The one thing that — more than anything else — will move your advisory business forward is to spend more time face to face with key clients.

Good face-to-face meetings accomplish a number of important goals. First, they enhance client satisfaction and reduce the likelihood of defection. Second, they can help you better serve clients and move you closer to generating additional revenue by consolidating assets you currently don’t manage or opening the door to business you currently are not doing. And, third, they can lead to a discussion about referrals to friends, neighbours, colleagues or family members — and, in today’s environment, referrals are the No. 1 method by which successful advisors attract new clients.

The first question to ask clients is how frequently you should plan to meet with them. This will vary based on the type of business you run, the number and profile of clients in your practice and where your clients are located. It’s a lot easier to meet frequently if clients are concentrated within a short drive of your office than if they’re spread out over several hundred kilometres.

As a rule of thumb, you should aim to meet face to face with every significant client annually, and to sit down with your top clients at least twice a year — more often, in some cases. Not all clients may be big enough to justify a meeting, although if it is not worth investing an hour to meet with a client, are you doing them or yourself a favour by keeping them on your books?

For advisors with 500 or more clients, some of these meetings will have to be delegated to an associate.

If you accept that meeting face to face with clients ranks among the highest and best uses of your time, then the next logical step is to ask yourself how you can spend more time having those meetings. For many advisors, blocking out time will be the answer: put one to six spots in your daily schedule for client meetings — yes, I have met at least one advisor who meets with five to six clients daily — and then organize your daily routine to make those meetings happen.

Once you have decided how many meetings you can accommodate in your workweek (almost certainly more than you have right now), the next challenge is getting in front of the right clients.

I recognize that sometimes busy clients might not want to take the time to meet or their location may preclude this, but bear in mind that investment counsellors, who deal at the very top end of the market with account minimums of $2 million or more, often plan on quarterly meetings with their clients. Remember as well that when it comes to meetings, quantity is as important as quality – two 45-minute meetings annually are generally better than one 90-minute meeting.

In my research with significant investors, I’ve found there are several reasons that they resist meeting with their advisor.

Sometimes, it’s the hassle of fighting traffic to their advisor’s office and paying for parking. This is especially an issue in such markets as Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, although congestion is becoming an issue in other cities as well.

Paying for parking is a particular issue for older clients. One downtown advisor pays for parking for top clients — and ensures that these clients know that this is something he does only for his very best clients.

Another Toronto advisor with a bank-owned firm addresses the downtown driving problem by borrowing a meeting room at the suburban offices of his firm and establishing a rotation in which he spends one day every two weeks in outlying offices, making it easier for clients to come in and meet with him.

If clients won’t come to you, you may have to go to them. Even busy clients will make time if you offer to meet with them at their office. Advisors who do this report big side benefits in getting a chance to see clients’ places of work, and sometimes meeting their clients’ colleagues.

The key to making this work efficiently is grouping meetings geographically and scheduling them well in advance. If you are organized, and providing that clients aren’t too far apart, you can have four meetings in a morning, with a breakfast meeting at 8, meetings at clients’ offices at 9:30 and 11, and then a client lunch at 12:30.

@page_break@Some clients say they don’t want to meet their advisor because he or she does all the talking and the clients feel the advisor has not listened to them. One way to address this problem is to write down a list of questions that you plan to ask clients before each meeting. These questions can touch on many topics — for example, how they want to help children or grandchildren or an elaboration on the kind of lifestyle they’re hoping for in retirement. What’s important is that by identifying specific questions before a meeting, you avoid the trap of being seen to do all the talking.

On other occasions, clients report that their advisor covers the same ground in every meeting with no new information, so they feel that taking the time to meet is not a productive use of their time.

In my experience, the single best way to make meetings productive and to have clients see them as being of value is by using a written meeting agenda.

The meeting agenda starts with the objectives that you have identified for that client relationship at the start of the year. (You have, of course, already sat down and identified your key business opportunity and priority for each top client for the next 12 months.)

That priority could simply be to deepen the client bond and insulate the relationship from competitive assault. Maybe it’s to get to know the client’s accountant or lawyer, or to make a connection with the client’s children — a particularly pressing problem as clients age, with assets at some point going to their heirs. It could be to consolidate GICs or other investments that you don’t hold, or to explore the need for insurance or estate planning strategies. Or perhaps your goal is to get an introduction to colleagues or family members.

Those objectives set the context for the meeting. That said, it is important that the client see this as their meeting, not yours. When you call the client to schedule the meeting, tell them that there are several items that you would like to cover when you meet, including an update on their circumstances, any business issues you want to focus on and a review of their portfolio with recommended changes, if appropriate.

If there are no changes, be sure to outline the reasons during the meeting. Unless you explain to your client that you have reviewed all the alternatives and outline the reasons you’ve concluded that the status quo is best, you risk that they will conclude you have failed to make changes because of laziness.

At that point in setting the meeting agenda, you need to pause and ask clients what they would like to talk about when you meet. Ask them what particular questions they have or issues they’d like to discuss and incorporate those into the meeting agenda.

Consider e-mailing or mailing the agenda with a confirmation of the meeting details, and use the agenda to guide the discussion during the client meeting. One advisor begins meetings by tabling the agenda and saying: “This is the agenda that we discussed for today’s meeting. What other questions or issues would you like to talk about that aren’t on this agenda?” In that way, he picks up any outstanding concerns and reinforces to clients that this meeting is for the client’s benefit, not his.

A meeting agenda will impose discipline on both you and client to stay on track, help make meetings more focused and productive, and increase the likelihood that clients will see value in meetings with you. One advisor goes one step further by using a multi-part form at the conclusion of the meeting to write down the next steps that follow from the meeting — similar to what you get when you take your car in for repair. The client keeps one copy; other copies go into the client file and to staff members. Another advisor achieves the same purpose by sending a follow-up note after the meeting with a clear outline of the next steps to be taken.

Once you have ramped up the frequency with which you meet with clients, the next key step is to make those meetings as productive and valuable as possible, for both you and your client. Consistent use of a meeting agenda is one of the very best ways to ensure that happens.

In my next column, I’ll talk about how using a meeting agenda can help you raise the issue of referrals. IE



Dan Richards, president of Strategic Imperatives Ltd., can be reached at richards@getkeepclients.com For other columns in this series, go to www.investmentexecutive.com.