Does your firm take a product or process-based approach to providing planning services? If it is the former, you are missing an opportunity to add value to your clients’ lives and stand out from the competition.
Incorporating financial and tax planning services into your offerings utilizing a process-based approach can help you grow your firm and better meet your clients’ needs.
The Risk of Being a Product-Based Firm
There is a popular quote that states, “No one likes to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.” That’s a powerful, but true statement. Yet many firms make the mistake of taking a product-based approach to their business.
Firms that want to diversify their offerings often fail to take a process-based approach to their planning services. Instead, they offer clients products without much thought as to whether they will help clients reach their goals.
When you offer products and nothing else:
- What makes you different from any other firm?
- What’s stopping your clients from buying a mutual fund from the bank or stockbroker down the street?
- What value are you bringing to your clients that would cause them to stay with you long-term?
Nothing.
To attract and retain clients, you need to offer more than just products. You must add value and find ways to stand out from other firms. Products are commoditized by taking a process-based approach to planning, you not only improve client satisfaction and are able to provide more value to your clients, but you also gain an opportunity to enjoy more fulfilling and rewarding work.
The Advantages of Taking a Process-Based Approach to Planning
Your firm has something unique and valuable that no other firm offers. It is your job to determine what that is and to demonstrate that value to clients. You escape commoditization and create a unique process-based approach.
If you need help trying to determine the unique value you bring to clients, you can:
- Sit down with team members and brainstorm what unique services and value your team brings to clients.
- Send surveys out to clients asking about their experience and what value you brought to their business.
- Ask your clients questions, determine their pain points, and find solutions to solve their pain points.
Each member of your team brings something to the table, including unique perspectives and ideas. These perspectives and ideas can add value to your business when you offer planning services using a process-based approach. The same goes for your clients—they will be able to provide important insight into what you are currently doing that’s great, where you can seek to improve, and insight into gaps you may be able to fill. Clients who write checks will give you the best insight always.
There are many advantages to taking the process-based approach to planning. Below are just a few.
Help Clients Improve Their Financial Lives
When you offer planning services to clients, you are helping them improve their financial lives and empowering them to take control of their future. It can add fulfillment to your work as you help clients reach their goals.
When taking a process-based approach to offering financial and tax planning services, it starts with you and your client working closely together to identify their short and long-term goals. You can then identify your client’s needs and objectives through this step-by-step process. Armed with such knowledge, you can begin outlining the steps needed to reach these goals and the products that will help them get there.
Rather than simply selling clients products, such as mutual funds, you are taking an active interest in the client’s needs to find the best products to reach their goals at a given time. Proper planning can help clients improve their financial lives, and that in itself is an advantage to offering these services.
Build Deeper and More Fruitful Client Relationships
When you offer planning services with a process-based approach, you naturally build more fruitful and deeper relationships with clients. You are getting to know them and their lives on a more personal level and finding solutions to secure their financial future or solve problems.
A process-based approach also means checking in regularly with clients to see how things are going and if anything has changed. Each of these moments provides an opportunity to find other areas where you can add value to their lives.
Maybe your client is getting married or buying a home.
Both of these major life events are opportunities to reevaluate their plans to ensure they are aligned with these changes. Along the way, you further strengthen your relationship with this client.
The process-based approach to planning services lends to deeper client relationships. When you build trust and connections with clients at this level, they’re more likely to stick around.
Offering Long-Term Value
Planning services offer long-term value to clients, but it is important to take a process-based approach to these services. Along with helping clients improve their financial lives, you build stronger client relationships, stand out from other firms, and find more meaning in your work.
These are just a few of the many benefits of offering comprehensive planning services to your clients.
Joseph Graziano, CFP® is VP and Wealth Management Partner at FFP Wealth Management. He and the team at FFP help manage more than $2.4 billion in assets. For the past 28-plus years, FFP Wealth Management has partnered with accountants and financial planners to provide premium services to clients. If you have questions about adding financial planning services to your firm or the challenges above, you can contact him here.
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