Maîtriser le parcours du client : Comment maximiser le retour sur investissement de votre technologie

Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to today’s webinar. We’re gonna explore the client journey, how it plays in your growth engagement, client satisfaction goals, where technology can support you and your clients. As you can see, we have a gosh dang superstar cast of speakers today, and they’re gonna share their expertise insights throughout our broad our broadcast today.

Gang, it is gonna be a good one. Now we want this to be interactive. So if there’s something that stands out to you or you have a burning question, anything that you just wanna get in front of the group here today, we have a questions box inside of your GoToWebinar control panel. Go ahead and put that question in there as it comes up for you.

Don’t wait till the end. Go ahead and put it up there. And we’re just gonna do as we do at the start of these things. We’re gonna go through a little bit of housekeeping just so you know all the good things.

We’re gonna go through the agenda today, look at some quick housekeeping items, and then we’re gonna talk about the client journey as a whole before breaking it down section by section and share some best practices and tips for you that you can implement in your business this year. And as always, today’s webinar is being recorded. It’s gonna be sent to your inbox by tomorrow afternoon in case you wanna watch or listen to all of this amazing content again, and you’re gonna want to basically, just be prepared. You’re gonna wanna watch it again or if you wanna share it with a friend, colleague, whatever.

And as mentioned, again, please enter your questions in that GoToWebinar control panel there. There’s a question box in there. We’ll keep an eye on it and keep an eye on those questions. And if it makes sense in the moment to go ahead and ask those questions to kinda keep going with that topic, we’ll do that.

If not, we’ll wait till the end to make sure that we get your questions out at the end. We got a lot to go through today, so we’re gonna jump right into it. And as we like to do at the start of these things, we wanna get a little bit of information from you. Wanna make this a little bit interactive.

We’re gonna launch a poll here that you can see now that we love for you to go ahead and take some time to to mark out what you’re looking to accomplish in twenty twenty four. And while you’re taking a look at that, I want our speakers, if you wouldn’t mind, to introduce yourselves. Susan, we’ll start with you, and if we could just kinda go around Susan, Ally, and then Andrew, and then I’ll wrap us up here. So Susan, how about you?

Alright. Well, hi, everybody. It’s great to virtually see you.

I’m Susan Theater, and I’m the chief marketing and experience officer at FMG.

Hi, everyone. I am Allison Susco, vice president of community at Asset Map, and I am so happy to be here with you all today.

Hey, everyone. Andrew Ladwig here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am the director of business development here at Wealthbox and excited to share some stories with you all today on their client client journey.

Awesome. Awesome. My name is Chris Quanta. I’m a success engagement manager here at Nitrogen. What does that mean?

It means that I get to work with our awesome partners and with our advisor success at Nitrogen here helping to empower fearless investing. I forgot to ask you guys, who where is it below zero or near freezing where you’re at? Anybody, anybody?

We’re we’re looking at, here in Pennsylvania where I am, we’re looking at about negative twenty five wind chill overnight tonight. So, yeah, it’s it’s chilly.

Good thing.

Yeah. Andrew, you said you have to go out and do some shoveling here, shovel some snow as soon as we’re done here, I think.

It’s a Sisyphean task. I’ll I’ll continue to have to do so this week as we get more snow.

Awesome. Awesome. We’ll go ahead and close that poll here and see what we’re looking at. Alright.

So we’re taking a look at what we’re looking to accomplish in twenty twenty four here. Grow that business, increase AUM ad clients, improve client engagement. Alright. So fifty five percent, grow that business.

So, hey, you are in the right spot. So let’s go ahead and kind of high level as we start to get into to it here. Take a quick minute and look at the potential journey of a client that what it might look like at the top. Now you’re looking to build that foundation, drive business, attract, nurture, and eventually capture and converting those clients.

Probably not new news to you, but, once we’ve established that connection, it’s time to deliver on those promises, the expectations that you set, and this is where you collect that data. All this is gonna come into play what we’re talking about with the different softwares that we have here, part of your tech stack, and what you need to build that proper plan to create that lifelong journey and client relationship. Now, again, this is this is a very simple kind of high level explanation of this journey. It’s probably the simplest you’ll ever hear, and that’s, that’s basically the webinar right there, folks.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Appreciate it. But of course, it’s it’s never as linear as as that, right, as we just display here. Clients may come in in at different stages.

The goal of your businesses, you might focus on different things as you’re going through that engagement process, retaining the clients and talking to existing clients. But, basically, whatever your focus is today, we’re gonna break down those different stages today with the folks that we have here. Again, these experts that we have on the line here so we can walk away with an understanding of how to focus to improve that client journey, leverage that technology to make that experience more efficient. So let’s get right to it.

We’re gonna start first on the on the growth section here and talking about attracting. Good lord have mercy. Susan, I have done enough talking here. Why don’t you kick us off here and just talk a little bit about the attraction part of that journey?

Absolutely. And I don’t know, Alice and Andrew. I mean, shocker that the number one poll response was growth. So, there are lots of different tactics, and we didn’t have enough time to go into all of them. So I’m just gonna focus on a couple.

I’m curious if any of you feel that this speaks to you. So most of you say, if I can just get in front of people, I can close them, but I need to get in front of them. How can I get in front of them? So if all of you are getting in front of people, I know you can grow your business. So I’m gonna talk about how you can get in front of people.

The other thing that’s interesting, this was an e money survey done of, two thousand consumers, and two thousand it was ninety eight percent of them said that an adviser’s website is an important factor when choosing an advisor. And I think everybody intuitively knows that when a prospect uncovers you, whether it’s through a referral or from Googling, they’re going to check out your website. I think everybody knows that, but then I’m not seeing the correlated action that I need to make sure my website is freaking awesome.

And to get in front of prospects, it’s not just getting in front of them physically. It is getting in front of them also digitally, and I think that’s my important my important message.

So are you proud of your website? I I as we go into twenty twenty four, I think an important thing if you’re looking to grow your business is to ask yourself that question.

