How do you strengthen as well as preserve your practice’s reputation, when your broker-dealer is having “issues”?
Everybody is having issues – virtually no one and no single firm escaped the financial tsunami that hit Wall Street in 2008. This is the year to re-build and re-affirm your relationships with clients, especially important if your broker-dealer seems to have more than its fair share of negative news.
Still, you can strengthen your relationship with clients by following these steps:
Make extra efforts to communicate with clients more intensively.
Call and meet with key clients. Explain how headlines on your firm do or do not affect your practice before clients ask. Communicate more than usual around investment needs and listen for concerns about the firm and respond accordingly.
Ensure that clients are focused on you as the investment expert, not on the firm’s strengths and weaknesses.
Make it clear to clients that you bring unique advisory skills to money management. Deliver the message that you are the maestro and the firm is your orchestra by emphasizing how you crafted a customized investment program utilizing “best of breed’ products and services. You can change the composition of the orchestra – products and investments – at will. Clients will then understand that you are in charge of tempo and arrangements. The firm is secondary.
Clients are more likely to remain loyal to you, no matter where you work, if they have faith in your judgment and your loyalty to them. You can deepen that sense by candidly explaining to them why you’ve chosen one product as opposed to another and by pointedly steering them away from firm offerings that you feel aren’t right.