Lesson 1 | Why Bringing Collaboration to Existing Clients is so Critical (7:09 minutes)
Why it's so critical to introduce collaboration to your existing client relationships
Number one, the thing that I like to talk to all of the advisors that I work with about, as a foundational concept, is that when you think about your best client relationships, your best client relationships are at least one other advisor, if not, I would say, a number other advisors' best prospect. Your best clients are being prospected by other advisors all the time, and that creates potential challenges in your relationship. Foundationally, if you're not bringing new things and concepts and ideas and value over all to your best client relationships, you can bet that somebody else is. The risk that you run if somebody else brings a concept idea into your relationship, your best client relationships, is that as soon as they get in and they start working with that client, you run the risk and the fact that they may ultimately start bringing other advisors to the table and creating their team.
You've got to make sure that you're always thinking about, especially your best client relationships, "What am I bringing to them? What am I bringing in the way of value, and how am I communicating that?" Collaboration is absolutely one of those things that you can do to be able to bring that unique value to those client relationships before somebody else does.
The other thing is, is that this is an opportunity for you to be able to celebrate accomplishments for to date, things that you have accomplished for them, hurdles you've helped them get over, things that you've helped them accomplish, opportunities that you've helped them capture, and this is a great opportunity for you to be able to celebrate that. You know, the thing that we often talk about is that clients will remember what we did for them last, and sometimes that could be good and sometimes that could be bad. This is an opportunity for you to be able to go back and take them for a walk down memory lane, and talk about all the great things you've done and the accomplishments that you've done together in this relationship. That's a whole other reason, is you want to be in front of these best client relationships to bring them back to the wins and the exciting times, and the things that you've accomplished in that relationship over time.
It's also an opportunity to take results to the next level. You've done a certain level of planning. You've put a certain number of things in place, but things have kind of halted, and that's left some gaps. Or maybe potentially because of tax law changes, or other changes that have occurred in the environment around us, and the world around us, there's now opportunities to take things to the next level. I think that's a really powerful way to be bringing new ideas. When we think about this whole concept of collaboration, collaboration is absolutely a way to bring things to the next level, a way to bring results to their next level, because the reality is, I talked about earlier in one of the prior segments about the fact that today our world ... Today the advisory world still works so much in siloed relationships, and that presents so many challenges for clients and so many missed opportunities from my perspective, because here's the beauty about collaboration.
If you have a bunch of bright minds sitting around that table, as we talked about in a prior segment, and you're in those advice seats and you're thinking about how to help the client achieve the things that they want to achieve, now that we've done proper discovery, and we're all working on the same set of vision and goals and opportunities that this client wants to achieve, and those advisors around that table are all working on that same set of facts and data and information, collaboratively, you can come up with a much better set of results and outcome for that client than any one of us can do individually. That's just the reality.
Clients oftentimes will begin to start to look at the fact of having all of these advisors coming together as an expense, potentially. But I will tell you that I have never in my 20 plus years of being in and around this business, both as an advisor and as a trainer to thousands of advisors, I've never seen a situation to date where a group of advisors came together to collaborate on the best interests of a client, and that outcome cost the client more harm than good, or was more expensive than the result that was achieved at the end of the day by those advisors coming together. I think that that is a false concept. It's a false perception, and I've never had a client say that to me, and people might be feeling that, because, let's face it. We don't like to get bills for things that we can't connect to value. Your compensation and the fees and things of that nature should be in direct proposition, or correlation to the value that you're delivering. But the key thing here is that by coming together in this collaborative unified front, all the advisors, you have a clear opportunity to take results to the next level. That's clearly a key reason to be able to bring this to your existing client relationships.
The last thing I'll just talk about here is that this is just simply something that you do to strengthen relationships. Some of these best client relationships of your, you might have been working with them for 15, 20, 25, maybe 30 years, in some instances, and so we want to find ways to get back in front of them. We're always looking for ... Advisors are always looking for how can I get back in front of them? What can I bring? What can I say? This is something to let them know that you're thinking about them. Collaboration is something that can take the work that you've done by yourself, or the other advisors siloed have done on behalf of that client, working collaboratively to a whole other level. This is an absolute opportunity for you to strengthen that relationship by bringing this value, by thinking about them, about the benefits of collaboration to the things that they're trying to achieve.
Again, these are the reasons why you go back to your existing client relationships, and each and every one of these that I've shared with you in this moment has amazing merit and strength, just to even bring one of those concepts for the reason why you're there. Remember that, and start having these conversations.