How Nitrogen Streamlines Your Financial Planning Process in 4 Simple Steps
Your financial planning process is the very core of what you do, as it serves as the foundation of your advisor-client relationship. While every advisor has their own process, when was the last time you took a step back and reviewed it with a fine-toothed comb? Ask yourself: Am I operating as efficiently as possible? What am I doing to consistently deliver exceptional value to my clients?
Whether you’re serving a few clients or several hundred, identifying opportunities to streamline is never a bad idea – especially if it means more time back in your day. Here are four steps you can take to ensure your planning process supports your growth goals and client concerns.
How to Streamline Financial Planning Process in 4 Simple Steps
Step #1: Build a Consistent Client Experience
One of the most critical components of scaling your firm effectively is to deliver a consistent client experience across the lifecycle of the advisor-client relationship. Better yet, you need to be able to repeat that consistent client experience with every single client (no matter how large your book of business becomes).
Being consistent is so important because it helps build trust with your clients, which also creates long-lasting loyalty. Additionally, consistency can help solidify your reputation and improve your brand recognition.
Every Second Counts
While we say “client experience,” the reality is that investors won’t wait until they become clients to start forming an opinion. In fact, Forbes reports that you have just seven seconds before your prospect starts forming an opinion about you and your business!
Prospects begin making up their minds about you from the very first interaction – a post on LinkedIn, an email newsletter, your website, a handshake at a networking event, etc. In a sense, the planning process really starts from the moment you introduce yourself to when you meet with a prospect for the first time, and it continues all the way until the relationship has concluded.
Step #2: Drive Up Conversion Rates with Personalized Proposals
The long-term success of your client relationship stems from your ability to “wow” prospects. Offering personalized proposals, for example, demonstrates your value and showcases your attention to detail. When you leverage a tech tool like Nitrogen’s proposal solution to do the heavy lifting, it gets even easier to drive growth without taking time away from current client tasks.
Nitrogen’s proposal solution replaces the old-school 40-page report (that few people will ever read) with an intuitive, tailored presentation that pinpoints the most pertinent information to each prospect.
Related: Click here to read the case study, “Equity Concepts has a 90% Close Rate Using Nitrogen”
Step #3: Make Retirement Planning Simple and Effective
In order to maintain a consistent client experience, you’ll want to find opportunities to connect the work you did during the proposal process with your ongoing engagement.
Nitrogen’s Retirement Maps, for example, pulls critical data points from the client profile already created during the prospecting process to instantly show their probability of success, time horizon, and risk capacity in retirement. The best part? The Maps act as a living document – growing and changing alongside your clients’ journeys.
Leveraging information like a client’s monthly savings, investment amount, retirement year, monthly withdrawal rate, and more can ensure the retirement planning process is both personalized and scalable, all while presenting clients with the most important information in an easy-to-understand format.
Related: How To Use Analytics to Win Clients
Step #4: Illustrate Success Quickly and Retain Clients
Retirement Maps offers impactful, real-time illustrations of retirement scenarios, which can help you and your clients stress test different decisions and their potential outcomes.
Having the ability to make decisions proactively and understand what’s coming down the line is a huge value add for those in or near retirement – as no one wants to feel unsure about their ability to live comfortably and enjoy financial independence to the fullest. That concern is relevant to many Americans, however. An AARP study found that the majority of individuals over the age of 50 worry they’ll outlive their retirement savings.
As an advisor, empowering your clients to feel confident and excited about retirement is key to long-term satisfaction, retention, and growth. Keeping your clients informed and confident about their financial plan is especially important during periods of market volatility which, when unaccounted for, have the potential to diminish a portfolio’s long-term potential.
With a tailored, proactive retirement plan in place, your clients can feel comfortable knowing they’re prepared to weather any storm.
Related: 6 Ways Financial Advisors Can Calm Clients During Market Volatility
Throughout the entire lifecycle of your advisor-client relationship, you’ll have opportunities to add value, bolster client confidence, and establish a strong foundation of trust. In doing so, you can more effectively secure long-lasting relationships, increase referrals, and ultimately leverage your brand and reputation to grow your firm.
However, the key to a truly streamlined planning process is to deliver a consistent client experience that makes every client feel seen and well cared for.
Simplify Your Financial Planning Process
Nitrogen’s planning tools can be used to help you deliver valuable, tailored information to clients and prospects in a visually appealing and impactful way. To learn more about how Nitrogen was built to streamline your financial planning process, book a demo today.