As a financial planner, one thing will always be true in your line of work:
You have to meet with clients to review their financial plans and portfolio – whether you meet virtually or in person.
Whether you meet monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually, these meetings are recurring. Unfortunately, when a financial planner sees a week or two full of client review meetings, anxiety can start to set in. Presenting your clients’ financial plans to them, walking them through investment decisions, and performing follow up may seem like a simple task. However, as your business grows, maintaining consistency across these meetings and tackling meeting-weeks can feel overwhelming and frustrating.
Let’s dig into how you can standardize review meetings for both yourself and your team to make the experience a positive one for everyone involved.
What Should a Standard Review Meeting Look Like?
Although today we are discussing client review meetings, this process holds true for any recurring meetings you have with clients. You might have review meetings, modular planning meetings, or even just casual check-in meetings. Developing a process for all of these is critical.
Before kicking off your meeting, you should have several items prepared to ensure things run smoothly:
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A predetermined agenda.
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A pre-meeting checklist. You can have one of these internally for your team, but also for your clients so that they come prepared with questions or materials.
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A standard meeting follow-up.
Your team and your clients should also be clear on what type of meeting this is, and when the next meeting in their cycle will take place.
Your review meeting should be relatively standard. You want to cover the client’s entire financial plan on a recurring basis. The Level Best team recommends you schedule this quarterly, semi-annually, or annually depending on the type of service you provide. If you’re struggling to know what to cover during these meetings, we recommend that you explore the various financial planning topics covered by the CFP Board. These can act like conversational guideposts, and become the backbone of your meeting agendas and checklists.
If you prefer to hold modular financial planning meetings or check-in meetings, the protocol will be similar. Clients should know how frequently you’re meeting, and what you’ll cover in each session. For example, with modular meetings, you may have a schedule that allows for one specific financial planning topic to be covered in each meeting. With regular check-in meetings, you may be checking to see if your client is following recommendations and implementing according to plan.
What Elements of a Review Meeting Can Be Delegated?
One problem that many financial planners run into is that as they scale, they start to run out of time to perform meetings with all of their clients. Some advisors solve this by reducing the total number of meetings they have. Still, that solution only is successful for so long. Eventually, advisors need to streamline their process or delegate elements of their meetings to free up time.
There are several elements of your client meetings that you can delegate easily.
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Setting the Agenda. Your team members can deliver meeting agendas to the client, and prepare an internal agenda for you.
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Pre-Meeting Checklist. Your firm can set up standard meeting checklists for both you and your clients. Some things on these checklists might be ensuring client links are available, letting the meeting leader know what items are still open for the client to complete, preparing data entry, etc.
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Standard Scheduling Process. One of your team members can help to track meeting cycles or surges and schedule with clients through your online scheduling tool. They can also request documents at this time.
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Deliverables. If you have standard deliverables for each meeting, your team member can gather those in advance and have them available for you and your client during the meeting.
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Follow-Up. If you’re an advisor, you’re no stranger to meeting notes and follow up. However, your team member can sit with you on meetings or listen to recordings after the fact to send a follow-up to your clients.
How Can You Maintain Accountability?
Any time you look to standardize a process, or delegate parts of your process, the question becomes:
How can we make sure this is actually getting done?
Our #1 answer is to leverage workflows within your firm. Workflows stored in your CRM allow you to easily delegate repeatable tasks, and to create workflows that help you track what’s getting done (and what’s missing).
Additionally, storing Standard Operating Procedures in your CRM or online cloud storage (like Google Drive or Dropbox) can help ensure team members stay on track and always have access to what they need. Organize these workflows and SOPs by meeting type, or client package, so that they’re easy to find.
It’s also wise to store additional resources and deliverables with these workflows. For example, if you have a standard, branded client deliverables for each meeting in your quarterly modular planning cycle, have those deliverables plugged into a workflow in your CRM to allows your entire team easy access to what they need, when they need it.
Finally, it’s important to remember that the ultimate goal is to create an exceptional, repeatable client experience. To do this, we recommend having you or your team check that all planning or wealth management recommendations have been implemented by you or your client (whoever is responsible). Add these items to the top of your agendas and checklists so that all parties can easily reference action items and stay on track.
Have questions about standardizing your client meetings? Reach out! We’d love to help you iron out your process.