Tip of the Week June 17, 2010
Not too long ago, I was working with a new client who had been an advisor for about eight years. She was a lovely lady from Calgary, Alberta, and one day, we had been working on how she could become better at capturing and chronicling personal information about her best clients’ lives.
Many of you who are familiar with Pareto know that we call this type of information F.O.R.M., and it is some of the most valuable information you own. F.O.R.M., for those of you who don’t know, stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Money.
Most Advisors we encounter have the ‘money’ part sewn up pretty well, but few in our experience take the time to put systems in place to keep track of the other three so that it truly becomes part of your integral day-to-day interactions with clients, and eventually, the crown jewel of your intellectual property.
Any one of your staff that deals with your clients, either face-to-face or on the telephone, uncovers these tidbits of information on a regular and daily basis. Clients are telling you and your support staff about their family, what they did on vacation, how their hobbies are coming along, etc. etc.
The problem is, if there is not a categorized way to efficiently organize this information, in a way that everyone can add to it, access it easily, and therefore benefit from it, the information dissipates into thin air over time. This is unacceptable.
How does this type of activity impact your next paycheck?
Well, in a couple of ways. First, it keeps your paycheck intact. When the markets are plummeting, for possibly an extended period of time, what keeps your clients from being courted and lured away by competitors? It is the relationships with your clients. If the personal connections aren’t there, why wouldn’t I take a chance on someone else promising better returns? F.O.R.M sees us through the good, and the bad times, and helps us weather the storms.
Secondly, the relationships you have with your clients are deeply entwined with how referable you are. If I am your client, and you regularly ask me, with precision, about all the ‘intimate’ details of me and my family’s life, I know you are for real, and I trust you. I am going to be far more likely to refer that kind of person than someone who approaches this kind of thing haphazardly, or not at all.
I hope you would agree that those are two pretty good reasons to become more serious about this with you and your team. Here are some key points that will help you become more efficient with capturing and chronicling F.O.R.M.
- Your Contact Manager needs specific buttons to match the categories of Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Money. When client information is uncovered, it is put in its specific category, so that relevant information can be accessed when you need it, and in a pinch too. Those of you who simply throw all of this stuff in a Notes section in your Contact Manager know all too well how cumbersome, and eventually useless, this approach can be. After a couple of years, you will develop carpal tunnel syndrome from the endless scrolling that is involved trying to find the specific information that you need.
2. F.O.R.M. is a team responsibility. Anyone on your team that converses with clients on the phone, or face-to-face, must put anything they uncover about your clients in its specific category. If they do not, the other team members will be oblivious to this knowledge, and can therefore never benefit from it. Your front lines are uncovering gold on a daily basis, and if they do not capture it, your intellectual property, and really, some of the most important information you will ever own, vanishes into thin air. The same thing applies in reverse as well with the information that you are uncovering.
As I was discussing these very same things with my client from Calgary, and the benefits inherent with these disciplines, she admitted that she had never been particularly attentive to these matters in the past. She was far more on the technical side, and she was very good at it too.
She then stopped for a second and said: “You know, it’s funny, as we are talking about this, I was thinking about my colleague and friend from Toronto. We went to school together, graduated at the same time, and we work in the same capacity for the same company. I was just thinking about her, and she is someone who has always been excellent at this type of thing and has done it for years (F.O.R.M), whereas I have always concentrated more on keeping my clients educated on the Financial Planning side. My conversations with my clients are typically financially oriented, whereas she always laughs at me when I tell her this, and says that her conversations with clients are seldom about money. They just empower her to do whatever she needs to do, and in the meantime, all she does is this type of thing (F.O.R.M.).”
She then added: “Do you know what else? She has beaten me in production every single year since we started.”
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