The ClientWise Blog

Sit down at a lunch table during any advisor conference, and I can pretty much guarantee you that sooner than later, the topic of conversation will gravitate to client referrals. In fact, I can’t think of a more fitting battle flag motto for most advisors than "referrals, referrals, referrals! ” Don’t get me wrong, referrals are great; and by all means you should keep asking for them.

BUT…if you really want your referral game to work big, you need to go small.

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“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou

That’s the genuine essence of creating WOW experiences for your clients – finding deeply personal ways to make them feel uniquely special. Too often, advisors think of their clients as a group rather than individuals – striving to be thoughtful by sending them all a bottle of wine (whether or not they happen to be wine aficionados) or a holiday turkey (even if they’re vegetarians). It’s not that those gestures are necessarily a bad thing, but are they really personal? 

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What exactly constitutes a “client advocate?” Advisors are often rather liberal in their definition, including those clients who, from time to time, provide an occasional referral to a friend or business associate who directly asks for it. Others include those clients who tend to provide a continual stream of referrals, even though those referrals are almost always the “wrong” types of clients – those who don’t fit your ideal client profile.

We define advocates as that select subset of your clients who...

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Last week, we posted Part I of this blog, which talked about the best way to tackle succession planning by starting to plan while you’re still growing your business. To make this incredibly overwhelming thought a little more manageable, we broke it down by our ClientWise Professional Advisory Model™. Then, we broke it down further into three different periods of time. Using this multi-layered thinking will help you be more efficient in evaluating your business and preparing you for succession.

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