What is your follow-up process with ideal clients and prospects?

Grant Hicks CIM

A key time management hack for successful financial advisors

The number one challenge for busy financial professionals is capacity. Knowing your capacity is critical to your success. But you don’t have time to segment and manage capacity, you're too busy with day-to-day meetings. I get it, I struggled with capacity as an advisor for years. Now as a practice management expert, I juggle between providing content, coaching financial professionals, speaking and training, and consulting for financial firms on practice management. I want to share an "aha" moment in working with financial professionals that can help you get more out of your day and your week. Your follow-up process.

What is your follow-up process?

After you have a meeting with an ideal client or ideal prospect, what you do immediately following the meeting is critical to your day. First, do you schedule time at the end of meetings to do a follow-up? Most elite advisors I speak with do not schedule follow-up time after ideal client meetings. It is as simple as booking 15 minutes in your calendar after every meeting and getting into the habit of booking the time and completing some of the follow-ups. Start booking it today to see the difference.

What happens at the end of a meeting?

Your meeting ends, the clients walk out the door, and what happens next is critical. Do you check email, get interrupted by staff waiting to talk to you, have another client waiting, or other fires happening? Sound familiar? You go onto something other than the follow-up from the meeting thinking you will catch up at the end of the day. The day goes by thinking you will catch up sometime this week. Then when you finally sit down to follow up, you struggle to remember the conversations from the day because this is one of three or four or five or more conversations.

When do you schedule it?

Follow-up is not scheduled for most financial advisors. What does a doctor do when a patient leaves. notes are dictated in services such as Copytalk ( www.copytalk.com) or Dragon dictation ( www.nuance.com) or similar software after every meeting or every call. Even though it is not scheduled, the habit to dictate notes is there. Scheduling it after meetings reminds staff that this must be done first, so do not disturb. Full disclosure, I too struggle with follow-up notes. I think I will do the follow-up notes later and catch up, only to get additional emails and tasks and not feel caught up. The longer you leave it the bigger the task gets in your mind and eventually, you get task paralysis. Without time blocked for follow-ups, you are mentally draining yourself. 

Engage staff

Another time management hack some financial advisors use for follow-up is to have their staff in on the last 5-10 minutes of the meeting to go over paperwork, administration, and follow-up. This is dependent on your firm's compliance rules of course, and licensing of staff.

Confidence at the end of the day

Imagine if every meeting you had, you scheduled 10-15 minutes to complete the follow-up notes, tasks, and administration. Then at the end of the day, all meetings had the follow-up process in place, tasks delegated and scheduled by staff. How would you feel going home, confident? Start scheduling a time to do follow-up for every ideal client meeting. You schedule a time to do preparation, why not schedule a time to do a follow-up?

Practice management checklist

While each financial advisor's practice may have a different approach, advisors need to understand where their practice needs help, and will they get the right help for the right part of their practice. What areas does your practice need help with? Get a copy of our comprehensive practice management checklist by going to our website   https://www.advisorpracticemanagement.com/about-us or clicking here https://practicemanagement.getresponsepages.com/

How about your goals for your practice in 2021? Our Practice management checklist or fee audit checklist 

While each financial advisor's practice may have a different approach, advisors need to understand where their practice needs help, and will they get the right help for the right part of their practice. What areas does your practice need help with? Get a copy of our updated 21-page “Comprehensive Practice Management Strategies checklist” by going to our website https://www.advisorpracticemanagement.com/about-us or clicking here https://practicemanagement.getresponsepages.com/

Fee audit checklist for ideal prospects, click here https://feeaudit.getresponsepages.com/

Call me

Contact us to help get clarity around your goals on paper, and having the goals conversation by contacting grant at [email protected] or click on the link to set up no-obligation 20-minute discussion https://my.timetrade.com/book/JMTNJ regardless if we work together, let’s have a chat and listen to your biggest practice management concerns to help you get clarity around your future business.

Grant Hicks, CIM, is President of Advisor Practice Management and co-author of “Guerrilla

Marketing For Financial Advisors” 1st and 2nd edition. www.advisorpracticemanagement.com for speaking, workshops, or coaching, contact Grant at [email protected] Grants combined financial advisor clients manage over 4 billion AUM , and earn over $40 million dollars combined!