The seeds of great client relationships are sown in the first interactions advisors have with their clients. From the first email, phone call, or meeting, potential clients are evaluating you and your performance and forming opinions about your ability to help them achieve their goals.
A crucial component of these initial interactions is the 30-second pitch—a concise, compelling summary of who you are, what you do, and how you can add value to their lives. This brief window is your opportunity to capture their attention, showcase your expertise, and differentiate yourself from competitors. Mastering this short introduction can significantly influence whether a potential client chooses to engage further, making it a vital tool in establishing a positive first impression and ultimately building lasting partnerships.
Once you’ve nailed the pitch, and the client is ready to meet formally, every action in those initial moments becomes a chance to establish trust and confidence. This entails laying a solid foundation and establishing early expectations, while also seizing the opportunity to deeply understand your client to tailor a comprehensive financial plan and anticipate future needs effectively.
Read on to learn 5 best practices for getting client on-boarding right every time so that you can build great, long-term client relationships.
Best Practice#1: Ask the right questions to understand your client’s needs #
The most critical component in any advisor’s skillset is their ability to understand and meet their clients’ needs. This requires mastery of questioning and listening skills, as well as a well-developed sense of empathy. These skills allow advisors to delve beyond surface-level discussions of spreadsheets and numbers, creating an environment built on empathy, trust, and understanding. When clients feel understood and valued, they are more likely to share their true circumstances, goals, dreams, and fears, which in turn will enable you to craft comprehensive financial plans tailored precisely to your client's needs.
In this workbook, we focus on honing the skill of asking effective questions. The workbook includes a list of 20 thought-provoking questions designed to help you better understand your client's goals, offer personalized service, and foster long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
Best practice #2: Enhancing Client Understanding with the Right Technology #
Your ability to identify and understand client needs can be greatly improved using the right technology. In the early phases of the on-boarding process, when top advisors need to collect client data, they rely on their advisor-specific CRM and digital Financial Needs Analysis (FNA) solutions.
An advisor-specific CRM is tailored to help you manage and nurture client relationships effectively. They offer features such as client segmentation, personalized communication, and detailed client profiles, allowing advisors to provide customized services and build stronger relationships.
A financial planning tool transforms previously time-consuming manual processes into streamlined operations, eliminating lengthy data entry and tedious tasks involved in client preparation. This allows advisors to engage in more meaningful and informed discussions, uncovering deeper client needs and developing strategies to address them.
When integrated, these tools can not only increase advisor efficiency—saving them time and effort by reducing the need for manual data input—but also improve client experiences by getting clients involved in the process of providing, reviewing, and verifying, not just their financial information, but their fears, targets and goals.
Making a good CRM and FNA toolset part of your onboarding process ensures you’ll have better results and consistently greater efficiency, freeing you up to spend more time relating to your clients and doing the ‘over-and-above things’ that will cement your relationships.
Best Practice #3: Focus on quick wins #
Empathy is really all about focusing on your clients’ goals rather than your own. Great advisors put aside their need to close a client or make a sale, they know those things will take care of themselves if they concentrate on understanding their client’s world and identifying the issues that cause them the most pain, as well as things the client feels would represent initial success in the relationship.
Initial success may be defined differently by different clients. Some will have urgent needs for RRSP contributions or specific insurance needs that can be met in a pretty straight-forward manner. Others may require tax assistance or advice on a business issue. Sometimes, you can provide immediate solutions or advice directly. Overall, it’s also important to remember to keep an open mind about achieving initial success by connecting your client to a specialist within your network who can expertly address their immediate challenge.
Successfully dealing with the things that are front-of-mind for your new client quickly and effectively makes a great first impression and sets the expectation that you are someone they will be able to rely on going forward to solve their problems or help them achieve their goals.
Best Practice #4: Set and communicate clear expectations #
All relationships benefit from clarity around both parties’ expectations for each other—especially if those expectations are set, understood, and agreed to from the beginning. In the advisor-client relationship it’s important to take ambiguity, anxiety, and guesswork out of the equation so that clients aren’t surprised by negative outcomes they didn’t expect—only by positive surprises that boost their confidence in you.
Setting clear expectations includes defining and communicating the process you will follow, and what each of your roles and responsibilities are at each step along the way. It’s also a good idea to set the stage for how long things will take. Give your clients an idea about the timing of each step and they’ll be less likely to feel anxious or like the process is moving more slowly than they would like.
Best Practice #5: Clarify and streamline your onboarding workflow #
The best advisors systematize their on-boarding process by identifying the repeatable steps necessary to successfully take on a new client each time out. They streamline the number of steps as much as possible, and they use technology to manage their system, so it requires little effort and is as automated as possible.
They also seek to continually review and revise their process so that it is optimized to the needs of their clients. As these advisors on-board more and more clients, and come to understand the frustrations their clients commonly feel around the process of receiving advice, they seek to customize their system to alleviate those headaches.
For example, in a CE credit webcast with Evan Inglis, Executive Financial Consultant at IG Wealth Management, he emphasized the importance of a systematized onboarding process for enhancing efficiency in his practice. This process includes templated emails, scheduled meeting times, a streamlined meeting booking system, and template documents for new clients to complete.
A great way to begin this streamlining process is to ask your new clients what is working and not working. Listen for indications that any parts of your process are causing them pain. Continually look for ways to eliminate steps, automate activities, and reduce the amount of time and effort required to complete the process for both yourself and your clients.
Wrap up #
Great client relationships are born in the early moments of your first interaction—when clients make their initial judgements about you, your experience and your ability. To give these new relationships the best chance for success, advisors work to build client trust and confidence. Great advisors focus on understanding their clients’ needs, create early wins, set and communicate expectations, and clarify and streamline their on-boarding workflow. Consistently following these best practices for on-boarding new clients will help ensure your clients are positively disposed to entering into a long-term relationship with you that will be profitable and enjoyable for you both