Have you updated it within the last few years? Are you consistently adding new quality educational content to your website?

And are you differentiating yourself in your message and clearly articulating who you serve and why? Lastly, does it really do you think it resonates with your target audience in the sense that is your copy speaking to that person in a way that actually connects even on an EQ or behavioral finance basis?

If you are answering no to any of these questions, I strongly encourage you to think about updating your website this year. Again, yes, you will close most of the people that you actually meet with, whether it’s digitally or in person.

But the first thing that is the gating factor is your website. It can either turn somebody off or it can lead them to the next phase in their research.

So the other things I wanted to just give a couple quick tips. We don’t have the time to go into the whole website overview, but ninety seven percent of your website convert visitors do not convert, which means you’ve got an opportunity when you redo your website to hone in on some of the things that will drive conversions. And these are just some quick tips, but check your calls to action. Of course, if somebody is visiting, you need to make it easy for them to raise their hand and say, I’m somewhat interested or I’m very interested.

So you should check to see whether you have a primary, secondary, and possibly tertiary call to action. The first primary one is for those that are ready to move forward. That’s the start here.

Secondary is something that’s a little bit more engaging but not threatening. I don’t feel like I’m giving you you know, I’m not setting up an appointment. Get a readiness assessment or, you know, get my risk score, things that are interesting, provide value, but don’t make them commit. And then the tertiary is to catch those that don’t click on the other two.

Some other great tips for conversions, go to the next slide, are to ensure that you’ve got a calendar widget.

So if, again, if you don’t have a calendar widget, this is an easy thing to add and will absolutely help create better conversions.

The other quick tip on CTAs is to make your CTA very specific to your audience. So we talk about niche marketing. I know you all, you know, have multiple niches, most of you, but have your educational content or value added pieces that you are using in your lead magnets, have them speak to a particular segment of your target audience, and you will get much higher conversions. So that’s my tip one is talking about websites because that is a gating factor.

But if we go back to if I can just get in front of the people, I’ll close the deal, my major, major tip is webinars are one of the best ways to efficiently get in front of people, which is why we’re doing one as well. So I’m gonna talk about webinars really quickly. So going to the next slide, I don’t know if you knew this, but we and it’s probably it’d be interesting to see if we’re seeing the same percent of our attendees here, but we did a survey with wealthmanagement dot com asking what marketing tactics advisors are using. And webinars and blogs remain the most underutilized across all firms despite their potential to reach a wide audience.

So this is an untapped opportunity and a competitive advantage for you. So when not many people are doing something, if you start doing them, obviously, you’re going to have an advantage over all the others that are not. So let’s talk about how, how effective they are.

This is a survey of advisers, and it was asking them the highest converting marketing activities. What do you see here? Events are by far the highest converting activity for slow growth firms, thirty three percent call it, and for high growth firms, forty three percent, somewhere an average of forty percent. So I think if I told you that if you do this marketing tactic, you’re gonna get forty percent conversions that you would say, you know what?

I’m gonna add that to my marketing plan. So let me show you just, a case study of someone that has done that. Well, actually, first, I’ll talk about what to do. So when I talk about webinars, a lot of advisers are just like, oh, sounds good, but I don’t know what to talk about.

It sounds like a lot of work. I don’t know how to get people there.

It is actually pretty easy. So you’ll see here we’ve got some slides, but there are many webinars where people are just interviewing somebody and there are no slides, and that takes very little work.

Just think about the questions that your clients or prospects are asking you about. And if you can get on some get a topic that’s timely, like tax strategies or, you know, thinking about the sunsetting of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act or anything that’s on the mind of advisers or would provide valuable information, you can just speak to that. Or if you’re not as comfortable being the spokesperson, the the main speaker on the webinar, invite somebody in your net like a COI. It could be a CPA, a state attorney, it could be, you know, people talk about, you know, identity theft and bringing somebody from the FBI. There’s so many options. Invite a specialist to be your keynote, and you just interview them. So it takes all the pressure off you.

Also, once you do this, when you do a webinar, you are able to leverage that in so many ways, and we’re all about doing something once and being able to leverage it so you can add it to your website. There’s fresh content that helps with SEO and helps keep your website fresh. You can add it to a YouTube channel. You can put it in social and promote it.

You can allow the follow you know, do follow-up. And it’s so easy for your clients to share a webinar that seems interesting with a friend without feeling like they’re giving you their name. You know, they’ll just forward an invite, and somebody can attend, and they’re blank you know, they’re anonymous, but yet you’re getting their name on a registration. So great tactic.

I’ll show you on this next slide an example of someone who’s had results. So over the last eighteen to twenty four months, this guy has had thousand people register, forty percent attend, which I think will all if everybody will nod, that’s sort of where I see it. Like, best case, you get fifty percent. More likely, it’s sort of forty to fifty percent attend.

He’s generated nine new client households, eleven million AUM, and he has done some ad spend, but you don’t even have to do that. But I think what’s important to note is that his first webinar had ten people.

So did he give up?

No. And I think what’s if I have one message to you, it is don’t think that if you try something once and it doesn’t work, you should abandon it. Marketing for advisers is the long game. I’m so sorry, but there’s not an easy button. It requires consistency and patience.

Doing something, a strategy that you know works, but it’s not gonna work overnight.

So on the next slide, just have a I think we have one more slide.

There are partners that can help. FMG is one of them. There are many others, but we have webinars and presentations that you can just leverage. So we’ve got our popular ones are like state of the markets.

We’ve actually got state of the markets twenty twenty three, so it goes over the whole twenty twenty three. We’ve got a tax strategies. This is, I think, an old screenshot, but it has the slides, it has the talking points, It’s all compliant approved. It enables you to immediately create it has a wizard to create an invitation. It automatically creates a landing page that is well designed that has the registration form.

It on go to the next slide. It will take you through a wizard to automatically create an email sequence that promotes the webinar, a social sequence that promotes the webinar. We try to make it as easy as possible. But if you’re looking for an easy way to get started, I really think this might be your number one tactic, dependency.

