How To Turn Your Clients’ Heirs Into Future Clients? Chloe Xu and Jonathan Bentley In order to retain business across generations, it is imperative that advisors create a direct relationship with their clients’ children as soon as possible to provide a sense of familiarity and trust. With an established relationship, heirs will then be able to understand and appreciate what the advisors have done for their family to grow and protect their assets. Here are three ways advisors can retain their next generation of clients: 1) Get Connected Intergenerational planning is one of the most important strategies for financial advisors to initiate a connection with a client’s children. If advisors are able to involve them in this planning process, it will provide them a chance to engage the heirs and begin building a relationship with them. One way advisors can get connected is leveraging social media outlets like LinkedIn. First, they need to let their clients know of their LinkedIn presence. Then, connect with the clients and through them, connect with their children introducing themselves. However, if their current clients are not on LinkedIn, advisors will still be able to find ways to search for their heirs based on the information they do have. After establishing a connection, advisors should remember to send across inter-personal messages. Examples would be wishing them happy birthday or congratulating them on a new life event that can be seen on LinkedIn updates. This will help foster a closer relationship between the heirs and the advisors. Be sure to keep your clients in the communications loop so they don’t think that you are trying to go around them to get to their children. 2) Show Value Communicating with the clients’ heirs about what is happening with their family’s assets and showing them how advisors can gain more money for them is a great way to earn the heir’s trust and show them the value of an advisor. Therefore, having frequent reports will help to earn their trust as it provides transparency. In addition, it helps to keep advisors on top of the heirs’ minds whenever they send across insights or reports. Again, this needs to be planned in conjunction with the advisor’s current client as there are sensitive privacy issues that will affect the visibility of what families assets that should be held private from their children and assets that can be shown - Not all children are always treated or trusted equally. Therefore, one of the safest strategies is to encourage your clients to take advantage of the
$10,000 annual gifting exclusion to set up accounts for their children. This will then provide the advisor a reason to stay in touch with the heirs without divulging things about their parents’ assets that they might not want the children to know about. 3) Give Them Useful Tools Setting up accounts like the annual gifting exclusion give advisors a reason to offer their children investment tools that can help them become better investors; This is another way to gain their trust and build a relationship. The trend towards “robo-advice” and portfolio construction can be incorporated into an advisors’ practice using a hybrid approach that provides them with a lower cost alternative to serve the heirs that might not meet advisors’ minimum investment requirements. InvestCloud’s Pink applet collection gives advisors the ability to offer this type of hybrid robo-advice on a very cost effective basis. This highly customized reporting and robo-advice functionality is powered by InvestCloud’s award winning technology, Programs Writing Programs (PWP®). With PWP, any business analyst will have the ability to do what a team of programmers would require weeks or months to do, within a couple of days. Now, with easy access to thousands of varied report views, InvestCloud’s clients have validated that firms do find added value in customizing reports to unique workflows and alternative constituencies. For more information about the InvestCloud and our amazing ability to customize client reporting, visit us atwww.investcloud.com or call us at 888.800.0188. Chloe Xu, started her career in a PR and Marketing agency for Financial Services accumulating years of experience in social media marketing and content marketing. Today, she manages all digital and social media content for InvestCloud, Inc. She holds a BA in Media and Communications at University of California, San Diego. Jonathan Bentley leads InvestCloud’s content development and management division. From helping advisors better craft and deliver their stories to curating customized advisor RSS site feeds, Jonathan’s team is critical to InvestCloud’s bespoke design and site management services. Jonathan was previously founder and CEO of LightPort Inc. which merged with InvestCloud in 2013. Previously a practicing RIA, while at LightPort Jonathan was involved in developing web portals for more than 500 advisors and money managers.