Financial Advisor Client Advisory Board
In a new CABHQ survey, 27% of financial advisors professed they “don’t need a Client Advisory Board to know what their clients want.” More than half of the respondents felt their clients would give them referrals, despite large losses in portfolios they manage and more than half feel their website is very effective in marketing to new prospects. Despite their confidence, there are many areas that can be improved to bring in even more business for these independent financial advisors, says CABHQ’s Andrew Gluck. “Without formally asking clients what they’re thinking-through surveys, a CAB, or other means, you’re just guessing,” he says.
Client Advisory Boards can take a look at marketing strategies to see where updates or improvements can be made. For instance, some of the most successful personal financial advisors are using Web 2.0 tools like social media sites and blogs. They also use online meeting software, provide webinars for their clients to learn financial terms and techniques, send personalized emails and provide online vaults. The board may recommend marketing techniques like brochures, seminars, webinars and newsletters. A good financial advisor will need to become increasingly more competitive in the years to come, considering the market for this profession is growing substantially, sending more and more advisors into the field.
A Client Advisory Board can provide damage control on a number of key issues that a personal financial advisor may not have ever realized. Bruce Peters of PeerHQ, a Pittsford NY advisory business consultant, said that one advisor he worked with had planned to spend the entire board meeting talking about his strategic plan for the year, but ten minutes into the meeting, he realized “they had one concern and one concern only: the advisor was switching broker-dealers and his clients were concerned that they would not get the same level of service after the switch.” These clients had many ideas about how their advisor could make a smooth transition to the new firm in a client-centric way. Peters says that, without the meeting, “Clients might have simply left the advisor and he might never have known why.”
The saying “Two heads are better than one” is certainly true of a Client Advisory Board. In fact, most boards have eight members or so, who help their financial advisor make his business more client-friendly and productive. Here, with his own little test panel, he can run marketing practices and promotions past them, ask for valuable feedback on how to improve his services or products, and set an agenda for the upcoming year. Marketing often falls short of client expectations, so it’s important that a financial advisor include key clients into the decision making to increase referrals, bring more ideas to the table and ultimately, improve business.
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