We all love helping our clients. While it is obviously exciting for us, how do we make it engaging for our clients? How do we make it exciting?

In the beginning of my career, I was trained to say to prospects, “I’d like to set up a time to meet to take you through my process.” Now, in hindsight, I cringe at that word. Who wants to go through a process? My accountant has a process. And I avoid him every year because processes don’t feel good.

Our language matters. We made better word choices to make the financial planning experience better. When we change our words, we can change expectations.

While we have processes backstage in our office, when we are on the front stage with clients, we take them on an experience, step by step.

Our first meeting is what we used to call our Factfinder, or Discovery, Meeting. Now we call this our Get Organized Meeting. Just imagine taking the pressure off clients when they realize that we are going through this together.

Our second meeting is no longer our evaluation or analysis meeting. Now it is our Direction Meeting. This helps our clients understand the path we are heading down.

Next, instead of sharing recommendations, we get to our Design Meeting. Here we take everything we’ve put together and collaborate with the client to come up with solutions.

And, lastly, we used to deliver their financial plan, but we now say we will provide them with The Plan Forward. This is then consolidated into a One-Page Financial Plan with all the data as appendixes.

Our One-Page Plan is a simple document that includes their current overview, their most important dreams and recommendations that we can check off one by one. The appendixes provide the reasoning and the math behind the One-Page Plan. The simplicity makes it feel less overwhelming, and it feels easier to implement.

All of this works great for clients who need the whole plan. But sometimes we have prospects who don’t need or want the deep dive of a comprehensive financial plan. Perhaps they are just starting off, or they are going through a divorce.

For these clients, we created Start-Up and Restart Plans — streamlined versions of our steps, which also come at a reduced cost to the client. Start-Up Plans bridge the gap between where they are at right now and where they will be when we need to complete a more comprehensive plan.

I learned from some people right in this very room that people don’t value things that they don’t pay for. Start-Up and Restart Plans give our clients an entry point so they can access our services in a simplified manner.

And some people aren’t even there yet. These are the people in our community who need us the most.

As time goes on, and the wealth divide becomes even greater in our community, we feel a duty to make financial planning more accessible. We partnered with a local organization to bring the basics of financial planning to those who need it more than ever. We do pro bono work with a local organization devoted to ending the sex trade to create the Dream Big Life Skills series. We work with women who have been victims of trafficking to educate them on the basics so that they are better equipped to enter their new freedom. We meet the women where they are at in life, and where they need us most, and we work with them on building a strong foundation.

We make financial planning accessible — to our prospects and to our community.

I’ll bet you are all a little like me. We all want to engage, excite and empower the people we work with and, most importantly, make it easy so that they are compelled to take action.

Transcript

Author(s):

Julianne Hertel, CLU, ChFC

The new world of the plan: Making planning engaging and accessible