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What does it take for a meeting with a key client to be successful?
To answer that question, first you have to quantify how you measure success.
Here are three alternative definitions:
- Did the client agree to move forward on at least one thing that will advance their agenda, moving them towards their goals and leaving them better positioned?
- Did the client agree to move forward on at least one item that that will advance your agenda and leave you better off?
The list of possible items here is lengthy, for example:
- Shifting your fee structure
- Consolidating accounts they have elsewhere
- Agreeing to work with one of your team members on day-to-day issues instead of calling you
- Opening the door to talking about needs that you’re not dealing with currently (e.g., insurance if you only have their investments, investments if you only have their insurance)
- Finding a way to get to know their kids better and potentially to begin working with their children
- Introducing family members or their accountant
- Referring colleagues at work
In the process, was your bond with these clients strengthened? Did they walk away feeling better about your depth of knowledge and professionalism and the extent to which you truly care about their long-term success, beyond the revenue you generate from their account? Did they leave saying to themselves: “Am I ever glad that Dan’s my financial advisor”
Shaping your conversation
In my view, a meeting can be successful without specific actions taken to advance your clients’ agenda or your agenda, but it’s impossible to have a truly successful meeting unless clients walk away feeling better about your relationship.
Even in tough markets like we saw during the global financial crisis, if clients don’t walk out of a meeting more confident than they felt when they walked in, the meeting wasn’t a success.
I recently got a call from an advisor who’d attended one of my workshops about a year ago and who’s a regular reader of these articles.
Over the past year, she’s implemented a number of ideas and feels that her meetings are much more productive as a result:
- Before calling a client to schedule a meeting, she reviews her files and writes down her goals for the meeting, one or two things she hopes to achieve that will leave the clients better off and advance their agenda and also one thing that will leave her better off, advancing her agenda.
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When setting up the meeting, she starts by asking clients what questions they’d like to cover, then adds her own items to deal with (often emerging from those goals she’s written down) and from that creates an agenda, which she emails to clients beforehand and which is tabled at the start of the meeting.
I encourage advisors to leave the line beside the first item blank and to say, “You’ll note that the first item on the agenda is blank. That’s for any questions that have come up since we set the meeting up or anything else that you’d like to talk about that’s not on the agenda.”
- In developing the meeting agenda, she factors in some of the research I’ve written about on the “peak-end effect”. This research suggests that what shapes client recollections of any experience the most are the “peaks” – the highs and the lows – and what happens at the very end. As a result, she structures the agenda to be sure to end on a high note.
“What should I know about?”
This advisor has also incorporated the idea of leaving the first agenda item blank, but after asking clients about what else they’d like to discuss that’s not on the agenda, she’s added another question of her own:
“At that point, I ask clients what’s happened in their lives since we last met that I should know about, whether good or bad.
I have about 150 client meetings a year. About 95% of the time I don’t hear anything new or I hear great news about promotions or buying a vacation home or their kids getting university scholarships or perhaps expecting children themselves. In those cases, we continue on with the meeting, unless of course their good news has financial implications we need to discuss.
Every couple of months, though, the answer causes our meeting to move in an entirely different direction … I hear about health or work issues with them or family members or kids struggling with school or careers. Sometimes their issues have specific financial consequences that we talk about. Often though, I’m just there to listen and to empathize … it’s amazing how often clients tell me they have no one to talk to about these issues.
At times, that conversation ends up consuming our whole meeting and we reschedule. Occasionally I’m able to point to clients or people I know who’ve run into an issue similar to theirs and ask if they’d like me to find out whether that other person would be willing to talk about their experience. And where clients are really struggling and need more help, I have a couple of psychologists to whom I refer people.
I know this won’t be every advisor’s cup of tea … most of the guys in my branch really don’t want to get into the soft stuff with clients.
But for me, there are four benefits to starting off meetings with that question – ‘What’s happened in your lives since we last met that I should know about, whether good or bad?’
First, I think it sends a positive signal about my concern for everything going on in my clients’ lives.
Second, it helps me do my job better, by ensuring that plans reflect clients’ current circumstances.
Third, where clients have positive things happening in their lives, which is most of the time, I’m able to congratulate them and talk about their good news a bit, I find that establishes a positive tone.
And finally, where clients are dealing with tough issues, I think it’s part of my role as their financial advisor to make sure I know about that and to support them as much as I can.
This advisor is right when she says that this approach won’t be a fit for every advisor. But it’s still worth thinking about how you’re going to begin client meetings to maximize the chances of a successful outcome, however it is that you define success. And perhaps this advisor will inspire you to apply your own creativity on the question of the best way to start client meetings.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries and to reach him, go to www.strategicimperatives.ca.
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