Last Updated on February 23, 2021 by Connor Prendergast
Our journey has just begun. The glimpse of the future that wealth managers were exposed to in 2020 was merely a taste of what we can expect in the years to come. We’re living in a new normal, an unprecedented digital era. Is your firm equipped for that?
The digital realm is very different from the conferences and classrooms financial advisors have become accustomed to. Prospecting is no longer face-to-face. Deals are not closed with a handshake. Growth cannot be achieved without online marketing.
Clients still want financial services, but their needs have changed. Men and women around the world, shaken by a global pandemic, are looking for virtual engagement. The secret to seamless scalability in the digital world lies in the technology you use to interact with them.
Adjusting to “New” Client Behavior in 2021
Advisor Jason Park, a long-time Blueleaf customer, didn’t just survive the pandemic. He thrived during 2020. He has been able to add advisors to his firm using Blueleaf as his central digital client engagement platform.
“When I first came into this business, I had this idea that people could only get comfortable with you through in-person meetings,” Jason told us. “2020 taught me that you can make friends online and clients like virtual better.”
How does Jason’s firm scale? He leverages our weekly email and automated communication features to regularly engage with his clients. Other advisors saw how he was able to grow his practice and decided to jump on board. You can do this too.
“Even if you’re older and not savvy with technology, you’ve been emailing for a long time,” Jason says. “When you do anything repetitively like that, you get better at it. If you’re already emailing, you’re virtual. Zoom meetings just take it to the next level.”
Overcoming the Competitive Disadvantage of Digital Disorientation
One of the biggest concerns for firms at the beginning of the move toward digital presentation was privacy. How do you protect client information when so much data about all your clients is displayed on your advisor dashboard? Our answer was developing a “privacy mode” setting to preserve confidentiality.
You don’t have to worry about “flashing” clients with all of your internal information when you have Privacy Mode toggled to “on” within the Blueleaf Portal.
Think about doing a virtual meeting with clients where you walk them through their accounts, performance, and holdings in Blueleaf. With privacy mode, you don’t have to worry about exposing your entire Advisor Dashboard (see the image above) with the client. Instead, you simply toggle Privacy mode to “on”, which places your clients in a “waiting room” where they only see information you set while you pull you their account information in Blueleaf.
Place your clients in the waiting room, where you can choose and image and text that displays for your clients while you bring up their account information to present.
Blueleaf’s secure document vault enables secure document sharing with notifications. Clients can upload necessary tax documents and even allow other parties, like their CPA, to view their accounts. Anytime a client uploads a document, advisors receive an alert so they can verify they have all the information they need in real time. Advisors can also upload files, including meeting notes or investment policy statements. It’s seamless and secure, providing a cohesive experience for remote client service.
Check out a blog post we wrote:
Using Blueleaf’s Client Portal to Become Your Clients’ Favorite Video Conferencing Meeting
FAs on the Move are Looking for Digital Advisory Firms
Clients need digital engagement. Advisors on the move are looking for firms with the technology to provide that. We have a number of customers who have purchased Blueleaf solely to scale their advisor recruiting.
There’s more to it than just offering performance reporting and data aggregation through a client portal. Blueleaf has firm management tools that you can use to track individual advisor AUM and client activity, making practice management more seamless and efficient.
Most recruiting deals are structured with a client onboarding percentage and growth incentives. Blueleaf can show you when your advisors add clients and how much AUM they bring to the table.
Our dashboard enhances both monitoring and communication between firm management and FAs. It also makes it simpler to incorporate admins and assistants in your daily processes. Firms can add users without incurring additional costs from Blueleaf. We charge by the household, not the user.
The Allure of an Effective Prospecting Process
Let’s put this all together. Using Blueleaf fulfills the need that clients now have for virtual engagement. Our security and communications features help your firm overcome the digital disorientation of financial advisors. The Blueleaf advisor dashboard tracks FA activity.
The combination of all of these can be used to develop a prospecting process that will attract advisors who embrace the challenges of the digital age. That’s what you’re looking for. Virtual meetings and remote client service are the keys to scale in this new era.
Taking the Next Step with Remote-First Practice Management
With parts of the country reopening and a vaccine for Covid-19 coming soon, there is some hope that advisors will be able to do on-site meetings again in 2021. That’s good news for wealth management firms looking to get their office staff back to work. However, after experiencing the convenience of remote meetings many clients won’t want to leave their homes to visit a financial advisor.
All this means that your strategy will need to be a “both / and” approach. You’ll need to offer both in person and remote options for clients as well as your staff. We call that “Remote-First.” It’s the way Blueleaf has been operating for ten years.
Our team wrote a book on it. I consider it a collective effort because it took years of collaboration and problem solving to come up with an efficient remote-first business model. You can read the entire story and find a virtual blueprint for your practice here.
An Experience Your Clients Will Love.
Clients will love the service and simplicity you deliver with Blueleaf’s superior client experience.
