I happened to hang out with a lot of financial advisors this week. At two different times I found myself in conversations where advisors were talking about their strategies for conducting annual review/planning meetings with clients whose investments they manage. I was struck by the contrast:
1. The first firm was genuinely interested in using the annual review/planning meeting as a chance to build their relationship with their client. We discussed how to make the meeting a relationship-building encounter, as opposed to a rote, obligatory, perfunctory process.
2. The second firm described their standard process for an annual meeting, in which an annual plan update is produced in such a way that the advisor can easily sell additional products to their client at the meeting.
All else being equal, which strategy, do you think, is more likely to generate the most revenue over time?