Forum Discussion

Terry-Bell's avatar
Terry-Bell
Icon for Advisely Partner rankAdvisely Partner
5 months ago

Creating your vibe

You need one thing above everything else, to create a vibe which is genuine and personal for your clients – you must truly know your clients. Unfortunately, it’s our experience that very few practices are taking full advantage of their CRM functionality to capture the information they need to create that key personal, relationship building information. And, even if it’s being collected at the onboarding stage, few practices deliberately maintain this information.

Simple info such as their children’ names (and their occupation or education level), details of the client’s preference for morning or evening meetings, coffee or tea, in-person or virtual meetings, wine or the ballet or both (will allow you to provide interesting content for your communications, plan events which appeal and so on), what the client is planning to do once the retire, when’s their next major holiday and so on. In other words - the ‘life stuff’.

What info do you collect (and maintain) to build meaningful, long term relationships with your clients?

client engagement
clients
marketing
practice management
  • jenny.brown's avatar
    jenny.brown
    Icon for Advisely Board rankAdvisely Board
    5 months ago

    Great points Terry-Bell we continually ask our clients "what's important to them in life" by doing this we get to know what changes and what we need to look out for.

    For example, 10 years ago, a clients health might have been taken for granted and so things like travel might have been at the top of their list, with a couple of health issues, or new grandkids, they will often move to the top of the list and that then becomes the topic of discussion. Knowing what are the good and bad things that have occurred over the past 12 months, also helps build a great "data base" for topics and shows the clients that we do really care.

    We use our XPlan crm to capture this so that it easily flows out into our reviews and is readily available if we are speaking with clients.

  • deborah.kent's avatar
    deborah.kent
    Icon for Advisely Index Top 10 rankAdvisely Index Top 10
    4 months ago

    Hi Terry-Bell this a good topic, in a review with a client we take a lot of notes on their current circumstances whats important to them and whats happening in their lives, we do record this for a number of reasons like jenny.brown it allows us to understand what we need to do for a client moving forward with their finances and if we need to adjust, it also creates a deeper connection with the client so when I see them again I can re confirm or ask questions about subjects like life events, they feel quite special when you remember events such as becoming grandparents for the first time or have a signifcant event like a wedding anniversay or one of their children getting married.  This is why we have great relationships with our clients