Working With Large Clients

Research by several major financial firms has demonstrated that a single financial advisor is able to provide Ritz Carlton level service to only about 100 client households and still spend 20 percent of their time prospecting to build their business. If you're focusing on client households with $1 million or more to invest, you already know that they expect only the best service and will go somewhere else if they don't get it. Despite this, a remarkable number of financial advisors fail to create a formal, consistent client service program to meet the needs of these clients.

If your / your team's client service is less consistent that it should be,there are several easy steps you can take to improve it:
1. Discuss the "best" service you are currently providing to one or more of your clients and write down everything you do for them, the frequency with which you do it, and its cost in time and effort for your team.
2. Once you've written it all down, organize it in terms of when and how you provide the various services and specifically whom on the team provides each service.
3. Is there a specific schedule for each service (e.g., quarterly review of their financial plan or portfolio performance)? If so, be sure to include that when describing the service.
4. How does each client respond to each service [what thrills one client might only elicit a yawn from another]? If you don't know, ASK!
5. Are there services your clients would like that you don't currently provide? If you don't know, ASK! Can you provide these services? Will it be worth your time and effort to do so?
6. Now that you have a complete list of services and their cost in time, effort and money, do an analysis to determine if you can really afford them. If you can't [e.g., they take too much time], you may wish to consider adding another advisor and/or sales assistant to your team, cut back on some of the services or reduce the number of your clients.
7. Now that you have a list of all the services you're prepared to provide, create an SOP [standard operating procedure]for those services to guarantee that they're provided in a consistent manner. Remember, inconsistent quality of service can be worse than mediocre service.

In #6, above, we suggested the possibility that you might wish to reduce the number of your clients (i.e., give up a million dollar client). Sounds crazy, doesn't it. However, at one time or another, we've all had at least one large client who was more trouble than he was worth. Super demanding of our time and effort, often unappreciative of our efforts and sometimes not very friendly at all these clients can be a great source of stress for the team. If you are managing one hundred or more large client households the odds are near 100 percent that you have at least one or more of these clients. Discuss it with your team and then seriously consider offering them to another advisor. The time and effort you save will enable you to quickly replace these individuals while making it easier to provide better and more consistent service to your other clients. Don't risk losing good clients by wasting time on bad clients. Thanks and good luck. kfg