The people that sign up are also gonna check out your website, so make sure that that’s strong too.

That’s what I got for growth. Yeah. We could go on, but I’m gonna hand it off.

Well, Susan, and I love what you said about that too. I I saw a post recently where it said, you know, your your first workout is probably not gonna be great. Your first Right. Right?

It’s like the first time you do something, it’s it’s not gonna be fantastic. Let’s just be honest. But it’s that consistency. It’s learning to grow.

It is learning from building on one thing to another that you really start to get that that expertise and that development. And I love that.

Just maybe bring in a subject matter expert and interview them. Right? Like, have easy, and advisors really do. I think one of the biggest challenges is they they’re so busy that if something doesn’t pay off fast, it’s just like, ugh, I don’t have time.

Right. Right. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I’ll get to all I wanna still, talk about one more thing here, and then we’ll talk about the nurture thing here.

We’ll just talk a little bit about creating, adding to that that awesome stuff that that Susan was talking about, the the website, webinars, like, getting just starting to do it. Think about creating an interactive element on the website. So maybe it’s in the on the website, it’s in social, it’s in your email network, in a webinar. Like, how are we interacting with folks?

Like, we did a poll today. Right? Like, how can you get information from folks that’s gonna help you help them? And now and and let’s be honest.

Like, you can’t tell me that you passed on finding out what Hogwarts house you’ve been sorted into or what Disney princess you will be or what nineteen nineties NASCAR driver you look like. It was Jeff Gordon, Ali. Thanks for asking. Oh, that was me.

Basically, boosting that audience engage audience engagement through that interactive, think about a questionnaire. It can be an unobtrusive way to improve that client interaction and maybe they’re not ready quite yet to book a meeting or a phone call. And it gives you some valuable data. Again, this has given us some data to go on of how we can best serve you on on this webinar here.

So So I’ll just point out real quickly the nitrogen the risk tolerance questionnaire. That can go on your website. It can be filled out in five minutes or less. You can have a link.

Maybe you wanna put it into a, link into a webinar. Have somebody click on that link, that lead generation link, and have them find out their own risk number. And then you’ve got something that it tells a little bit of something about them, and then you have information on on them of, like, what their what’s their risk tolerance, how much money do they have to invest so you can continue to nurture that conversation. And speaking about nurturing conversations, we wanna talk about like, okay, we we’ve attracted folks.

We maybe got their attention. You know, I I saw something and and read something and I don’t know if it’s super up to date, but if somebody’s brand new lands on your website, you got about like eighteen seconds, to get their attention before they’re maybe gonna move on and say, I’m not interested in that. Less. I’d say.

Probably less now. Right?

Yeah. Probably the risk score is one of those CTAs. As we talk about increasing conversions, that’s that second one that doesn’t feel threatening but gives you something valuable. Those are the most important.

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And CTI, I think we all know about call to action. Basically, giving them something to do there. So I know they use those abbreviations all the time.

So how about we’re getting those interesting. So we wanna stay in touch. Right? We we’ve got the attention.

They’re, like, they’re waving their hand a little bit. So we wanna get and stay in touch with these folks and get that personalized and thoughtful communication, to start building this relationship. But we need to keep track of these folks. We need to have an organized way to do that.

Andrew, I’m gonna throw it over to you to talk a little about how we’re organizing all this information that’s coming our way.

Yeah. Absolutely. And and, Chris, I think what all of us have heard at one point or another is, yeah, I’m using my CRM, but, you know, I’m using it as almost like a modern Rolodex. Right? And I may not be using it to the full capacity, and I think there’s a lot of advisors out there that feel that way. So there are a couple best practices to think about when we start to talk about nurturing and bringing along those relationships, and I’ll actually take a cue from a couple of Susan’s notes there. The first one being segmentation.

This can be quantitative in terms of what a relationship means to a adviser or a firm’s business, or it can be more qualitative.

Susan, you showed an example, a case study of someone that worked with Microsoft, and my guess is as they were putting out, the marketing surrounding those webinars, they were likely using their CRM to help kick that off, to be the the starting point for that. So whether it’s segmentation from a gold, silver, bronze, a, b, c, or it’s more from a qualitative standpoint, thinking about things like using tags, having people set up in groups, that’s gonna allow your marketing to really help nurture those relationships.

The second piece is referrals, and any study you look at, advisors talk about referrals being the lifeblood of their practice.

Now here in West Michigan, one of the major public companies is Steelcase. We have a big furniture industry here in West Michigan. If I were working with folks from Steelcase, I’d wanna make sure I was tracking who was making introductions for me there. And maybe it may be someone that is working in the HR department, maybe someone in the c suite, maybe someone that’s simply a shift lead there, but tracking those referrals from a business building standpoint is gonna allow you to come back and reflect on specifically areas that you may wanna mine more and talk to them more or folks that, boy, I really should be talking to them more often.

I know they’re working with a couple hundred people on their shift. I need to get back in front of them there. Finally, centers of influence. Susan, you brought this up, and it was a perfect point.

When we’re talking about estate planning attorneys, CPAs, teachers, professors, these are people that could be referral sources in the future, but especially when we’re talking about leading webinars, perhaps leading in person events. Remember, a lot of those folks are looking to get in front of people as well, especially when you get into the state planning attorneys and CPAs. So leverage your network, but also make sure those are living within your CRM so you can track, hey, we did three events with them this year. We saw a great return on investment, or, boy, I really should be reaching out to them more often.

Make sure you’re working with those centers of influence and those referral sources. And most importantly, make sure they’re living in your CRM so they’re trackable and you can use them in the future.

Yeah. And actually, just playing off that, in our do it for me program, we’d I’ll talk a little bit about this later, but, we just wrote a series of COI emails for every possible COI we could think about. So every different type of attorney, whether they’re a divorce attorney, a state attorney, a business attorney, a business succession attorney, an insure whatever, and CPAs and so on. And the thrust of the email is really obviously just an introduction, but we all know that we’re much more interested in something that has a so what in it for us. So instead of just, I’m great at this, but I’d love to meet you and talk, the thrust of the email is actually, you know, I’d love to work with you. I think, you know, we have I I come across clients that need a referral, and I’m wondering if you’re accepting any and think we could do some things together, whether it be a webinar or event. Would you be interested?

