Coaching your clients on how to hire a good financial adviser

Here’s a thought for your next newsletter / blog post / or LinkedIn update: write about how to hire a financial adviser.

Tuesday, March 6th 2018, 6:00AM

by Russell Hutchinson

Imagine your best client is leaving to live in the UK permanently. They have loved your service, not just the formal parts of the financial adviser relationship they’ve had, but the informal parts too. They’ve appreciated the way you have focused on their goals, and even more, the choices or behaviour that they had to change to work towards them. They felt that you have always seen the financial advice as a subset of their life, not a goal in itself. They are going to miss you.

After such a touching endorsement, they went on to ask: how do I find someone like you to help me in the UK?

Sure, your answer can help them, and may help them a lot.

But more than that, writing down the imagined response to this question is a great way to help people find you, too. Thinking about the client’s that appreciate your service the most, and the criteria and process they should use to find an adviser like you, is, by definition, the criteria and process that your ideal client should use to find you.

You can probably most easily imagine the criteria – and they will vary depending on your offer – likely to contain question such as services, references and recommendations, advice approach, location, cost and so on.

But it is the process which is most interesting. Imagine describing the process and encouraging a client to follow it. A financial adviser I follow in the UK recently wrote about the process, and it is exactly what they do.

They show the client how to check their equivalent of our register of financial service providers. They take them through the services and engagement information. They really try to insist that the client check references, encouraging them to speak with existing clients about their services.

It speaks volumes to the client about the quality of the adviser. Nothing underlines competence and value more than an adviser that has many existing clients that are happy to spend ten minutes on the phone talking about the value they have got from the advice process.

Tags: financial advisers Russell Hutchinson