Why AI is Actually the Best Thing to Happen to Advisors

First, have Doctor. Daniel Crosby, which I know is the reason many of you joined. He is a psychologist, a New York Times bestselling author, and Orion’s Chief Behavioral Officer. So welcome. Thank you for being here.

It’s my pleasure to be here with both of you and joining from Lehi, Utah. I saw another one in the chat there somewhere. So, hey, neighbor.

Awesome. Hey, neighbor. New neighbor too, right?

That’s right. Just about just about a month in the state and just about a week and a half in my house. So, yeah, brand new.

Oh my gosh. You’re in the throes of of the new move, getting everything situated.

Yeah. I had to dig this out of a box for sure.

That’s great.

And then, of course, we have Susan Theater, our CMO, and she is, always the funnest one on these things, I will say, and has the most marketing knowledge. So thank you, Susan. Where are you joining us from?

I am joining you from beautiful Boston. If anybody is in the Boston or New England area, I think it might be the most spectacular day we’ve had all summer.

Oh, love that. Oh, we have a Dublin, Ireland. Hi, Gavin. Welcome.

And I saw a Bora Bora. Mean, are some people that are some nice Bora Bora.

Oh my god. I I’d close my laptop.

Well, that just makes me feel great that we are better than Bora Bora too. I love your time. I am Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist here at FMG, which is a fancy way of saying I get to do a lot of this, get to meet with advisers, talk with you all, share what we see as, innovations, trends that are happening, and then bring it back to our team to help make your marketing easier. So we are gonna dive right in, but the scenario that this all sort of stemmed from was something that we have heard more and more.

And we’d love to hear how many of you have had this happen to you already. Right? So one of your clients sits down and they have a printout from ChattyPT or Claude, and they say, you know, I put in what my portfolio is, or I asked, you know, AI to review it or what my financial plan is, and here’s what it said. Or maybe a prospect comes and says, these are the questions, and I got it from from AI to ask you.

How do you, you know, handle that situation?

And it’s happening more and more. Someone said Sarah said once a week this is happening. Is that from clients, Sarah, or, prospects? Maybe maybe both. And so I’m sorry?

No. I was saying probably both.

Yes. So by the end of this hour, though, we want to help convince you that to turn the way you’re thinking about it and to think of this as the best opening of a conversation that you could have and show you exactly what to do with it.

How’s that sound everyone?

Sounds perfect. Okay. So let’s get into it.

Oh, that was what I was discussing. So we would love to know as we’re going into the topic, where do you see the greatest opportunity in your practice today with AI? And you can just drop this isn’t like a poll on your screen. You can just drop a, b, c, or d, or if it’s something else, put it in there. But we’re really curious. Is it when you’ve thought about it to this point, is it, you know, more client engagement, back office, consistent personal outreach?

And and we’re seeing a lot overwhelmingly see.

Does that surprise anyone?

Kind of. Really? But I think it’s really interesting, and I think it actually speaks very much to the value proposition of Orion and FMG too.

Right. Right. So, I mean, I think though what a lot of people have thought of it as more as creating efficiencies and not so much the communication part and how that ties into that moment when someone is bringing it to you, probably because this is happening a lot more new. Right, Daniel, like, this is not like a year ago, we were not talking about someone bringing an AI printout and what would you do? Yeah.

Yeah. I’m look I’m looking at these responses. I’m a little shocked and I think I’m I’m here in real time trying to assess my shock and overwhelmingly see, I think because I have a behavioral hammer, I see little nails everywhere, right? And so for me, my greatest excitement has been about personalization and humanization of the process.

But I think that something like wrapping up and automating back office efficiencies actually feeds that as well. Because I think in addition to the direct ways that AI can very directly help us get to know our clients better, let us know who we should reach out to and when and what we should say, I think of course the more back office efficiencies we can sort of offload to the robot overlords, the easier it gets for us to spend time connecting with our clients. That, you know, it’s maybe more consistent than I initially thought, but surprised at how many are seeing.

Yeah, you know what, I bet it’s it’s they are very interconnected too.

But Sam, I did see a question, you know, since we’re doing this as an Orion FMG webinar, we have people that are joining that are FMG clients that don’t know a lot about Orion, and we have Orion clients that are joining that don’t know a lot about FMG. So maybe we just do a little quick elevator pitch.

Good point. Sorry. We jumped right into the what’s gonna help you?

We forgot about that. Maybe, Sam, you do a quick one on FMG. And and, Daniel, why don’t you just give a quick overview of Orion after Sam goes?

Yes. If you’re not familiar with FMG, we are an all in one marketing, suite of tools.

Also within under the umbrella of marketing, we now also have texting and a testimonial tool, which people sometimes don’t think of as marketing. So everything from your website to social media to emails, events, texting, testimonials, being found with AI search, and coming up. Those are all things that we help advisors with every day, and we have some that just use our technology and manage it themselves. And then we also have a do it for me program where you are paired with a human as what we’re talking about today that actually will run your marketing for you.