So that’s something we do for our do it for me clients. And in order to do it, we need them to have COIs in their, CRM.

So that’s been a huge a huge benefit, and many of them are seeing the doors open. So that’s a great use case.

Speaking about the this is another great stat.

Sixty percent of investors think you guys all do the same thing, and I’m sure that makes many of you go like, no way. You know? But if I pulled up ten websites, I would make a pretty decent bet that they all have similar messaging about the services that you provide.

And it makes it hard from a consumer’s perspective to differentiate. So how do you do that? How are you going to convert these prospects?

The opportunity, believe it or not, is just educational content. And this again is one of those head scratches where people are like, well, that doesn’t work overnight. And I’m like, no, it doesn’t. It is a long game.

But look at this, sixty three percent of consumers, and again, this is the e money survey, believe in informative educational content makes you stand out. That’s that’s a pretty big number, and that’s actually an easy to execute initiative. I mean, some of these things, you know, people are like, oh my gosh. I need, like, massive I need massive custom SEO, and I need to do digital ads.

Those are usually out of the comfort zone of most advisers, but educational content, writing about what you know or leveraging a partner that has content that you can either use as is or customize, that’s easy. And look at this, ninety six percent of millennials and gen x’s are in they believe that they’re very interested mainly, but in all, very and somewhat interested. Ninety six percent are interested in this content, and and Gen x goes up to fifty nine. These are our target markets.

I mean, sometimes people just forget like, oh, those are like the youngins. I don’t need them. Millennials and Gen X are people that you do wanna be reaching. You probably already have the boomers and the silent, which is why they’re not as interested.

So let’s go to the opportunity of educational content. What are you gonna write about? Write about what your clients are thinking about. This is the same things that could be your webinar topics, and, oh, that actually really works because you can leverage it to be your content.

So you could do a webinar, you could have a blog on the same topic, you can post your webinar, and look at that magic, and it’s actually very efficient use of your time. So have you written anything or leveraged? Have you been posting or talking about how to navigate the cost of senior care? This is on the minds of almost everybody I talk to.

Anybody here on the call? I mean, it’s if you have parents that are aging, it’s just a huge concern.

Another big thing, people love to read about mistakes to avoid. They’re much more interested in the mistakes to avoid loss aversion than they are in the best tips to maximize your estate. So using sort of that, what are the common estate strategy mistakes that you have seen from clients that you’ve worked with? You don’t have to mention the clients, but these are great tips. These are great topics for webinars and for blogs, for emails, you name it.

Then the next, some other ones are get about, like, timely topics, and they don’t have to be, like, straight and narrow financial planning. They can be something that’s a little verging on human interest that ties to the markets. So the September effect, we did we wrote this blog for our Do It For Me customers, and it was one of the most highly performing, like, people emailing the adviser and saying, oh my gosh. This was so great.

I sent it to a friend. Thanks so much. And it just talked about how the perception is that October is the bad month. No.

It’s actually September. So it’s sort of like an moment. And just even a year end checklist, things that are value add.

Go to the next slide.

And then if you don’t wanna write your own content or you don’t wanna work with, you know, maybe a vendor that helps with that, you can also just share articles that you’ve read. I tell people, like, over the weekend, most of us do some reading. Make a pile of the articles that you found interesting, that you think your clients would have found interesting, and share them on social or share them on email. We make it really easy at FMG.

We have a mobile app. You can go in. You can find the any article. You click on it, and we actually have ChatGPT integration as well.

You don’t have to use it, but if you wanted to, it’ll write the caption for you, summarizing the article, adding the right level of emojis. We’ve actually trained it based on marketing best practices. And there you go. That takes five seconds.

So I’m gonna challenge you to say that sharing content is not that challenging.

Sharing educational content is in your wheelhouse from a marketing perspective, and it is, in my opinion, the most important thing you can do.

I love that. I love it. Susan, you you got me thinking as, like, an eighties and nineties latchkey kid, when you say, like, feeling forgotten about, it sad truth is revealed. Right?

Like, yeah. No. That’s actually, like, who’s talking to me? And I was listening I was listening to our county assessor this morning because that’s what I do for fund in Northern California is listening to the county assessor.

But, like, new laws being passed here in my area where, you know, parents used to be able to pass the primary residence down to the kids and there was no assessment. Now that’s changed, so now they’re gonna have to assess this house where you could just pass it to your kids now.

Oh, I mean, changing tax regulation is one of the biggest you know, everybody’s interested in that. I mean Yeah.

Yeah. And so, like, that that perked up my ears to, so having that content out there ready to deliver, providing that value, boy, my gosh, you’re so right. That makes somebody stand out. So, talking about and and Susan, you hit on it a little bit. And, Ali, I promise we’re gonna get to you.

You’re not on this webinar just to, you know, nod and and shake your head and say Oh, but I do I do wanna say one thing.

I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this, but, with all the great items that Susan and Andrew especially went over, I think something I noticed is all the great tips that we use in our own businesses as technology companies are really similar to the tips that the advisor should be using. And we do, I mean, it hits home. Right? Referrals are your best, prospects and getting in front of people, having a great website.

All these things are are really standard to not only, you as advisors, but also us as tech companies. And we do a lot of time and research, making sure that we’re, you know, really kind of hitting home on the most important things. So I think it just goes to show that, you know, there’s a lot of similarities, in both of our businesses. And also, you know, we’re doing a lot of work on our end on the tech side, to really, bolster how important it is.

So just really interesting, kind of synergy between the two, items, between the two businesses.

Yeah. It’s it’s so interesting to see the overlap and really what sings to people and what really gets gets their attention and attract exactly what we’re saying, attracting them and bringing them into that funnel. So talking about that con converting sorry. Did somebody I’m gonna pause real quick.

