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What Future Clients Really Want
Advisors are falling victim to a number of inaccurate stereotypes about tomorrow ’ s clients . By Philip Palaveev
THEY SAY THERE ’ S NOTHING LIKE HEARING IT DIrectly from the horse ’ s mouth . And certainly when it comes to growth and marketing , there is nothing like hearing directly from consumers — the people who hire financial advisors . But we ’ re often coming up with wrong assumptions and ignoring important things by not listening to the broader audience of present , past and potential future clients . Instead , it appears to me , the conversations and data used by advisory firms often focus on the advisory firms themselves and best practices data gathered within the business community . If clients are ever involved , we tend to gather the opinions of a very biased sample — the people we ’ re working with now .
That approach has us working in an echo chamber and possibly taking away flawed insights , something that could hurt us if we ’ re using this information to change or build marketing strategies .
If you ’ re talking to people already around you — instead of talking to people you ’ d like to be around — that ’ s a bit like ask- ing other Americans what their favorite restaurants in Rome are . You might get some good information , but it would be better to ask Romans .
In the last two years , the Ensemble Practice has been surveying different kinds of people : These include those who may become clients of a financial advisor , not just those who already are . We created a sample of 1,000 people with incomes above $ 100,000 . We wanted to hear from those who work with an advisor , who have not yet worked with an advisor , or who had terminated one and never hired another .
Our data suggest there ’ s a rich opportunity for advisors to grow and reach more consumers . The growth , however , may require examining our generic assumptions : Our potential future clients respond better to more differentiated strategies , things that go beyond asking “ How much do you have in manageable assets ?”
Men And Women One of the first things we noticed in our data is a misconception about male and female clients . While men and women
28 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2023 WWW . FA-MAG . COM