How do you demonstrate the true value of advice to (potential) clients in £’s not words?

Excited businessman working on his finances at home, overjoyed with great outlook.

By AdviceBridge

When it comes to delivering better outcomes for clients, financial advice can be game changing.

While this won’t be news to you, are you doing enough to make your (potential) clients aware of how much value financial advice can bring to their lives?

Putting a number on the value of financial advice

Research from Royal London revealed that taking professional advice offers more than just practical, financial benefits. As well as actively helping to improve their emotional and financial wellbeing, having a financial planner on side can make a material difference to someone’s wealth.

In fact, over the course of a decade, customers who had sought financial advice were, on average, £47,000 better off than those who had taken care of things themselves.

And people who had an ongoing relationship with their adviser were up to 50% better off than those who only received advice once.

But how do you demonstrate the value of financial advice to prospective clients you haven’t yet met, or are just reading through your website? And what about those you are having the very first conversation with? Read on to find out.

When do you disclose your fees?

According to research, only 5% of advice firms fully disclose their fees online (not many of you, but it’s useful to understand the pros and potential issues). Should you choose to cover fees on your website, full disclosure will help set you apart from the crowd. However, this bold move can also be detrimental and put some prospective clients off making an initial enquiry, which is why most don’t. But is there a better way?

Top three reasons to bite the bullet and share your fees online

1. Transparency and trust: Most advisers/planners tell their clients that they are transparent. Disclosing fees online proves this is true.

2. Avoiding surprises: Advisers/planners who disclose fees online tend to find that they end up having fewer fee-based conversations at the first meeting.

3. Enquiry selection: Many advisers/planners who disclose their fees online do so to deliberately deter inquiries from the wrong type of client.

If you are committed to sharing your fees online, make sure you avoid making these common mistakes:

  • Disclosing fees without explaining the service or benefits clients will get in return
  • Using compliance documents as a shortcut
  • Quoting broad ranges rather than specific amounts. For example: “We charge between £2,000 and £10,000 for a financial plan, depending on your individual circumstances.” By attempting to fudge the answer, some clients will anchor to the lower figure and end up disappointed when you quote more, while others will be put off by the higher figure and never get in touch
  • Hiding the fees page. If you’re going to have a fees page, give it prominence in the navigation menu and make it easy to find.

If you don’t wish to disclose your fees online, the next best time to do so is during your initial conversation, hopefully in a face-to-face meeting or video call.

However, if you are showing your fees, how are you demonstrating your value? Are you able to show prospective clients the value, specifically to their circumstances, in £’s not words?

Use the opportunity to demonstrate the value of financial advice

While the research from Royal London quoted above is a useful anecdote to use in conversation with prospective clients, it isn’t personal to them. So, you need to find ways to make it personal and answer the main two questions people want to know: “What’s in it for me?” and “How much is it going to cost?”

But what really drives that is the underlying driver of wanting to know when they can afford to retire and if they can sustain their desired lifestyle in retirement.

Show don’t tell, and bring a sense of immediacy to early conversations

The obvious answer is to show them all the answers using cashflow modelling tools.

By using actual figures that relate to your prospective client, you can demonstrate how financial planning can help them. You can use digital tools to help them visualise and understand their true financial situation now, and what it could be in the future.

Although most advice firms (90%) use cashflow modelling tools, many don’t use it for every client, citing time and cost as blocking reasons.

However, used correctly, this type of strong visual aid can bring a sense of immediacy to early conversations. It also allows a prospective client to engage more deeply in the conversation and invest emotionally in their financial plan.

It can also help to engender trust, which can sometimes be harder to achieve.

By showing prospective clients several different realistic scenarios for how their financial future could play out, and being brutally honest in all cases, cashflow modelling can help to strengthen your relationship, even at the preliminary stage.

But you can’t do that until a prospective client has already engaged with you, right? Wrong.

How AdviceBridge can help you demonstrate the value of advice in £’s

AdviceBridge provides a simple and easy way to demonstrate how financial advice would benefit your prospective clients, based on their individual circumstances and goals, by putting that into clear figures in under five minutes. Clients can even do this themselves…

The platform incorporates cashflow planning and scenario exploration in a quick and easy manner that can be used by you or your client. It uses intuitive steps so there’s little training or understanding needed, and the system carries out multiple computations to assess the best outcome for their particular circumstances.

Prospective clients can use AdviceBridge to help them understand their finances better before engaging your services. And existing clients can use the platform to help them reach financial decisions now and at retirement. Furthermore, the AdviceBridge platform can increase client engagement through its simple and meaningful interface.

The client-facing app allows your clients to interact with goals and scenarios 24/7 and you’ll get an instant alert telling you about their actions. This means that you will know when their circumstances may be changing and when they could benefit from additional support and advice.

Get in touch

The AdviceBridge platform is designed to save you time and help your clients feel more engaged in their financial future. To find out more, please get in touch. Email hello@advicebridge.com or call us on 020 3925 3850.