Yeah. So from from the Orion side, we’re a most in one tech and TAM provider. We wanna be kind of the advisor’s homepage there. And then in terms of my involvement, my job at Orion, my job is to help humanize everything. We just big believers in behavior being one of the most enduring competitive advantages advisors have. So we’re actively creating tech and embedding it into our AI systems that help you better connect with and educate and and personalize your offering for your clients.

Amazing. Thank you for answering that. So let’s go back though to this moment.

And Daniel, from the behavioral psychology point, maybe you can think about, you know, what’s happening psychologically here in this moment for both the adviser holding it and the client handing it over.

Okay, so I’ve got to actually tell a story. I did this the other day when we were when we were talking about this, I I I literally did this printout thing the other day, you know, because being an advisor. Oh, no, no, not my advisor. Yeah, my advisor is my my advisor is my dad, I just call I just call my dad, but you know, I did this at a car dealership, you know, being new to the area, my kid just turned sixteen. So I gave her my fourteen year old car and I was out shopping for a new car. So I’m at a I’m at a dealership and I go, you know, go to chat GBT and plug in like, what’s, you know, what’s the standard discount from MSRP I bring you know, sort of these negotiation points to the dealer.

And I think what was fascinating is this was a BMW dealership, I ended up not not buying from them. The person who I, you know, broached this with, I brought the sheet in, he became angry is too strong a word, but certainly, certainly defensive.

And yeah, it really sort of derailed what had previously been a really sort of nice and cooperative conversation, you know, they get you a drink, you’re looking at cars, it’s chatty, it’s friendly. And then we started talking numbers. And I said, you know, hey, here’s what here’s what I’m seeing.

And he really kind of rolled his eyes and gave me this, here we go again, had clearly been getting a lot of this, but he became defensive. That wasn’t the whole reason I didn’t do business there, but it was the beginning of the end, I think.

And so I think it starts an interesting conversation, Susan and Sam, about just the attitude with which we approach this, you know, this print off moment, because I sort of took the like, well, what do you have to hide? And why are you being so defensive about this, about what had previously been a nice interaction?

Yeah.

And I wonder if that’s just because someone feels like the person coming with the information feels like they know more than you. So, like, because I’ve had this experience in doctor’s offices, when, you know, my husband was really sick and that we would go in and seeing all these second opinions. And I would say, well, I read on the Internet this. Had a doctor literally say, oh, because the Internet’s always right.

You know? So I think there can be situations like that where maybe that’s where the defensive side comes from. But how would you maybe suggest are there any tools or ways? So you’re saying like, number one, maybe don’t be defensive, but what else could someone do, an advisor do to help just soften the situation?

So I like what you said about the doctors, right? I think doctors are a good model for this because WebMD has been around for ages. Doctors have been dealing with this for two decades. And look, we know the internet’s not always right.

We know chat, GPT and clot aren’t always right. WebMD is certainly not always right. It’s gonna always give you the scariest possible diagnosis, right? You’re done.

But I think what a lot of, I think what a lot of folks read into this printout moment is, I don’t need you, or I know more than you. And I don’t think that’s the message at all. And I think when we approach it with this, I don’t need you, or I know more than you attitude, there’s a natural defensiveness that leads to this sort of negative spiral that I experienced. I think how we need to perceive it, especially as advisors is what does this mean for me in particular, right?

And in a way, it’s a gift because some of that discovery has been done for you, you know, that client is telegraphing to you, what’s important to I think that that’s where we begin, right? It’s, we start providing context and even being excited that like, hey, they’ve come in here, they’re telegraphing to me what their values are from the outset. And that may or may not be a good fit for me and my business.

And I think if you, I mean, the web MD is a great example.

What you just did with the car dealership is a great example. In neither of those situations, people using web MD have not decided they don’t need doctors and people that do research on cars are still going into the dealership. It’s the same thing. I think of it as information.

And information has always been available. Since the internet came out, people could do the same research really on their financial situations that they’re doing now in Claude. It’s just a lot easier. So, what they can’t do is they they can’t discern between some of the emotional aspects of those financial decisions, and they want an expert.

So it’s just about being educated and doing a little bit of research, but it doesn’t change. If anything, I think it actually accentuates your value as a financial advisor because they were never going to you just for an answer. They were going to you to steer them and their family towards the emotional goals that they have and all the nuances that are there as their family.

Susan, I love what you said because from a behavioral perspective, information is so cheap and it’s getting cheaper in this age. And I think as information gets cheaper, meaning and context and application become more expensive. And you know, my, I have a couple of favorite examples of this.

The doctors and nurses smoke cigarettes at a higher rate than the general population.

Really? Yeah, they do. Doctors, it’s like slightly higher nurses, it’s almost double. And it’s, it’s not because they don’t know, it’s not because they lack information, right?

Right, right, right.

You know, a couple couple years ago, I, you know, I went on a big health journey and got in shape, and it’s not because I had some great discovery about, you know, what a what a calorie is, you know, I mean, it’s just, it’s not about information, it’s about application and context and meaning. And so I think we’re a lot of times as a profession too bought into the information piece and not enough on the application.

I also think everybody’s had an experience at this point where they ask a question to AI and AI gives them the answer. And then if they push back even a little bit, the AI tool will say, oh, you’re right. I didn’t consider this or, oh, you’re right. And I think as more and more consumers have these experiences with AI tools, there’ll there will also be you know, I’m seeing in the comments people saying, the person doesn’t even read read what they brought to me.