Go ahead. I thought okay. I thought somebody something else to say.

I don’t wanna I don’t wanna step on you. Hey. Just wanna talk about other factors that that when it having meeting booking those meetings, hopefully winning those folks over as a client, now we’re gonna basically convert them. There’s a lot of things that come into play here.

Right? It’s your transparency. It’s your expertise. It’s that personalization. All these things that we’ve talked about, others that make you stand out is perhaps the advisor for them.

And a lot of it depends on the client, of course, but I wanna just take a little bit of time here to share some examples of how advisers are using nitrogen to help close that business and convert that business. So we did a a research study back in the spring of twenty twenty three, identifying those common factors that lead to that firm growth. And we asked, what are the barriers to landing the client? And overwhelmingly, it was like, hey.

We don’t have the process in place to really scale up our business, to really take it from here to there. What is it to where it comes to onboarding those clients? Like, hey. We’ve identified there’s a problem.

We’re gonna be there to be that solution, but we can’t. We don’t have something that’s gonna stand out in place. And and I and I can tell you, if you don’t have that, clients can see it. Prospects can see that that it really like, this seems a little disorganized.

This doesn’t seem like this is as smooth as it should be going. And so really getting and that’s what we’re talking about. All this technology that can be in place to help you scale and to get that business and up and running and and moving along. And then you see the other thing here, building those route right foundations and then getting those systems in place.

And then it was you just spoke about the importance of landing and winning that client. And, the other chart there re re reiterates, there we go, the importance of why we’re all here today to grow that business. I just wanna talk a little bit about here if you’re using nitrogen, if you have nitrogen in your process, like, how advisors are using that. We call it the ACAP form moment.

Again, using that CTA, that call to action, they identify like, hey. What’s their personal risk number going through that that interactive questionnaire, that risk assessment there. And then finding like, hey. That’s great.

Okay. Let’s find out what your risk number is of how you’re invested right now. You told me how much you want, how much risk you want. Let’s see how much risk you have right now in your portfolio.

Does that line up? Does it not line up? We can we can identify those problems. I’ve lost count of the number of advisers, guys, that I’ve talked to that said, I got that ACAP form moment just by them taking that risk assessment, getting their personal number, and seeing how they’re currently invested right now.

So, again, it’s that educational content. It’s that stuff that’s helping you educate your clients, your prospect, to help them understand where they’re at and where they need to go and using things like GPA. Basically saying, hey. What’s the efficiency of these investments?

What’s the efficiency of this portfolio? It’s just like grade point average, like in school. Like, a one point o is Bueller Bueller Bueller four point o is is kinda head of the class there. So how your proposals, your portfolios can stand out and really make sure that they’ve got a winning a winning portfolio and winning investments when they’re with you.

And then and then bring bringing those proposals, right, what is the process that we’re using to to say, hey. We’ve identified that problem now. Like, yeah. We see that there’s perhaps a difference between your personal risk number and your portfolio.

Or maybe your personal risk number and your portfolio are similar, but the GPA, the the efficiency of the portfolio that you have now, actually, we can do a little bit better than that. A portfolio that’s perhaps a a risk number fifty three, not all fifty three portfolios are created the same. GPA helps us understand that. And so basically using a really nice proposal process to help them understand where they’re at and where they need to go with you is really important.

So again, getting those processes in place to give them that confidence to move from that prospect to that meeting to that client to hopefully referral champions. Ali, as you were saying, becoming those those champions. And Ali, I’m gonna kick it over to you too. At long last here, we have things that we call study groups where we have advisors and kind of think of like mastermind groups, where they get in a room and we kind of facilitate it and they’re kind of learning from each other.

And we do talk about tech stacks and onboarding, prospects to clients is a big topic. And there’s more than one advisor that I’ve talked to that said, hey. Nitrogen risk questionnaire and having an asset map completed for them, that is bare minimum what we’re gonna have. Like, if you’re gonna be a client of ours, you have to have these two things completed or we can’t move forward.

So, again, those process and these are pretty successful firms. So we’d love for you to just talk about setting expectations and kind of moving forward in that in that in client engagement.

I would love to. And it’s a killer combo, nitrogen and asset map. We, hear about it all the time, and, we and what good timing and a great transition, because, you know, everybody envisioned an asset map. I know we’re not brand new.

So, you know, our bread and butter and the most popular thing about asset map as a company and as a product is that asset map report. Being able to visualize every single thing that a client has, their business interests, their, beneficiaries, anybody who’s important to them on one page. And you can see why that would be beneficial, right? It talks to a lot of what we’ve been discussing in this webinar, getting to know your client as much as you can, finding a place of trust between you and the client and the prospect as quickly as possible so you can make it valuable for everybody right from the start.

And, you know, now that we’ve attracted people with a great website, we have engaged them and they’re interested in working with us. You’ve gotten in front of the right people.

Let’s find out more about them. Let’s turn them really into clients and and get the most important information from them. Important being not necessarily holdings details and, you know, values down to the dollar. Clients don’t really care about that.

They wanna know if they’re on if they’re on track, if they’re okay, and if they’re making good decisions. And, you know, getting that conversation going early on is really where, Asset Map shines. And I wanna talk about a few different ways that we’re getting data into the system. And, certainly, you know, a great place to start, would be manually.

So that sounds silly, right? We wanna integrate everything. We want everything to be, seamless and turnkey.

But at the end of the day, really quickly on manually, and then I have slides on the next two, discovery and integrations, a lot of the asset map history and data has been through client and advisor interaction. And when I say interaction, I mean kind of that that meeting process, getting to know them in an ongoing way.

You know, whether it be over a Zoom, Asset Map is super, super Zoom friendly, you know, because it is, simple and easy to talk about. It’s great for a screen share. But that being said, of course, getting up on the big screen in the office, if you have clients who still like to come in, just as good. But the idea behind, our CEO and founder Adam creating Asset Map was, let’s have it be the same experience for everybody, whether they be in Florida and I’m in Pennsylvania, or or if we’re sitting across a desk from each other.

