fix them.

And if you can, you’re going to flip it around to impress them.

So where did you start with this project of consistently exceeding

client expectations? Really easy.

You started by identifying and eliminating

everything that irritates them. How about that?

And so I’m going to leave it there.

We have a lot that we can offer to help you

if things come up. As you go through these 37 things that you have questions

about, just leave comments in this video. Love to hear

what your feedback is after you go through this project. So that’s

it for me. I’m Mark Little and I’ll look forward to seeing

you next time.