They just say, like, here’s what it said. You know? And so I think people will also start to take a lot of this with a little bit more of a grain of salt as they have experiences where they see how wrong a tool can be. But I wanted to just put up on here, you know, I also think sometimes the defensiveness can come because of the headlines we’re all seeing in the profession.

We see things like this, and it makes us feel nervous. Maybe the client isn’t bringing it. They’re not having a bad they have a wonderful relationship with you. They trust you.

They just, you know, are asking the question. And to your point, Daniel, it’s giving you insight into what’s important to them. But when we see headlines like this, it makes us nervous, you know, and makes us feel defensive.

And I’m gonna go to this one that Susan sent me about, you know, who do people trust in different scenarios. You know, there’s there’s a lot that we can unpack here, but I think that the the idea a lot of times is where does the angst come from? And it comes from this nervousness that the the narrative being shaped by the media is everyone’s gonna lose their jobs because of AI when, you know, the actual reality is very different.

And I think this is this chart is from a Northwestern Mutual study, and part of our do it for me program at FMG is writing blogs and emails and social posts that our customers can personalize.

And then we actually send everything out, post it, promote it, put it on, send an email out using for many people, the integration with Redtail. This is a chart that is in one of our do it for me blogs that we are going to send out to everybody on this call. And the blog is called the AI gives answers, guidance requires judgment. And I’ve gotten a lot of really great feedback. So this is something we will give to all of you. You can leverage it, you can use it, you can version it into an email or social.

But I think my advice would be if somebody, when not even if, when a client or prospect brings in a printout, I think obviously the worst thing is to be threatened. The second worst is to dismiss it.

I think the best, and I’d love to hear Daniel’s feedback on this, but I think the best is to welcome it because they’re proud. They actually did the research. Actually, there’s a little bit of pride in showing you this. Read it with them, tell them what it got right, which builds some trust, then way more than defensiveness ever could, and then show them where it’s not quite right, which is exactly where your advice and value comes in.

And to some degree, if you think about, we’ve always been fighting as financial advisors, the perception that our value is performance and talking about how it is not. It is the relationship. It’s the emotional. This is the perfect opportunity to make that value proposition visible because you’re showing exactly why just information and just performance.

That’s not what you deliver. What you deliver is the insight that can interpret that for your personal relationship.

Yeah. So so so many so many things to say here. So, Susan, you may not be aware of this research, but you or you may, but very intuitively you’re talking about one of the most well founded and well documented findings in psychology, which is that when you’re trying to influence someone, when you’re trying to persuade someone, it can’t be all positive, it can’t be all negative, you need to have this balance, right? I give this somewhat silly exam, it’s like, you know, it’s almost my eleven, it’s almost my eleven o’clock lunchtime. So I give this silly example, maybe because I’m hungry, of you go out to a restaurant and you say, hey, I’d like this steak, or you know, I’d like the steak, and they say, you know what? I wouldn’t like the fishes better.

And you go, wow, like, thank thank you so much. That doesn’t diminish, you know, that doesn’t diminish your trust in the restaurant. It it it increases your trust in the server and you’re glad they shot you straight.

People have a sense that AI is good at some things and it’s bad at others, and that humans are good at some things and they’re not as good at others.

I think the only sensible and honest and trust building exercise is to do exactly what Susan has talked about, and to be positive and upbeat when they bring something in, talk about what it got right, talk about what it got wrong, and talk about the role of information and the role of context in that. I also want to introduce something called answering an easier question. So like, you’ll you’ll see this everywhere. It’s a it’s a psychological principle. You start to see it everywhere.

Uh-oh.

It’s a cliffhanger. I know. I’m like, what is it?

Tell me what it is. He warned us ahead of time. Doctor.

Crosby warned us ahead of time that he may have, his Internet was a little shaky leading Bridget’s like, I have my pen ready to take notes.

Yes.

While we’re waiting for him to come back, I just wanna mention Susan had said that this is in you’re all gonna get this. And that also speaks to the connection because I saw someone asking about FMG and Redtail. So Yeah. You can connect the two systems, and there is a sync.

And you it’s very easy then to send all your emails through FMG to all your contacts that are in Redtail, and it syncs back and forth. Okay. Wait. He’s back.

Yeah.

So bay basically, just a in simple Redtail, obviously, is an amazing CRM, one of the most popular.

And we have a bidirectional sync. We are a marketing platform that enables you to do emails, social, event promotion, manage your website, and all of those are a la carte as well as testimonials and texting. So with a button, we do a bidirectional sync. It brings your contacts in, including your groups, your tag groups, all that stuff.

And anything you do within our platform, it then writes it back to Redtail. So Redtail is the source of truth, and we are the execution of that into any of the marketing channels that you can use. We have a fantastic partnership. And a lot of what we’re talking about today is how to leverage the information in your CRM and then act on it through our platform.

Okay. We were answering questions while we were waiting for you to come back. Okay. I think you’re we you’ve left us on a cliffhanger.

