Are You Meeting Too Often With Some Clients?

Advisors often share with me that they think they are over-meeting with some of their clients. Doing so creates additional work for everyone on the team and may put an unnecessary burden on the client.

This is particularly true for long-time clients whose financial situation is in good order.

A simple way to designate how many times you should meet with each client is to start from scratch and create a “client-meeting frequency and random call” spreadsheet. (Download sample here.)

If you have segmented your clients, don’t feel it is necessary to meet with each client in a particular segment the same number of times during the year. The number of times you meet with any client should be individualized.

If you feel you could meet with a client fewer times during the year, but wish to remain in contact, use the random call section of the spreadsheet as a way to stay in touch.

Doing so reduces the burden of meeting prep and follow-up and opens up time on the calendar for everyone involved, including the client. We will talk more about random calls below.

Create the ‘client-meeting frequency and random call’ spreadsheet

1. Generate a complete list of current clients.
2. Next to each name, determine and then note how many appointments that client should receive.
3. Sprinkle in random calls for those clients with whom you want to have additional contact. Note the number of random calls you wish to make for each client on the list alongside the number of appointments. For some clients, the number of random calls may be zero.
4. Balance the meetings throughout the year, taking into account tax season, vacations and conferences for you. For clients, choose a convenient time of the year for them to meet with you.

5. You can schedule client meetings to coordinate with a client’s financial plan (or other deliverable) due date or insurance renewal date. If your client has seasonal ups and downs for work, try to meet with them during their “quiet time.” For example, my first career was in the fashion industry. You wouldn’t have much success trying to get me scheduled for a review meeting between October and January. During these months, I would be preparing for and working like crazy through the holiday season, retail’s busiest time of year, and then I would go right into inventory in January.

   If you have clients who are unresponsive to your requests to schedule a meeting, it might be that you are trying to reach them during their busy time of year.

   Here are two more examples: One advisor I know was in the produce business in his first career. Now that he is an advisor, not surprisingly, he has many clients who are in the produce business. There are extremely busy periods in the year when you don’t even try to talk to these people, let alone try to get them in for a meeting.

   Another advisor I know has several hunters as clients. He is well aware of the schedule for duck, deer and elk hunting and doesn’t dare try to schedule meetings with his hunting clients during hunting season.

6. When you begin filling out the spreadsheet, start with the clients whom you want to meet with the highest number of times.
7. Then use clients you meet with annually to balance out the months.
8. You will want to have some months lighter on appointments than others. I try to keep March and April lighter so I can field tax inquiries from clients and CPAs. I have an annual family trip in July, so I keep that month light as well. December is a good month to keep light. You want to enjoy the holiday season and you may have a client or two who needs help handling a year-end issue. Designating December a lighter appointment month allows you to handle last-minute, unexpected client service issues without throwing a wrench in your plans.
9. The goal is to chart out your months with an appropriate number of appointments so the workflow throughout the year remains balanced. You don’t want to end up with forty appointments in January and 10 in February (unless it is by design).
10. If you are stuck with where to begin, look at when you last met with a client to determine when in the year you should next meet. Here again, you have a bit of flexibility with annual clients to balance the months appropriately.
11. By going through this exercise, you may discover you are scheduled to conduct more service meetings than is humanly possible. If this is the case, you have several options.
    1. Go back and see if you can reduce the number of service appointments for any clients. Remember, you may be able to substitute a meeting with one or two random calls.
    2. Remove some clients from your practice. Be careful they are not “related” to a top client or are part of a Simple or other retirement plan you manage.
    3. Move some of the clients to another advisor on the team or add an advisor to the firm, assuming it makes good business sense.
    4. For those of you who work for a large firm, you may have the option of “turning in the client” to the corporate office.
    5. Transition the client to an advisor outside of your firm with whom you have a professional relationship—possibly an up-and-coming advisor who is less selective in who they work with.
    6. Increase fees for certain clients to make it worth your while to work harder.
    7. Decide certain clients don’t need a scheduled meeting each year. You, or someone on your team, can reach out by phone once or twice per year to remind the client you are here for them if they have any questions or concerns.
12. Once you have determined how many client service meetings you need to conduct each month, dedicate appointment slots on your model week that correspond to this number. For example, if you need to conduct eight appointments per week to satisfy your largest appointment month, you should have at least 10 or 11 appointment slots on your model week to accommodate eight appointments. This allows the person who schedules appointments for you some flexibility in finding appointment slots that will work with your client’s schedule.
13. Remember, we are only talking about client service meetings here. When considering the number of client service appointments you plan to do during the year, also consider how many prospect meetings and new client onboarding meetings you will conduct in a year. This will help you decide how many total appointment slots should be allocated on the model week.

