How to supercharge your customer retention strategies for building awesome client relationships
Great financial advisors love what they do. They passionately perfect and demonstrate their expertise in their prospecting and they know how to communicate what sets them apart in their marketing endeavors. However, they also know that keeping up with the markets and courting new leads is only half the battle. Building a relationship with current customers is the other factor in success. This is why having excellent customer retention strategies for your business is essential.
The truth is, business growth for a top-performing financial advisor is a balancing act of thinking short-term with the current market and cultivating a real relationship over time. In an industry where the growth of a portfolio and navigating a client relationship through potential economic upturns and downtowns matters, it’s simply not enough to focus your efforts on converting as many leads as possible. You can’t ignore the potential cost of losing those customers after a couple of years.
In fact, those first years may be the best time to focus on strengthening your customer retention strategies. A customer retention insights study by PriceMetrix found that “the most critical time period for advisors to focus on client retention and attrition risk is from the one-year mark to the four-year mark in a client relationship.” It also stated that older customers were more likely to stay with the same financial advisor, while the risk of losing business increased with younger professionals.
Instead of seeing that as a reason to court only older, more wealthy established clientele, who don’t have a lot of room to grow, there is an opportunity here to think about the emerging millennial entrepreneurs. There is a new wave of innovators and business leaders in startups and software development; many of them are already your leads and new clients.
So why not fine-tune your customer retention strategies to meet the growing and changing financial needs of a new generation? You can not only cultivate those younger leads into clients, but effectively make those new clients into the kind that stay with your business for many decades. Here are key elements to focus on every day, from day one, to supercharge your customer retention strategies and build awesome relationships with your clients.
Connect emotionally
It’s likely that you’re already well-versed in how important it is to build trust and rapport with your clients, but in recent years the financial industry has not always done the best job of demonstrating those values. It’s not helpful or wise to focus on the negative, and an attitude of doom and gloom or fear-mongering certainly won’t instill a sense of optimism and security with new clients. However, it’s not enough to tell them to simply relax, back off and hope that everything will work out!
So how do you address the very real concerns that younger people may have while they are looking to manage their money and business wealth over the long haul of an uncertain future? The answer is simply by listening.
The first step to establishing trust and demonstrating your reliability and expertise as a trusted advisor is by making yourself accessible and starting conversations with your clients.
Ask about their concerns and give them straightforward, honest answers about the current state of the market and future risks.
Make yourself accessible by phone, text or email for questions and make your website and social media spaces where you anticipate questions and show you care.
Demonstrate your expertise in sharing knowledge online, not only addressing their concerns and security but also in establishing a focus on their hopes, dreams and goals as well!
Creating connection with the emotional side of wealth and money management is a strong way to grow a relationship with a client in the first year.
If you want to work with the best clientele, make sure you’re making the very best of your leads! Schedule a free demo of our lead management software and turn leads into customers with less work!
Back it up with integrity
Once you’ve asked about a client’s fears and concerns and addressed those with your honest answers, you have to follow-up with risk management and real action if some of those causes for concern arise. If there is turbulence on a plane, the first person that passengers want to hear from is their pilot offering an explanation of what’s going on and some reassurance about what the plan is to get through it. There is nothing worse than silence in those cases, and riding out the ups and downs of the financial markets is no different.
It’s not enough to tell brand new clients that you are going to make yourself available and always level with them. Six months down the road if they have a pressing concern or question and it takes too long for you to return their phone calls, they are going to seriously re-evaluate this relationship.
So your customer retention strategy has to have an action plan in place that involves a sense of integrity and how you are going to be there for them to check in, to anticipate concerns and follow up to keep building on that initial trust that you worked hard to establish in the early stages.
Communicate the long-term benefits
While the action plan is important to address a client’s concerns in the current state of the market and assess the risks coming around the bend, you also need to communicate a shared vision for their goals. Success means being able to look into the future and the long-term benefits of managing your client’s wealth as a journey you are taking together.
A lot of advisors want to earn their clients’ trust with their actions early on, but fail to educate them properly on what is possible over the years. You have an opportunity to educate and mentor your clients to make wise financial decisions in the long-run and trust you to be their guide along the way, and that is key for your customer retention strategies.
Providing open communication and expertise about what is possible in the short and longer-term strengthens your relationship and dramatically increases the likelihood of them staying with you.
If you want to work with the best clientele, make sure you’re making the very best of your leads! Schedule a free demo of our lead management software and turn leads into customers with less work!
Share your experience boosting your customer retention strategies with your best clients in the comments!