Oh, I’m sorry about that unintentional. So answering an easier question. So a client brings a printout in and ostensibly write what’s on the paper, it might be about fees, it might be about allocations or something very technical.

But I promise you, the decision gets made by answering an easier question, which is, is this person likable, right? When you think about is this person likable, is this person trustworthy? And I think a lot of times we can get wrapped up in the specificity of the very technical or very specific question, but what clients do when they make decisions, what humans do when they make decisions, they don’t compare spreadsheets.

They refer to vague emotional realities, which is, is this person kind? Are they warm? Are they competent? Are they trustworthy? And if you meet those questions with a smile, if you meet them with honesty and enthusiasm and break down the pros and cons of the human and the AI piece of that, then the easier question is, yeah, like this person is trustworthy. You think about my car experience. I’m trying to decide whether to buy, you know, an expensive car from this person, and suddenly they’re defensive and they’re rude and they’re, you know, they’re cagey, whereas before they were none of those things.

I don’t now particularly care about the finer points of the person sitting across from me is surly or untrustworthy. So just know that whatever the deeply technical specific question that’s being presented to you, it’s less important than your likability and your trustworthiness. And I think embracing the attitude that Susan and Sam are talking about here is the way in which you convey that.

Totally. And, you know, we see it in our own business here all the time. We we’re helping people with marketing technology. Well, the technology is always changing.

So Yeah. We can build a website for somebody six months ago, and then what these LLMs look for for ranking changes, and someone comes to us. And we are way more trustworthy when we’re just honest. And we say, yeah.

When we built that for you six months ago, this is where it was, and things are always changing, and we’re in the process of building new tools. And we have found that we’ll win every time than when you’re just get defensive about what the question being asked. So, you know, I love that this You know what?

To that point, I think I know I know Orion feels this way too. There are there are a lot of companies that are starting up. I actually I saw this stat. LinkedIn, the CEO of LinkedIn said that in the last six months, there’s been a sixty percent increase in the number of LinkedIn users with founder in their profile.

And there are I hear from advisors, I’m guessing you do too, Daniel, and I know Sam, you do, that there’s like a little bit of sense of being overwhelmed by the number of new shiny companies that are doing cool AI things.

And I think it’s a little overwhelming, but I think your clients to some degree feel a little overwhelmed with all the news about AI and should I be syncing it with Should I be putting my financial stuff in ChatGPT? I mean, there’s just a lot. So from our perspective as your partner in technology for Orion FMG, we’re more of the incumbent and the legacy, and we want to be the trusted place where we’re going to vet what is good in AI and incorporate it into our platforms. But I think your clients expect you to do that too.

You can be sort of that voice of, Don’t worry about all the noise. We’ve got you. And I think leaning into the fact that you’re leveraging AI to improve your practice, efficiency, create more time for yourself to be with clients. They wanna hear that.

They wanna hear that you’re embracing it, but they also want you to say, we’ve got you.

Yeah.

Good point. And I I love this chart from our friend Carl Richards with the behavior gap of the advice from the algorithm versus real life.

You know, I think anybody who’s Oh, so good. Tried to just do something completely with technology. Technology is great until it isn’t or until it breaks, and then you need a real a real human, and that is an experience many people have had. So let’s talk a little bit about the most valuable thing that you do, which is the most human thing you can do. Daniel, can you walk us through what we’re what we’re looking at here?

Yeah. So this is a meta analysis, which is just nerd talk for a study of all the studies on where advisors add value to their clients’ lives. So this is literal basis points, dollars and cents value. And what we see is, you know, I think a couple of takeaways here. First of all, advisors, every single part of your day is valuable. Like every every piece of your value stack adds some level of value and that’s important.

But what stands out Can you zoom in so people can see that anybody?

You probably can’t, can you?

We’re sending out the slides to everybody. I know this is hard to see. Sorry, Daniel.

You can zoom on your end, I think, but I don’t think I can zoom in presenter mode, but all of you should be able yeah. Liana just said you can zoom in. But I think when they’re saying, can you even read that chart? It also might be the the like, what is it showing? So he’s gonna tell us that in one second.

Yeah. So what we see here, though, is if you look at the pieces that AI does well, you know, you’re talking about some things like product selection, asset allocation, tax alpha rebalancing, these things add thirty to sixty five basis points of value per year.

If you look at the things that AI does poorly, this would do be things like, you know, handholding, behavioral coaching, getting to know you stuff, you know, getting to know your client, these things are adding sixty five to two forty four basis points of value per year. So it’s actually a really exciting moment we find ourselves in, where the least additive parts of advisor’s value stack are easily automated, and the most valuable parts of an advisor’s value stack remain very human. And where I get extra excited is that you can use the one to support the other, you know, we’re working on things at Orion right now, where to say, hey, ping, you know, John Q advisor to see who in, you know, who needs an outreach today, right? Who needs a kind word, who needs an encouraging word from me today? And you know, the encouraging word is all yours. But the flagging who might need that encouraging word is the, you know, is the test. And so I think we have every reason to be positive.

And to be excited about the fact that we are going to get to do more of what we do best and what helps clients the most in the years to come.