Random calls

1. For family members and friends with whom you speak regularly, it doesn’t make sense to add additional calls to the random call section. In fact, it would be awkward to make a random call to someone you speak with regularly.
2. The random calls should not fall into the client’s birthday month, as you might make the call and then not acknowledge the client just had, or is about to have, a birthday.
3. However, you may want to schedule your top clients to meet with you during their birthday month so you can take them to lunch before or after their meeting, have a bouquet of flowers for them to take home, or have cupcakes with candles so the whole team can participate in the celebration. This strategy gets tricky if you have a husband and wife whose birthdays are not six months apart (for semi-annual clients). How do you celebrate one birthday without recognizing the other? You don’t.
4. Random calls do not need to be made by the advisor. If there is a team member who has a good relationship with your clients, he or she can make some of the random calls too.
5. You should have a dedicated time slot on your model week to make random calls. If a team member will be making random calls, they should have time blocked off on their model week as well.

Template for a random call

A random call might sound something like this:

Hi Jane. This is Teresa. I was on my way to the office this morning and you popped into my head and put a smile on my face. Instead of letting the thought go, I decided to give you a call to let you know I was thinking about you and hope you are well. No need to call back. Everything is fine. Hope my message puts a smile on your face too. Take care.

Obviously, you will have to change up the message so as not to repeat yourself call after call, year after year, to any one client, but I suspect you can come up with a brief, possibly topical message for your random call. For example, Covid-19 is an appropriate topic for a random call: “Just a check-in to see how folks are doing…”

The random call is something that is scheduled for you (on your model week) but is a surprise for the recipient.

And note, it is a random call, not a random email. I encourage you to rarely substitute an email for a call.

From spreadsheet to CRM

You can choose to keep the information on the spreadsheet and continue to manage client relationships here, or once you feel the spreadsheet is in good order, you can transfer the information into your client relationship management (CRM) system.

It is best to initially develop the schedule of meetings and calls on the spreadsheet as it is valuable to be able to see the whole picture (year) at once.

Whether the list remains on the spreadsheet or is added to your CRM, the person in charge of scheduling meetings, or reaching out to clients to ask them to go online and schedule their own meeting, has a starting place to keep the calendar filled.

What additional information does your client service person need?

Knowing who should be met with or called in which month is a great starting place for your client service person. However, additional information is required for them to do the best job possible. Here’s some additional information that will be helpful for your client service person to know when he or she begins contacting clients to schedule their service meeting.

• Does the advisor need more time than normal for this appointment in order to cover a complex issue, go over a financial plan or for some other reason?
• Will the advisor be driving to the client’s home, office, or another professional’s office (CPA, attorney) for this meeting? How much drive time to and from that location do I need to consider? Am I able to schedule this meeting outside of high-traffic times?
• Can this appointment be handled by phone or virtually instead of face to face? Should I offer this up as an alternative to a face-to-face meeting or does the advisor need to conduct this meeting in person?
• Is this the client’s birthday month? Does the advisor want to take the client to lunch before or after the meeting? Should I schedule a late-day meeting so the advisor and client can go to dinner after the meeting?

While the client service person is gathering this information from you, let them know if there is information you need from the client in advance of their meeting. When they are working with the client to get them on the calendar, they can provide a friendly reminder about the information you need.

Annual audit

Even after you have completed the spreadsheet, there is more work to be done. On an annual basis, you should review the information to determine if changes should be made.

Did a client lose a spouse and you feel it would be important to meet with the surviving spouse more often for the next year or two until they get their feet back under them? Alternatively, you may decide to keep the number of meetings the same but add a bi-monthly random call to check in and say hello.

You will also want to be sure all new clients have been added to the list. You don’t want anyone to slip through the cracks.

Although what I have described here is quite a bit of work, this is the heart of your client service model. As the saying goes, “It is easier and less expensive to keep an existing client than it is to go out and get a new client.”

In fact, according to the Econsultancy/Responsys Cross-Channel Marketing Report, adding a new client costs five times as much as keeping an existing one (see p. 68 of Company of One by Paul Jarvis). Be sure you are doing all you can to serve your existing clients. And if you have any questions about the process I have described here or you have great ideas to share, please send me an email.