The common refrain from practice management consultants for years is that to survive and succeed, planning firms need to clearly define their target market. After all, if you don't know who you're trying to serve, you can't create unique value for them, and you can't focus your limited resources. The good news is that after years of this messages, a recent trend suggests that financial planners are finally getting it... sort of. Planners are saying that they've defined a target market in increasing numbers; the problem is, their target market is often defined as no more than "people who can afford my services" - and that is NOT a target market!Read More...
There is a perception in the financial planning world that the process of acquiring a new client begins at the first meeting - the so-called "approach talk" - and therefore any firm that does a good job at converting prospects into new clients in those early meetings must have an effective business development process. Firms that want to grow more/better/faster are encouraged to refine their process, materials, and techniques used in the approach talk to improve the rate at which prospects convert into clients.
Yet the reality is that from the client's perspective, the process actually starts much earlier; and because the "pre-meeting" parts of the process are so ignored by most planners, the reality is that many (or even most!?) potential clients may be lost before you ever have a chance to meet them!Read More...
The FPA Annual Convention every fall is arguably the biggest event in financial planning each year. Typically drawing upwards of 3,000 attendees, it is certainly by numbers one of the largest conferences by far; although some of the custodial conferences (e.g., Schwab Impact) are competitive, FPA's is focused more directly on financial planning. This year, though, the FPA has rebranded the conference as FPA Experience, and conference chair Evelyn Zohlen is trying to take the event to a whole new level, with a huge focus on building community, and an effort to make it "the most interesting conference in the world" starting with a phenomenal promotional video!
If you've been to any session delivered by a practice management consultant in the past several years, you've probably need that to grow your business further, you need to standardize and systematize. In other words, you can't do everything differently for every single client and expect to keep growing much, because at some point your practice is so complex delivering 100 different services to 100 different clients that you just can't absorb the 101st without having your head explode (or alternatively, you couldn't possibly find the time to meet with the 101st prospect to try to get him/her as a client anyway).
In response, planners tend to complain: "But financial planning must be tailored to each individual's situation; and since every client is a unique snowflake unlike any other, so too must their financial planning experience/products/deliverables each be individualized, unique, and customized one client at a time."
Are there still ways to run an efficient practice in a world like this?
The Financial Planning Coalition is fighting the advocacy fight for a fiduciary standard for financial planning. While this certainly is a consumer-centric direction for financial planning, the firms today that practice financial planning may need to be careful about what they wish for. After all, for many firms, the fact that they operate as fiduciaries has become a central message of their marketing to prospective clients.
So what happens if the Coalition wins the fiduciary fight? If everyone who practices financial planning must operate as a fiduciary, do a number of currently successful firms lose their key marketing differentiator and have to rewrite a new marketing plan?
Within the financial planning world, there is often little love for popular consumer "personal finance gurus" like Suze Orman, David Bach, and Dave Ramsey. Whether it's because of their entertainment-style deliver of financial advice (in the case of the former), their bombastic platitudes of overgeneralized advice with little client-specific information (in the case of both), or their controversial views about how to address common problems like debt (in the case of the latter), most financial planners don't seem to think highly of their consumer-popular counterparts.
Yet the success of those like Orman, Bach, and Ramsey - who, in the end, touch the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions, while the "average" financial planner's impact may only be measured by a mere few dozen or hundred clients - makes me wonder: Maybe there is something we as financial planners could - and should - learn from the success of those like Orman and Ramsey?
As financial planning fights for its standing as a full-fledged profession, we try to demonstrate its core value to society - that going through the financial planning process has a positive impact on achieving a client's goals. Yet for all we proclaim about our beliefs in the value of financial planning, why is it that virtually none of us think financial planning is valuable enough to pay for it ourselves?
It seems that the common wisdom in the financial planning world to improve client referrals is either "ask more often for referrals" or "do a better job when you ask for referrals." However, it may be that the single greatest reason why most planners don't get very many referrals is simply because... well, they're not actually that referrable.
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