It’s so, so, so smart. And I love that this is a meta now. So nobody can say, well, that one survey just found this or that. It’s a good across across many of them. And, you know, I just Susan had mentioned this before, but we wanted to put this in here as an example.

So I almost wanna ask a quick question.

How how many of you have had clients or prospects reach out to you since SpaceX and ask about access to IPOs?

I’m just Yes.

Yes. Yes. Getting lots of yeses. Yep. Yes. So this is a well, Susan, why don’t you explain it?

Wow. Look at this.

Dan, you’re definitely gonna need to talk about this. Yeah. So this is the kind of thing that we capitalize on at Well, not capitalize on, we enable you as any of our FMC customers. We try to think about what is on the mind of your clients and how you can get ahead of that by talking about it and providing them with information that steers them in the right direction.

So this is another blog, please let us know if you’d like to see it, IPO reality versus the headline narrative. And Daniel, you’ll talk about this, but this is a perfect example where the facts can be laid out one way and sound great, and they can be laid out a different way and not sound great. And it’s for the advisor to help really combat that emotional, and it’s probably a behavioral science thing where they want to chase that shiny thing. And it’s the advisor who tells them, Don’t do that.

That’s not the right thing. And so this is a great opportunity for you to add value. And I think this blog that we wrote for our Do It For Me customers helps. But Daniel, what would you tell everybody to How can they leverage this also as a way to lean into the human advantage and the value of advice?

Well, so I think I won’t have to explain the importance of narrative to the marketing geniuses at FMG, but, you know, we really are a storytelling species and we react far more to narrative than we do to facts, right? And so we know, yes, we know factually that, you know, the average IPO underperforms the, you know, in the twenty twenty percent over the over the three years following. However, we have these narrative counterfactuals where it’s like, there’s always gonna be that article of like.

It’s the headlines. Like, media just steers you wrong.

Yeah. It’s like if you if you had put ten thousand dollars in Amazon when it IPO ed, you’d be a gazillionaire now or if you would put ten thousand dollars in Tesla or whatever.

And so those narratives tend to override. So understanding this as advisors, I think we need to use narrative counter examples too. So when someone comes to you and says, hey, you know, if I had put ten thousand dollars in company A, like I would, you know, I’d be worth fifty million bucks now, and what’s to say that that Anthropic isn’t company A, and you say, well, yes, and if you would put, you know, dollars ten thousand in company B, you’d be broke, and that’s most companies, right? And so I think we need to use the power of narrative both directions, because that is a knife to a gunfight, like bringing, you know, bringing simple statistics to a narrative battle is not a fair fight.

Right. Totally. So we’re getting a few people asking about these content pieces and if they can use them. So, Aubrey, on the back end, maybe you could just put up a quick poll now.

If you would like to learn more about FMG’s do it for me program where we actually create these types of content pieces that you can send to clients, you get to meet with someone a human on our team every month that will be your point of contact. And, truly, we put together the whole editorial calendar, what blogs you’re sending, what social posts you’re sending. We speak to the moment with breaking news pieces depending on what’s happening. We help plan and run events for you.

We give you webinars.

Have pretty it’s everything.

And the concierge will help customize everything. It Yes. We do believe in customization. This is just your starting point, so you only have to do two percent of the work, not a hundred percent.

Yes. So you can just say yes, please, and we’ll get let you we will reach out to you afterwards with more information, and we can also share some of these content examples that you can send to your clients or put on your own blog, things like that. Okay. Awesome.

So I wanted to put this chart in there because I thought this was so interesting. And I had a couple people in the chat, I don’t know if you all saw, asking about how does this work when we think about prospecting as well. So when someone’s choosing to stay or thinking about leaving or you’re thinking about picking up maybe a new client who’s unhappy with the adviser that they have, This was so interesting to me. This is from the Spectrum Group, and it was the top four reasons that clients leave an adviser, and it is all behavioral related. So Wow. Daniel, I would love to get your, you know, your take on this. Does this surprise you at all seeing this chart?

So, I I’ve seen other research that shows that eighty seven percent of folks who leave, leave for poor communication or a bad relationship versus thirteen for poor performance And it goes back to answering the easier question again, right? Most of your clients are not pulling out spreadsheets and comparing it to the S and P and benchmarking you against a hedge fund index or something.

They they are sort of blurrily answering the question, does my adviser care about me?

Yes.

Does my adviser care about me? And if you have not done all the things you see on the screen, if you haven’t reached out, if you haven’t returned a phone call, if you haven’t checked in, that’s when they answer that question negatively. So yeah, it’s about nine to one people who leave. What’s fascinating to me is if you look at the research around why people hire advisors, that’s overwhelmingly relational too.

Accenture did a study a few years ago that said, what are you looking for when hiring an advisor?

And the number one answer was someone who gets me. And it’s not because technical chops are not important. It’s just this answering an easier question and technicals, technical chops are easier to vet.

I can see, know, did did my friend recommend this advisor? Do they have a CFP or a CFA? Do they have, you know, years of experience? Do they have good reviews? That’s all easily vetted, and it speaks to the technical team.

So you put a pin in that, did they have good reviews?

