When clients don’t understand your value

Fifteen years ago, a client and I were cycling when he introduced me to one of his friends. He said, “Hi, this is Al Quennec.” The friend said, “Who is Al to you?” He said, “Oh, he’s my money guy.”

My heart fell right away because this client didn’t understand the breadth of the work and complex financial planning we had done for him in the previous five or 10 years.

I thought to myself How do I rectify that? How do I show him all the work that we’ve been doing for him across several different areas of financial planning?

Showing clients what you do

My mentor, MDRT Past President James E. Rogers, CLU, CFP, a 52-year MDRT member, once said to me, “It’s not enough to do a good job. You have to show them you’re doing a good job.”

I talked with a coach for financial advisors. Together we came up with this idea of a personal financial organizer as a way of documenting everything we’ve done and everything we’re going to do for our clients.

Jim always said to me, “Before you get the client, you have to let them smell the leather.” Building on that advice, we made sure that all the binders were made of leather. That’s just one way that a client can have a tactile hold on it, and they can open it up and see everything that we had been discussing. It’s a visual experience, and it’s a tactile experience, and it doesn’t get lost so easily as a computer file would. This binder is not just for our use; it’s for the client’s use.

The first page in the binder is the welcome letter, saying “Welcome to your PFO: Personal Financial Organizer.” Furthermore, it lets clients know it’s a resource for them as well as for those who may be acting as their power of attorney in case they are disabled or unable to communicate with their executors.

Updating plans

At the one-year anniversary of providing the PFO, we call clients and say, “It’s time to renew and refresh this binder.” It’s then that we start talking about the financial plan update report.

For my team, this is where it makes our lives so much easier.  We bring out the original financial plan and say, “These were your goals and objectives when we started working together. Has anything changed? Do you want to strike some off? Add some? Let’s put a check mark next to everything we’ve completed together. And I’ll tell you when we do the financial plan update next year, that item, though completed, will remain on the financial plan update report because it’s a mark.”

Every time we meet with the client in preparation for the meeting, we pull out the last financial plan update report, and in advance we know what our client’s concerns are.

I also like to think of this as a tool that makes the client want to work with me. Not because it’s an obligation but it’s something they want to do for themselves and their families.

Alain Quennec is a 19-year MDRT member. This was excerpted from his 2024 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation, “Create personal financial organizers to manage client relationships.”