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Hanna Ogle. Credit: Ogle

Life Health > Running Your Business > Prospecting

CFP Instructor: Choose Your Clients Carefully

By Allison Bell

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What You Need to Know

  • Some clients focus on the upfront cost.
  • Others think about what will happen in the future.
  • Hanna Ogle prefers doing business with the second type.

One way to provide better retirement planning could be to work with clients who share your ideas about how retirement planning should work.

Hanna Ogle, an insurance and risk management faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin, talked about the value of a good advisor-client fit in a recent email interview.

“What’s important to the client?” Ogle asked. “What problem am I needing to solve for this client? It’s important to know as quickly as possible when developing a relationship with a new potential client.”

What It Means

In the short run, you might have to learn to love the clients you can get.

In the long run, Ogle maintains, you’ll likely achieve better results if you get along with a client, share compatible values and are good at solving the kinds of problems the client wants solved.

Hanna Ogle

Ogle has a bachelor’s degree from St. Edward’s University, and she holds the Certified Insurance Counselor and Certified Risk Manager professional designations.

She got her start in insurance in 1997, as a service and sales agent at Southwest Insurance Center in Austin, Texas. She spent a few months as a territory sales manager for Central Texas at Progressive, then moved to Watkins Insurance Group in Austin in 2005.

Today, she’s vice president of personal lines at Watkins.

She began serving as an instructor at the University of Texas Center for Professional Education in 2018. She teaches the Financial Planning Insurance and Risk Management Course for the university’s Certified Financial Planner program.

She’s also one of the authors of The Tools & Techniques of Insurance Planning and Risk Management, 5th Edition, a book that’s part of the NU Resource Center collection.

The Compliance Backdrop

New agents and advisors may feel as if they have little choice about what clients they serve, and that helping the widest possible range of clients with their finances is a noble thing to do.

But state lawmakers, federal regulators and state regulators have given the idea of basic client segmentation a boost.

For decades, state insurance regulators have been implementing “suitability” regulations that require agents and advisors to know enough about clients to offer them products that suit their needs.

In 2010, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority adopted FINRA Rule 2090. The rule requires financial professionals who are subject to FINRA oversight both to offer clients products that suit their needs and to comply with “Know Your Customer” requirements.

Know Your Customer regulations require financial professionals to verify clients’ identity, to prevent money laundering and other forms of wrongdoing.

Insurers have developed their own guidelines for screening clients.

Reinsurance Group of America, for example, published an article in 2019 that encourages insurance underwriters to look out for applicants who lie on applications, pay premiums that seem to exceed their financial resources or know too much about insurance claim procedures.

Accordia Life, an arm of Global Atlantic, is an example of an insurer that uses payment method requirements to try to avoid working with questionable customers. In an Agent Market Conduct and Compliance Guide, it notes that it does not accept premium payments made via cash, money orders or traveler’s checks.

Emily Whitish, the owner of High Five Design Co., a company that designs websites for therapists, counselors and coaches, recommends screening out people who are likely to be a poor fit by setting up a website that gives a clear description of what you do and don’t do, along with a contact form that shows whether prospects are likely to be a good fit.

Ogle’s Strategy

Ogle gave her process for sizing up personal lines customers as an example of the relationship fitting process.

When helping clients, “you’ve got to understand what’s important to them,” Ogle says. “Are they more scared of having a claim and finding out they don’t have enough coverage? Or are they more focused on the annual premium for an insurance solution and budget concerns?”

From Ogle’s perspective, one good test of fit is what happens when prices rise.

If the customer is more focused on the premium bill coming in today than having quality coverage in place, “I’m not sure we are a match,” Ogle says. “It’s better to know right up front if your goal as a financial planner and their goal line up.”

Hanna Ogle. Credit: Ogle

Allison Bell

Think_Allison

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