Because we’ll come back to that, but that is becoming increasingly important. I bet there’s behavioral science to that too. It’s sort of that, I wanna know that other people think they’re good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the technical piece is easier to vet than the relational piece. So it’s not that technical chops don’t matter. It’s just that by the time they knock on your door, that part’s been specked out. Like, they’ve done their homework there. Now, they wanna see if you’re warm and kind.

Totally.

I think you know what I’m looking at this, Sam.

This is the people that leave but if you were to do a client survey, this is the end of it when you’re not doing something.

But on the flip side, I’m guessing, Daniel, if we think about why people choose advisors and then there’s why do they leave, but those that are engaged and raving fans and referring, it’s because you’re doing these things proactively. You’re sending emails out on topics that are of interest. You are using your CRM to know about a birthday or a graduation. You’re being proactive.

You know, by the time you’re not returning, if they’re calling you because you haven’t called them, you’re in trouble. So, the proactive piece is the middle that I think Orion, Redtail, and FMG help you lean into which is where the growth is going to happen.

Yeah, absolutely.

Such a good point. And, you know, one of the things I was thinking about too, somebody asked in the questions, when we talk about proactively contacting a client, what does that look like?

One of the great things about using the Redtail and FMG Sync is you can have different groups, and you can tag them and categorize them in many different ways. Sadly, we find most people just have a prospect list and a client list, and that’s it. But what we suggest you do, and I’m sure, Daniel, a lot of the people on your team over at Redtail suggest you do, is have subcategories. So you might have clients that they are more needy.

They wanna hear from you more often. You can put them in a group, and they could get a weekly email from you very easy, especially if, again, you’ve got it synced with FMG. It just we write it for you. It goes out.

Versus other people who they don’t like a bunch of inbox clutter, and they’re more once a month. And you can ask them what they want, but you can also have subcategories. So if something happens with all of a sudden, you know, there’s a new COLA released, and everybody who that’s gonna apply to gets that email versus the people on the roster who are only forty, they don’t get that email. Right?

So we really suggest this is where technology can really help you, and make it so much easier to have the right cadence in place. Yeah.

Okay. And this is just another example of, you know, when you were thinking about the content, one of the things that we’re really focused on, and I know, Daniel, you you all have a ton of content as well that advisors can use is what could just an AI robot send versus what can you send that just reinforces the value of that human relationship. Right? So sending something that anybody could just throw together from AI is very different than, you know, sending something that shows that you understand the specific nuances of that client, that a real person shaped that communication. And that doesn’t even have to be every single email, but, again, even tapping into using those groups, marking people appropriately in Redtail so that you can send them the right messages is gonna make a big difference.

Okay. So with the time we have left, we wanted to walk you through this human advantage playbook starting with understanding your clients and prospects better using behavioral insights. And you can see we’ve tagged Orion, Redtail, and FMG in the appropriate places all the way through the very end. There’s no end, hopefully, to a client relationship with the different stages. So, Daniel, maybe you could talk to us a little bit about some of the things you all provide or help advisors with at Orion for that first point.

Yeah. So I’ll talk about one of our favorite applications here at Orion. It’s called the BFI twenty.

This is something I created here where I interviewed four twenty five married couples and I asked them more delicately than this, but I asked them effectively, do you fight about when you fight about money?

And what we did there was we were able to, we started this off as this sort of couples money questionnaire piece, but what it morphed into was just a way to understand people’s financial values broadly, whether that’s, you know, in a couple or solo, and it’s fascinating. So it takes about two and a half minutes to fill out, you can do it as an individual or with a couple, with a grandparent, a child, any two people who have conversations around money, and it can give you insights into how they communicate, what they value, how they think about it, and you can use it to customize reporting, customize discovery, all these things. So I think that’s a great example of where, you know, a quick AI tech intervention helps you get at some very human truths fast, and then your own human connection ability takes it the rest of the way. But it gives you it gets you halfway down the path and then let your natural rapport take it the rest of the way.

Janet said brilliant. That sounds very significant and huge insight into couples relationships. That’s I feel like Right. I’m not an adviser, but that would intimidate me if, like, a couple arguing. And I’m sure so many of you listening in have an experience where you’re more therapist and coach than you are just financial adviser. That gives me hives just thinking about.

That’s amazing.

We did a blog just like, I mean, this is we’re so aligned.

The retirement conversation couples keep avoiding and talking about how people couples have very different ideas of retirement and they rarely have really discussed them and it relate, it does impact their financial strategy and it’s just one of those things that’s out there but that’s for, you know, that’s where you lean in and provide a ton of value.

Oh, so smart. So that’s just one example. I know there’s more. And obviously, if people want to learn more about Orion, Aubrey is gonna drop in the chat. But, Daniel, just wanna say the website they could go to?

Yeah. Orionbfy dot com is where we have a lot of tools. We also have some new new pieces out where if you wanna connect with your clients around something beyond performance, we have content around money and meaning and happiness and staying the course and all the great sort of human side of money stuff that I talk and think and write about.

Amazing. Okay. So from there, we’re gonna go to step two, which is knowing and using Redtail or if you’re using a different CRM to organize your clients’ prospects and COIs. And we’re putting in here who deserve attention, but, of course, like, you can set this up in lots of different ways.

