Strategy Highlights
Week 30
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Strategy 6: Build Your Professional Network
Once your professional network is in place, you will be ready to address your affluent clients’ advanced planning needs. The setting for doing so is the professional network meeting. You have a single objective for these meetings: to identify, prioritize and document all opportunities for assisting each client in each advanced planning area.
Steps for the professional network meeting
- Open the meeting. Take a moment to welcome everyone to the meeting.
- Provide an overview of the wealth management process. Using your two-page overview of the wealth management process and formula, point out specifically where you are in the process and where you need their help. Ask for any clarifying questions.
- Review how the professional network operates. Provide a brief overview of the network model, with you the wealth manager as the general manager of a team of independent professionals. Then describe how the meetings will run, how you will capture the recommendations through mind mapping and how often the network will meet.
- Follow up on open issues from previous cases. If there are any open items on client cases that were discussed at previous meetings, follow up on them now. Keep this brief and high level.
- Present the first case. Take five minutes to present the first client’s Total Client Profile.
- Facilitate brainstorming on the case. Using a flip chart, move around the room to gather all ideas on helping the client in each of the four areas of advanced planning. Once you have gathered all ideas, determine which actions should be taken first in order to make the greatest possible positive impact on achieving the client’s key objectives while ensuring your profitability.
Repeat Steps 5 and 6 until all client cases have been covered.
- Describe the next steps. Explain how you will use mind mapping to document the ideas that were generated to create an advanced plan for each client. You will then present each client with his or her advanced plan at your next Regular Progress Meeting. From there, you can expect the client to move forward on some or all recommendations.
- Close the meeting. Sincerely and enthusiastically thank the professionals for their involvement in your network.