Permission to Advise

The digital age has brought widespread positive change. People are more connected than ever before; information is freely available, and clients have real decision-making power. However, the shift to digital is not without its frustrations. Among those frustrations is the sheer volume of noise that technology produces. Every digital channel from TV to social media is filled with adverts demanding our time and focus.

Time is money, and so people living in the digital age are forced to develop the ability to filter out irrelevant information. Potential clients, now more than ever, are asking for credible reasons to dedicate their time to your product or business. Brands compete against each other to retain their clients’ attention. Staying front of their clients’ minds requires constant innovation.

Within this context, how can financial advisors stay front of mind and secure their future with their clients and within their clients’ respective reference networks?

By the very nature of the work that they do, advisors create a personal bond with their clients. This bond is based on trust and makes their clients sit back and pay attention to what they have to say. But this bond won’t last indefinitely…

Competitor companies frequently target advisors’ clients. These companies have large marketing budgets that they can exploit to capture their targets’ attention. In this demanding environment, clients’ trust is an indispensable resource. To stay front of mind, advisors must make credible monthly contact with their clients to strengthen the trust they have worked so hard to secure. After all, trust is the foundation of a financial advisor’s permission to advise.

Consolidated client portfolio statements are one way for advisors to establish credible monthly contact with their clients. Seed Analytics provides a service that transforms tedious reporting into a trust-building strategy. The advisor’s clients receive 12 credible portfolio statements per year at virtually no time cost to the advisor or their back office. Although these statements are generated by Seed Analytics, they display the advisor’s own branding and become an extension of the advisor’s services.

Seed Analytics takes care of data acquisition and consolidation. All the advisor needs to do is click the send button to distribute branded consolidated statements to their entire customer base.

In a world that generates so much noise, clients are seeking out trusted relationships to help them establish their future. By working with Seed Analytics, a financial advisor is taking a simple yet effective step to strengthen their clients’ trust and retain their ongoing permission to advise.

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The Loyalty Loop a Model for Recurring Business

Advisors often ignore recurring business. While perhaps not the best source of finding new high net worth clients recurring business is usually the cheapest way to source healthy, incremental, increases to their overall book. The cost of sourcing and landing the client is eliminated. Trust, once created, serves as a sturdy foundation for loyalty and future business in a cycle called the “Loyalty Loop”.

The Funnel is Flawed

The traditional evaluation funnel is a framework for approaching new business. It outlines the steps clients take when selecting an advisor. The approach suggests that clients assemble several possible potential advisors before filtering down to the single advisor that they select as their advisor. Finally, the framework somewhat naively indicates that customers automatically remain loyal once an advisor has been selected.

But this model is flawed. It fails to take into account the ongoing experience after a client selects an advisor. It also ignores the potential client’s ability to get service quality information from the advisor's existing clients.

Loyalty

The loyalty loop is a framework that describes the recurring business model. It suggests that clients go through a constant evaluation cycle. If advisors are absent and the experience miserable, then clients typically seek out new options. In contrast, clients return for new business when the experience is pleasant. The trick is to keep a high level of engagement while avoiding the time sink. So how can advisors maintain a positive experience over the course of a financial year?

How to Build Loyalty

One cost-effective solution comes in the form of a consolidated portfolio statement. By sending a client a monthly portfolio statement containing the advisor’s brand, the advisor can increase the touchpoints from a single annual review by an additional 12 points.

Seed Analytics offers consolidated client reporting. Statements for every portfolio in the advisor’s book are generated by Seed Analytics’ systems at a fraction of the cost it would take an advisor to do it manually. Using the client reporting system, advisors can send their clients a monthly consolidated statement together with a monthly market summary. That way, clients feel updated about their investments in the context of the market. The email is sent from the advisor’s email address, so if the client does need to reach out, they simply need to hit reply.

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