So somebody asked earlier, could you, for instance, just send content to younger clients just starting careers? Yes. That’s exactly a great way to think about it. You could have a group for people that are young professionals.

And then when there’s relevant information to send, relevant pieces, you can even build out whole campaigns with our team at FMG. So you can search for the pieces that work and then have that group in Redtail and then send to them. You could just have your clients that live in California. So if there’s you know, sadly, we know, like, a lot of times there’s wildfires, there’s earthquakes.

If there’s something relevant that’s just gonna happen to those people, you can send to them. So it’s really, really important to do this step. And as you’re running different marketing funnels, we’ve you know, we haven’t talked too much about prospects, but this is something that I wish more people would do. If you have a, you know, a guide to estate planning on your website or Social Security, as someone downloads that, they should go into a grouping in your Redtail account that tells you that’s where they came from.

So then you know that’s content that’s of interest to them, and you can send them further pieces that are related to that. That, you know, really, really will make a big difference in the type of communication that they’re getting and how valuable they see it.

Okay. And then from there, go to decide what does this person need, to feel that they are hearing from you regularly enough, and they’re not one of those eighty four percent that are at risk of leaving.

So, I don’t know, Daniel or Susan, is there anything that you’ve heard advisers doing, a way that or ways of checking in with clients or little touches that have stood out to you as great strategies or best practices?

I’ve got well, as part of our do it for me program, one thing that our customers love is every month we come up with a marketing tip, and it’s really geared towards either an event or like a surprise and delight moment.

And Danielle, I’d love to hear you opine about surprise and delight moments. My hypothesis is those might do more for growing your business than anything else. We call them referable moments. But for example, I just came up with one for September, and this is just a simple little one.

Sending an email out to all your clients and saying, I hope you had a wonderful summer. I’m sure you have tons of great memories on your phone, but like all of us, most of those just stay on your phone. Send us one of your favorites and I’ll frame it for you and send it back so you can remember it all day long. And obviously that becomes a great moment for them, but also something to talk about you because they don’t talk about you when you have a financial, an annual review.

The other one was partnering with somebody for the day before Labor Day, like Thursday before Labor Day. Partner with somebody in your local community that puts together cheese boxes or cheese There is like a booming business, it seems like everywhere where there are companies and little shops that do it, but also even just people that are doing somebody that has a passion for doing it out of their house. Partner with them and then offer your clients and maybe a friend to be able to say, Yes, I’d love to grab a cheese plate for Labor Day. And then just on that Thursday, have all the cheese plates that are boxed up, but have the person that is putting them together there doing a demonstration.

So if anybody wants to learn how to do it or do one themselves, they can do that. And people will bring friends. And then when they have their cheese plate out over the weekend, they’re talking about you.

They’re talking about where they got it. Yeah. I love that.

Do those things matter, Daniel?

Yeah, Susan. So, to your surprise and delight point, one of my favorite stats that I quote in one of my one of my presentations is on the difference between moderately satisfied and very satisfied clients. And in terms of giving referrals, it is a one hundred X difference.

And so moderately satisfied clients, this is kind of like you’re doing your job, you’re competent, they’re not going to fire you, but there aren’t these surprise and delight moments, right? Nobody calls their friends and family if they stay at a hotel and the bathroom is clean and there’s no air on the pillow or whatever, right? I mean, nobody’s doing that. But when, you know, when my family stayed, when my family stayed at, when we were moving to Atlanta many years ago, we stayed at a Ritz there when we were house hunting and they gave my kids peach jelly beans.

They brought peach jelly beans to our room and said, welcome to the peach state and I, at that moment, I would have died for the Ritz Carlton. I mean, you know, I, whatever I needed to do, pay more, whatever, because my kids were going through a tough thing and they just looked out for them in a small way. And the bag of jelly beans is the difference between, you know, whatever, and now I’m gonna tell everyone about it and I’m loyal for life. And so it doesn’t have to be expensive.

It doesn’t have to be big.

It just has to be thoughtful. And that’s that 100x difference between, you know, referrals and no referrals. And it’s just not big, but that surprise and delight is the key.

I remember, you know, before FMG, I had a tech business that we actually sold FMG, and that’s how I’ve joined this wonderful organization. It was called Twenty Over Ten, and we had a line item in our business budget to send gifts, surprise and delight gifts, as it would come up. And we made people empowered to do that. So I can remember someone talking to a customer, and the the gentleman said that his kid was going off to become a marine, and he so proud.

And so we sent him a T shirt that said marine dad on it. You know? And that T shirt might have cost twenty dollars at the time and, you know, a few bucks to ship, but he would talk about it all the time. He loved to tell people where he got it from.

To your point about what you just mentioned when we went to Disney World after my husband passed away, I can’t remember how somehow the kids mentioned it to the woman at check-in, and she, like, sent me a message and was like, do you have a photo of your whole family? And she printed out a photo of us with my husband late husband in it and had it framed in our room when we got back from the park one day. And so even though Disney’s a gazillion dollars, like, I can see why they have loyalty from people. So you’re right. These little moments matter so much. And I love, Susan, that as part of the do it for me program, we’re building that in so you don’t all of you listening don’t have to think about it. We just give you the ideas.

