Enjoy the current installment of “weekend reading for financial planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with a reminder that while most regulatory attention has been focused on the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, the Treasury’s FinCEN group is actively working on a new set of anti-money-launching (AML) rules that could impose new compliance burdens on RIAs (akin to what broker-dealers and banks already have to deal with for AML compliance). And in the DoL fiduciary news itself, the buzz this week is that with a potential 60-day delay on the table, asset managers have been slowing their development efforts on the new T-share class, at least until the dust clears.
From there, we have a number of articles this week about marketing and business development for financial advisors, including: how to think differently about crafting a (more unique) value proposition for clients; a structured process for trying to create and articulate your value proposition; some new research on why clients leave advisors (and how to start conducting exit interviews to understand for yourself why your ex-clients left, and what you might need to change); and an interesting article about whether in the world of digital marketing, it’s better to stop thinking of potential new clients as “prospects” to sell at all, and instead think of them as an “audience” to engage instead.
We also have several articles specifically on how to create better engagement with clients and prospects, from how to create a “client persona” in your marketing to further refine your messaging and improve engagement with prospects, to the latest research about how people have different engagement styles, and the importance of adapting your own communication to match the client’s style, and why it’s so crucial to not just answer a prospect’s questions but ask them questions and get them talking in a prospect meeting (as it better engages them and leads to deeper rapport).
We wrap up with three interesting articles that challenge conventional thinking in the industry: the first is an analysis by Wade Pfau, building on a prior article from this blog, about how the DALBAR behavior gap study is actually fundamentally flawed in the way it compares investor to market returns over 20-year time periods (as DALBAR compares investors to the returns of the market invested with a lump-sum all at once, even though most people didn’t have all their wealth to invest 20 years ago); the second raises the question of whether the whole “passive revolution” is overstated, and whether the phenomenon is simply that investors (and advisors) are no longer stock-pickers and instead are “asset pickers” (for which index funds and ETFs are simply convenient active building blocks); and the last raises the question of whether, as robo-advisors continue to evolve, if eventually financial planning will be given away for free by robo-advisors… or whether the ongoing lead generation, engagement, and self-onboarding tools of financial planning software means eventually it will automate itself to the point that it doesn’t need a financial advisor anyway (or at least, that the advisor has to provide a value proposition above and beyond just the software analysis itself!).
Enjoy the “light” reading!
source https://www.kitces.com/blog/weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-mar-11-12/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=weekend-reading-for-financial-planners-mar-11-12
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