We want it to be really seamless and really, you know, just a similar experience no matter where that client is. So that client advisor interaction, popping up the asset map report, asking what might have changed since you last met. Oh, you know, my wife is still a nurse at so and so hospital, but she’s been promoted, or my husband has, you know, recently taken on a new job. You know, all these things are allowing you to get to know the client better through that getting to know each other process like an interview or a meeting.

But popping to the next slide talking about discovery, I think this is a perfect thing to discuss, you know, when you’re thinking about, a really easy way to get the client or prospect involved but without it being overwhelming. Find out great information about them, really just by sending them a link that’s specified to them. So you can see through our little GIF that’s kind of populating on the right hand side, we have a really great direct to client fact finder. You’re gonna use this when they’ve never been entered into asset map before.

You’re entering in that prospect. You’re entering in that client. They’re gonna get the link. And maybe I send it to Susan and her husband.

They’re sitting around on a Friday night watching TV, eating some popcorn, and they say, hey. We’ve got this, you know, we’ve got this meeting coming up with our new advisor next week. And, you know, she sent over a link that’ll let us tell her a little bit more about us before we get there. Why is that good?

Gives the adviser insight into what’s going on with Susan and her husband before they even show up to the meeting. So they’re going to know what the great questions are to ask. And as this is kind of rolling through, you can see it’s easy. Right?

Tell me a little bit more about yourself. What’s important? Oh, well, I have some investments. I have a job.

I have a house with a mortgage. They are able to tell you whatever is most comfortable for them, as little or as much as they want to. So it’s really on the client to decide what’s important to tell you. And there’s another piece that I absolutely love.

Is there anything else on your mind? That nice soft question that isn’t necessarily about an investment or an insurance policy, but it gives the client or prospect the ability to say, you know what? I’m really worried about, my aging parents, or I’m really worried about saving for college for my daughter. Whatever the topic is, they’re able to tell you.

Boom. Discovery is filled out. You can see as it scrolls, there’s a little confetti page. Once you get the confetti page, you as the adviser get a notification that’s going to say, hey.

Susan and her husband filled out this report. You can jump in and you can prepare yourself for a meeting. Like, we like to say getting to a place of trust and credibility even faster than you normally would because you’re finding out what’s most important to the client. So that’s one way of maybe my favorite way of getting data into the system.

And the amount of responses that we get are through the roof. Everybody’s basically replying to this because you want your own information to be correct.

We have plenty of advisers who make this part of their everyday process. And if the client or prospect isn’t willing to go through this quick fact finding capabilities, maybe it’s not the right fit. And it’s great to know that, right up front if, you know, you don’t have a client or prospect that’s engaged.

Now if we pop over to the next, we also, of course, have integrations. We have integrations with two of the lovely folks that are on this call. So you can see this one is flowing through Nitrogen integration. So this is a great way to say, okay, now I’ve found out a little bit about you from your perspective, mister and missus client, but let’s now take it to the next level if we have integrations at places like Wealthbox, Nitrogen, Orion, all of the great partners out there.

You can kind of fill in the blanks, from that direct to client fact finder with some live data coming right from some of our wonderful partners, like I said. See that risk score right on the asset map report. There is not much more special than that, so you can talk about the risk conversation right along with what’s most important to the client, whether that be their business interest or, like I said, education funding, whatever the topic is. We notice when we call it kind of that client’s name in lights.

They wanna make everything accurate and they wanna have a really valuable conversation.

So as far as data gathering goes, you know, I I don’t think there’s much better out there than, you know, engaging them through asset map, but again, getting some of that great information from our partners as well.

Fantastic. And talking about managing that, Andrew, I think we’ve got you up next talking about just managing, helping manage client expectations through your CRM.

Yeah. So now lot of it lot of this process, we’ve already been through. Right? We we’ve gotten their engagements.

We’ve helped bring them on board as a client. But now how do we really nurture that relationship? Right? And there’s a couple things that really stick out to me as I as I think about nurturing that relationship.

And one of the advisers that I worked for years ago had a great way of thinking about this. Once they become a client and they’re starting to think about that relationship with them, from the moment their hand touches that front door for their first client review meeting or for that implementation meeting, how prepared are you for whatever is coming next? Not just that meeting, but the twenty four hours after that implementation meeting, or the twenty four hours after that client review meeting. So I would encourage everyone out there, if you haven’t done so, think about your last eight to ten client review meetings that you’ve had.

How did they go? Were things consistent? Are you happy with what that result is? And that really comes back to, Chris, what we’ve been talking about is having processes in place.

So the first thing to think about is owning that implementation. So once that client said, yep. I’d love to work with you. Do you have those rock solid processes in the background to bring them on?

And what we’ve built with Wealthbox, and for those of you out there that have used Wealthbox, this is available to all of you today. For those of you that haven’t seen Wealthbox, yet, this is also available to you. We have a Wealthbox workflow template library. So oftentimes, the first step is the hardest.

How do I kick how do I start building a, client review workflow? How do I start building a new client onboarding workflow? We’ve got that first step done for you, so start there. From there, start to think about whether it’s with your custodian or your broker dealer.

What are those core processes that you and your team walk through? Especially for those of you that are looking to grow in the future, workflows allow you to crystallize your best practices so that as you bring on new advisers or new team members, they can fall directly in line and be ready to go. That ramp time gets much quicker. Taking more from that implementation side, then moving on to the client review side.

One of my favorite stories from an office that I worked with here in West Michigan is they actually used to have a specific check-in call that the lead adviser would make forty eight hours before every client review meeting. It was a simple, hey. We’re working we’re working on your family plan right now. Just wanted to check-in with you.

That did two things. Number one, it let that client know you’re thinking about them ahead of time. Number two, it was that soft opener to see if there was anything that they needed to discuss. And, oh, by the way, it confirmed that they had that meeting coming up.

