Presenting the Plan

(December 2005) Financial advisors who wish to become true wealth managers need a defined consultative process that enables them to fully understand their prospects and clients, and recommend appropriate solutions to address all aspects oftheir financial lives. This is clearly a big jump up from just providing investment management or financial planning.

To make this jump, I recommend a process built around a series of five client meetings. Last month, we looked at the first of those meetings—the discovery meeting. Now we turn to the second—the wealth-management meeting.

To prepare, create a wealth-management plan for the prospect. Thisdocument must be comprehensive and address the full range of financial issues. They’ll vary from one prospect to the next, but often include investments, insurance, financial planning, estate planning, asset protection, credit profiling and charitable gifting.

Constructed well, your wealth-management plan will fully establish you as an expert in the eyes of your prospects and serve as the road map to achieve everything important in their financial lives. Once you have created the wealth-management plan, proceed to the client meeting where it will be presented. You should have three goals for this meeting:

• To provide the prospect with an actionable wealth-management plan;
• To clearly demonstrate the value you can add; and
• To continue building the personal relationship with the prospect—a process you began during the discovery meeting.

To accomplish these goals:

• Set the stage. Assert that you clearly understand the prospect’s current situation and where she wants to go. Let her know you will help make smart decisions about her money, and are excited about the plan.
• Outline the agenda. Referring to prepared materials, explain that during the meeting you’ll walk through a wealth-management plan, starting with the executive summary and then moving to a diagnosis of the prospect’s current situation and your recommendations for moving forward.
• Outline your procedures. Describe where the prospect currently is in your consultative process, and explain the steps to be taken after this meeting.
• Walk through the wealth-management plan. At this point, you’ll present the plan, one section at a time. To avoid overwhelming the prospect, don’t delve into too many specifics. Aim to take no more than15 minutes to go through the plan.
• Agree to move forward. Once you’ve completed your presentation, take a moment to get confirmation of commitment from the prospect. Simply say, “Now that we’ve reviewed your plan, do you think there’s a basis for going forward together?”
• Solicit and address concerns. Most prospects will respond to your commitment question positively, but some may have reservations. Encourage the prospect to share those reservations, and then address each of them. These are the most common reservations you’ll encounter:
  • The prospect has a particular investment he really wants to keep(often a sentimental investment such as stock gifted by a grandparent).
  • There are questions about fees.
  • The prospect has concerns about tax considerations.
  • The prospect forgot to tell you about one or more accounts during the discovery meeting.
• Close the meeting. Wind up by scheduling the next meeting, at which you’ll ask for a formal commitment from the client before beginning to actually implement the wealth-management plan. I’ll go into detail about that next month.

Copyright 2005, CEG Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved. John Bowen is founder and CEO of CEG Worldwide, a U.S.-based global training, research and consulting firm.“The Bowen Report” appears monthly.

(09/12/05)