Totally. Okay. So let’s talk move on to number four. We got three more to get through before time runs out. Thank you all for the great questions and feedback. And I see in the chat some people are asking for more information about certain services Orion or F and G provides. Please, you can send us in the q and a your email, and we can get in touch with you offline separately as well.

Okay. So enable. Make the campaign event follow-up, whatever it is, to execute. I’m seeing a lot of questions in here, Susan. Like, how often should we be sending emails?

You know, should it be once a week? Should it be once a month? We talked about this a little bit about, you know, segmenting your clients, but can you walk through a little bit how FMG makes it easy to do this?

Yeah.

And I think there’s I mean, I’d I’d love to hear Daniel’s thoughts on this.

I I remember reading somewhere that there’s a difference between, you know, consistent communications and, constant. So I kind of think of the newsletter drip as sort of a constant, and it becomes noise a little or a little background because it just is expected.

And what I think is most important is sending things when they are not expected and they have no set expectations. So sending an email about IPO hype versus reality. Like, I don’t think your clients are expecting that, but they would really value it and might even forward it to somebody and might even talk about it at dinner tonight. So I learned from Lightyear owned, I was the CMO at Satera and Advisor Group, and we were owned by Lightyear.

And the chairman, Dan, the chairman told me, Your content should aim to pass the spouse or friend test. In other words, if you send your content, would somebody that receives it want to share it and talk about it with either a friend or a spouse? That’s the level we wanna aim for. So I think you wanna communicate when you have something to say that is going to be relevant to your audience.

The more you can segment, the better. But there are a lot of topics that are of interest to everybody, such as IPOs, such as AI. So that’s what we aim to do. And we aim to do it so that it’s not every two Tuesdays or every Friday just but it comes out and they get it in their inbox and they’re like, that’s really interesting.

Yes. And the main thing is having a system in place. I’m sure many of you listening to this, marketing is something that you have a lot of grand ideas about or things you wanna do, but it always falls to the bottom of the list.

It’s hard to be consistent. Yeah.

So we real I mean, we hear from the clients we work with all of the time that the consistency of the communications is one of the things they value the most and knowing that Susan and I and the whole team at FMG are thinking about the content, what’s relevant right now, what should you be sending. And so we’re happy to be your partner in that. And thanks to everybody in the chat saying, I’d love FMG to do my marketing. We will definitely reach out to you. So, Daniel, talk a little bit about the humanizing point. We’ve we’ve, you know, talked about this throughout a lot, but I think too, you know, maybe are there things like low hanging fruit things people could be thinking about when they’re thinking more about humanizing their interactions or how often that they’re reaching out to clients or if there’s anything Orion provides. You kinda mentioned a few already.

Yeah, so I’ll refer back to that previous slide that you had up. I think this is another reason I’m excited about the opportunity that we have.

So the one right before this one.

I think it’s such an exciting opportunity right now. I was at a farmer’s market the other day with my son and he’s about halfway, he’s twelve years old, he’s about halfway to his black belt. And so, you know, we’re in a new state, we’re trying to find a new dojo for him and we passed by this, you know, this dojo at the farmer’s market with their ads out and I’m like, oh, hey, we should go see what it’s all about and he said, dad, all their materials are AI slop. I don’t want to do that And then he throws back something that I say to him all the time, which is, you know, how you do anything is how you do everything.

And he said, look, if that’s if they’re phoning it in with this inauthentic AI slop sort of lazy generated stuff, like I’m not interested in that dojo. And I thought that was such an interesting moment. You see on LinkedIn, see in advisor communications, there is so much half baked, boned in, pitiful communication happening right now, that it becomes easier and easier for the cream to rise to the top. So if you are relevant, if you’re timely, if you’re human, and if you’re authentic, people have a sixth sense for care and authenticity, and there has never been a time, there’s never been a better time for you to be a human first advisor who actually cares about her clients, then this moment now, you’re gonna stand out so far from the rest.

I wouldn’t even worry so much about the tactics and things just if that heart’s there and you’re making an effort, you’re gonna look incredible in the age of AI.

I totally agree. I think that’s a great one to end on because that really is why you why we believe that AI may be the best thing to ever happen to financial advisers.

That was so well said. How old is your son?

He’s twelve.

Man, everyone can learn some things from him. I love it. And think about all of the young people that are growing up in this world. You know, they’re gonna be so much more discerning and yeah.

It’s it’s, it’s interesting times. But thank you all for joining us. Thank you so much, Doctor. Crosby for being here with us.

And of course, you too, Susan. I hope everyone has a great rest of the day and a great weekend. We will be sending out all of the resources. Let us know in the chat.

Did you find this helpful? Did you like this format? Did you get something out of this? It’s always good to get your your feedback, and we will be sending the slides, the replay, as well as a few pieces of that content that you all said that you would love to be able to send to your own clients.

And so look out for that in your inboxes, and look out for more invitations from both Orion and FMG, for more of these types of sessions in the future. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Daniel.

Thanks, Sam.

Thanks, guys. Yeah.