Have that client review process built out in a workflow within your CRM. Ali was talking about bringing in asset map and being able to bring in data. Have that workflow so that once you’ve used FMG to send out that email, once they’ve responded, tuck them into that workflow to respond to them. But especially when you get into the client review realm, make sure that you have that down pat to make that meeting and the twenty four hours afterwards clear.

Finally, we talk we all talked about this. I think just about every adviser on this call today probably has multiple different lines of business, and chances are while you may bring a client on for, say, four zero one k planning or for insurance planning, you may not be working with some of their other assets or their outside assets. It’s important to track those opportunities, not just on new potential clients, but also on your existing clients. We work with a lot of firms that say have retirement plan business or insurance business that are looking to bring on wealth management clients down the line.

Great way to keep up on that, make sure nothing gets lost in the cracks is to use opportunity tracking, and that’s something that we’re seeing almost all of the firms that use Wealthbox use on an ongoing basis because it just allows them to see where their business is at today and potential gains in the future.

Love it. Love it. Thanks, Andrew. And and let’s talk about building a collaborative plan. Ali, we’re gonna go back to you.

But before we do that, I just wanna remind folks, if you have a question, anything that’s burning, comment, question, I always say to my team or a snide remark, go ahead and, put them in the, questions box inside your GoToWebinar control panel. Frederick asked, who or what is nitrogen marketing? I’m assuming you’re talking about the list of speakers here. I’m just gonna give a shout out to Dan Prendergrass.

He is our head of our growth and marketing here at Nitrogen. He is the guy that’s running the slides in the background. He is the man behind the curtain there. So thank you, Dan, for doing that because I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

So just a shout out to Dan, the guy in the background who got us all together today, organized all of this. So that is who and what nitrogen marketing is. So with that being said, let’s let’s talk about that collaborative plan. Ally, you’re gonna send it back to you.

I didn’t even think about the fact that none of us are typing right now. Like, it’s obvious that none of us are dragging through these slides. So, agreed. Thanks, Dan, for keeping us honest and keeping us on track.

So I do want to, first to call out a really cool study that we recently did. So over at Asset Map, we just worked, I guess at the very end of twenty twenty three, I think it was October, with, JD Power to find out, what’s the interest of, human versus digital, especially around advice and financial planning. So, what does Gen z, y think? What does Gen x think?

And what do the boomers think about, the preference of how, interaction and advice is delivered? So if you see on the left hand side, we’ve got advice. So, we’re asking that people make changes to their plan and we’re really kind of digging into implementing new and different things. And you can see, probably to no surprise that our boomer generation really, really wants some human interaction when it comes to, providing advice.

Gen x a little less. Gen z, we’ve got basically digital, almost all the way through, with thirty one percent still saying that they want some, human interaction. When it comes to planning, again, no surprise, we’ve got the, boomers who would really like that to be a human interaction.

Gen X, same thing, with, Gen Z remaining, pretty on par. But what I think is maybe the most interesting is, and we talked about this a little bit, I would almost consider our direct client fact finder over at Asset Map service and admin. Right? Getting some data, before we first get started with that meeting.

And pretty much even almost anybody at this point is ready to go digital when it comes to doing some fact gathering, you know, service and admin functionality. I would put, like, a DocuSign in here. So, you know, things that don’t necessarily require major decision making. That’s where everybody starts to shut down.

Right? When things get too complicated, they want a human, to help them out and certainly that’s where, the expertise of our audience comes in today. So I really love, this study and we have a few different, pieces of information and statistics that we did with J. D.

Power again at the end of last year. So I thought I’d start with this, because it really is interesting to see, you know, even every single, age demographic, still wants some folks involved, especially when it’s high value decision making happening. They really wanna make sure that they’re getting that, kind of, you know, they’re they’re feeling like they’re making a great decision and they’re getting that, validation from, from an expert. So just thought I’d share some statistics with you all, but let’s hop into the next section.

Let’s take our data and have it help, by working for us a little bit. So next slide, if you would.

Quick, but there’s a couple different ways in asset map to you know, we have all this great data now. Let’s let’s level set. Right? We we have our integrations loaded up.

We’ve done our direct to client fact finder that has pre built our asset map. We found out all the great information about the client. We have workflows set up in in Wealthbox and we’re tracking everything in, in Nitrogen and FMG. And now, you know, let’s get some of that great data to actually behind the scenes do some work for us without us having to really spend a whole lot of time doing it manually.

And, just, you know, about eighteen months ago, we released something at Asset Map called signals. And you can think about this almost like a check engine light for your car. It’s going to actually go out and look at your data, all the great information we know, like if I go back to Susan and her husband in that example, and say, wow, we really have a good idea of what she’s got going on now.

Let’s let’s see what could potentially be a gap. Is there something that could maybe happen in their financial life that would throw a wrench in this whole thing? And all the great planning they’ve done and all the great saving for retirement, could potentially go by the wayside if we don’t have an important discussion. And Asset Map is going to, behind the scenes, go look at all of that data that you have in your each household and even at a main kind of client list level and say, these are some conversations you might wanna have. It looks here like they’re okay for liquidity, legal liability issues.

I don’t really deal with long term care, so I turned that off. But it looks like for a loss of life and potentially longevity, you’ve got a red, and red means a conversation should probably happen. And you can give the, you know, the client the opportunity to to say, no. I’m good.

Thank you so much for bringing it up. But it’s allowing you to do your due diligence and talk to your clients about things that the data is telling you could be a potential problem. So, again, yellow is kind of iffy. Red, certainly is, you know, the algorithm’s telling you it could be an issue.

Green, you’re most likely good to go. But it’s really nice because, again, you’re just logging in and checking it out and you can maybe potentially even have a staff member, jump in and make some phone calls, and you have a great topic for your next meeting, which, you know, that way you don’t have to worry too much about, coming up with something too creative.

And finally, if you just wanna jump to one more, slide, Chris, for me, I’ll I’ll turn my time over.

