July 24, 2020
Wealth Management: How to run an effective client discovery process with Ayoa
Client discovery is arguably the most important part of the wealth management process for any financial planner – no matter their size, or the clients they’re working with. During the client discovery stage, you build trust with the client and establish what their goals are, enabling you to set expectations and put a plan in place to ensure you deliver them. So, how can you make this process more effective?
As any financial planner knows, wealth management has become an increasingly saturated market in recent years, with competition coming thick and fast, and in a range of shapes and sizes. This means that in order to stand heads and shoulders above your competition, it’s becoming increasingly important to provide great customer experiences to every client; ones that are engaging, built on a foundation of trust, and offer complete transparency. This ensures that everyone is on the same page in terms of what can be achieved from the get-go and that the client feels confident that you can help them reach their financial goals.
This begins with stage 1 of the 6 stage wealth management process, during the client discovery (or data gathering) stage – and often before you’ve even met for the first time. Though this stage will look different for every client you work with, a successful client discovery process requires you to do extensive research, ask the right questions, and use the right tools to display this information. This is where Mind Mapping can help you.
Why use Mind Mapping for client discovery?
Though it’s most commonly associated with brainstorming and creative thinking, Mind Mapping is a valuable tool for financial planning. When used for client discovery, Mind Maps can enable you to put the information in a clear and organized structure that’s easy for you and the client to understand, as well as help you to gather more valuable information about your client. This is because the visual nature of a Mind Map can boost our ability to think creatively, encouraging us to generate more ideas. Their interconnecting branches also mimic your brain’s natural thinking processes.
However, using Mind Mapping software, such as Ayoa, can take the client discovery process to the next level by not just making it quicker to collect and analyze the information you need, but by making the experience more collaborative for the client too. In Ayoa, you can easily share your Mind Maps with whoever you want, and give them read-only or editing access depending on your needs. With the option to add Comments to individual branches of your Mind Map, your client will feel involved at every step of the wealth management process as they can easily make suggestions and ask questions about specific points.
Additionally, by having everything displayed in the easy-to-process format of a Mind Map, the client can see everything you’ve completed so far and what you have planned. This reiterates your value as they can see the “shadow work” that you’re doing behind the scenes, helping them to put their complete trust in you.
Here’s how you can use Mind Mapping to ensure an effective client discovery meeting:
Before the client discovery meeting
If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to put in the work before you meet with the client. Remember, the client discovery session is only around 50 to 60 minutes long, and they have no obligation to proceed further!
Although the majority of your data gathering will be done during the actual meeting with the client, you should be conducting research beforehand to demonstrate your interest in them and your understanding of what their needs are most likely to be. During this stage, you need to be considering a range of factors, such as where they live, their education, work, family and financial history, and their personal interests. In terms of their company, you want to know their key challenges and focus, as well as gather information and statistics on their market.
Input the data you find into a Mind Map ready to run through with the client during your meeting. By choosing the Speed Mapping option in Ayoa, you can quickly add your information to your Mind Map, and its box-style branches will automatically adjust to accommodate this. This means you can focus solely on getting the information down as everything will stay tidy and organized, and will be easy to see at a glance. Don’t forget that you can also add Attachments, Comments, and Notes to the branches of your Mind Map to provide additional context.
During the meeting
During the client discovery meeting, you want to continue gathering information about the client, as well as establish their goals as this will ensure you can set realistic expectations about what you can achieve for them. You need to be asking them the right questions, and these need to be determined before the actual meeting takes place. Some great examples include:
- What was your first job?
- What is your first memory of money?
- What charitable causes do you donate to and why?
- What are the key values you grew up with and are still instilled in you today?
- What are your personal and professional goals?
- What are your financial concerns?
- How do you define success?
If there are any you can’t answer from your initial research, a great idea is to put them into your Mind Map so you can easily fill them out during the client discovery meeting. Presenting your client with this information (and any other data you’ve gathered about them) will demonstrate that you’re prepared to put the hard work in and that you understand the importance of knowing as much about the client as possible to ensure they get the most value.
If you’re having a virtual meeting rather than a physical one, you can use Ayoa’s Live Share feature (exclusive to our Ultimate Plan) to walk the client through your Mind Map alongside a video call, and they can see you make changes in real-time! By giving them access to the Mind Map, they can also implement their own edits directly to the map, vote on branches they think are important, or add their own Comments, Notes, Attachments, and more to ensure you’re both on the same page.
After the meeting
Communication shouldn’t slow down just because the client discovery stage is over. Let your client know that they can come to you with any questions or suggestions they have either by adding them directly to the relevant branch of the Mind Map or by starting a conversation through Ayoa’s instant messaging feature – Ayoa Chat. When someone sends you a direct message in Ayoa or adds an Attachment or Comment to one of the branches in your Mind Map, you will receive a notification, ensuring that nothing gets missed.
If your client is happy to move onto the next stages where you’ll finalize their goals and begin implementing the steps to help them achieve these, you can turn the branches of your Mind Map into tasks, ready to be managed in a dedicated Task Board. Like Mind Maps, you can add Attachments, Notes, and Comments to individual tasks, as well as set Start and Due Dates and track your progress with Progress Indicators – so your client is always kept in the loop of what has been done, and what is still yet to be implemented.
Ready to revolutionize your client discovery meetings and make each and every one a success? Find out more about how Mind Mapping can help wealth managers or sign up for your free Ayoa account to get started!