We do have some light planning built into Asset Map as well, so it’s certainly not gonna go into the detail, that your more advanced planning tools like your right capitals, your e money, your money guides do, but, you know, wouldn’t it be great if in fifteen minutes you can tell clients if they’re making good decisions on certain topics with kind of a what you want, what you have, and a what it means type way of looking at it. So, speed planning, be able to, you know, really help almost all of your clients, not just all your top clients, let them know if they’re making good decisions for important financial, anything important in their financial life.

So that’s that’s a great, way to, again, get that data to work for you a bit.

Ally, am I on the right slide? Do I need to go to one more here?

I’m I’m We’re all good.

You can skip to, the next section because I know we’re coming up on time. So get to the next buy or gal.

We’re we’re gonna get right to it here. So, yeah, we’re just talking about client satisfaction, kinda wrapping everything up here as as we do. Thanks so much for being here. Susan, just kinda talking a bit a little bit about client satisfaction. You wanna get us started here on that one?

Alright. I’m gonna put the speed speed voice on, for the next slide.

Can do.

Alright. So, I’m gonna challenge you to to your original poll answer where you said client satisfaction, I think, was your lowest priority. But I think the client satisfaction has a huge correlation with your growth because I’m pretty sure from every study I’ve seen and from talking to you, referrals are still the greatest source of your growth. Even if you start marketing like a fiend, you still are gonna see referrals be the greatest source. So keeping your clients really happy is really important, and communication is the key to that. As as we’ve mentioned, just even sending you know, just calling, like Andrew said, just calling the day before a meeting and surprising and delighting those things go so far and are so easy. This is a YChart survey, another great company.

Couple questions on the left. Would you consider the basically, I’ll summarize. This is asking, do you consider the adviser’s communication when deciding whether to stay with them? Do you sit consider their communication frequency and type of communications when deciding whether to referral refer?

And guess what? Regardless of size, actually, it’s a little bit more with the larger clients, over ninety percent. So bottom line, whether they’re going to stay with you and whether they’re gonna refer you has a ninety plus percent correlation with your communication frequency and style. The second graph on the right is which best describes the frequency you wish your adviser was using, and the dark blue is I want more, please give me more, and the light blue is please give me somewhat more.

And for both those that are under five hundred or greater than five hundred and over sixty, more than fifty percent want more. So at net, communication drives satisfaction. It drives referrals, and they want more. Go to the next slide.

So what are you gonna communicate about? Oh, also, another another big point. Who wants their clients going to CNBC or Fox or any of the or Reddit for investment advice? I’m pretty sure nobody.

Right? The less you communicate, the more often they are going to go. Look at this arrow at the bottom. Twenty five.

For those that answered, I hear from my, you know, I I hear from my advisers somewhat or very infrequently. Twenty five percent of them are going to CNBC for invite for advice and information. Those that are being communicated with frequently or very frequently, only six percent. You don’t want them looking up information.

You give it to them before they are looking for it elsewhere. Very important. And so people ask, what do I communicate about? And I’ve I’ve given some examples before in this webinar, but another great thing, this is an advisor pediograph, one of my favorites.

It’s a list of services that advisors services that your clients want and expect from you.

And the black bar the black bar is what they expect. The blue bar is what they think they’re getting.

Only two categories do they feel that they’re actually getting close to what they want, which is financial planning and investment management, both of which I’m sure are on all your websites. Look at all the other categories. Have you written about and messaged on your website and communicated to clients and whether in emails or blogs about wealth transfer, about trust services, about estate planning, tax advice, non liquid asset management, long term care insurance, loan and credit management. These are the topics that are on the minds of your clients. They expect it from you. You may well be actually communicating. Actually, you may well be doing these things, but if you’re not communicating it I just was talking to an adviser who did a client set survey.

He does you know, he consults on and works with estate, you know, state attorneys and others, but, you know, provides that quarterbacking around estate planning and tax planning, and only twenty five percent of his clients thought that he provided any planning. So it’s all about communicating. So there’s a huge gap between expect expectations and what they think you’re getting giving them.

Talk about what’s on their mind and just a huge opportunity here. This could be your content list for the rest of the year. Go to the next slide. We are at fifty nine, so I’m gonna go really fast.

Your words matter. Go to the next slide.

I think it was Andrew that mentioned or no. It was Allison, I think, that mentioned this. They just wanna know that you’re keeping them on track. Don’t use the what you do. We provide estate planning for high net worth. Talk about the outcome that it delivers to the clients. We craft legacy plans to care for our clients’ families so much better.

Go to the next slide.

Here is and we’re sending out this deck, so you guys will have all this. I’m not gonna go through it, but here’s my my sort of, you know, New Year’s present to you. Here’s what we use as a monthly target for our content strategy for our do it for me program. We do blogs, emails, social media, and surprise and delights like Andrew mentioned.

These are something to weave in. All of these drive client satisfaction, which then drives referrals and growth. Go to the next slide. And here’s just as an example of how it looks in a do it for me calendar that we send out to our clients.

We’ve mapped out where all the content goes. They’re able to read it and edit it and then personalize it, and then we execute it for them. But this is something that you can also easily not easily. It takes a little bit of time. But with the advice of the panelists today, these are things that you can execute and will make such a big difference in twenty twenty four.

Awesome.

So much good stuff.

Andrew or Allie, anything else to add as we close here?

No. Thank you so much, for including us today. And, if you need any help or have any questions, I’m sure there will be information coming out that will allow you to follow-up with us.

Absolutely.

And if I would say anything, find yourself some process orientation in your practice, whether it’s on the front end of a relationship, during the relationship, or nurturing that. There’s a lot of ways to do so. And and, again, thanks to the Nitrogen team for helping set everything up today.

All it could be and more, you guys. Thank you so much for everything that you brought. Susan, Allison, Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Thank you everybody for joining us, taking the time today.

Like we said, just a reminder, you will get the recording of this so you can go back and watch all of that awesome content. You guys, we will see you soon. Thank you so much. Have a fantastic everybody give yourselves a hand.

We did it.

Bye, everyone. Great seeing you.

Happy New Year, everybody. Bye bye.

Yeah. Bye bye.