Client Relationship & Service
Picture the scene: Waitstaff place platters of food for a family-style gathering in a restaurant’s private dining room. Advisors and their clients make toasts and share updates about their work, lives and families. Events like these can make clients feel like friends — and help financial professionals forge deeper bonds with their clients.
Your events schedule might largely be focused on year-end planning or midyear outlook seminars, but it’s also important to add a repertoire of events that enable you to attract and engage with a broader group of attendees. A robust and varied slate of events can help you stand out from the advisor crowd and burnish your image as a partner who understands client needs.
Picture the scene: Waitstaff place platters of food for a family-style gathering in a restaurant’s private dining room. Advisors and their clients make toasts and share updates about their work, lives and families. Events like these can make clients feel like friends — and help financial professionals forge deeper bonds with their clients.
Your events schedule might largely be focused on year-end planning or midyear outlook seminars, but it’s also important to add a repertoire of events that enable you to attract and engage with a broader group of attendees. A robust and varied slate of events can help you stand out from the advisor crowd and burnish your image as a partner who understands client needs.
Even as offices begin to reopen, virtual work is here to stay, so it’s important to think about how each medium could be leveraged to best connect with your audience and meet event goals. While a purely financial presentation might easily be conducted via webinar, client appreciation and recruitment-type gatherings might be better in person.
What is your goal?
Great events are made well before the actual day and demand a thoughtful approach. A good place for advisors to start when creating an event is to consider the challenges of their particular niches. If you have a lot of corporate executives, for instance, you may consider an event on why it could be important to diversify concentrated stock options from one firm.
Then, set out a goal. Do you want the event to serve as a client thank you (family reunion-style summer picnic or holiday party at the end of the year), a venue for networking, or a way to help you strategically target certain groups? For example, a family-friendly, in-person volunteer event could help you get to know clients’ spouses or partners.
Stuck for ideas? Want to move beyond the standard fare of market updates over country-club rubber chicken? Here’s what some enterprising advisors are doing to spice up client events and battle Zoom fatigue.
Getting creative in Cleveland
Advisors at Luma Wealth in Cleveland pride themselves on the creativity of their client events, according to Heather Ettinger, the lead advisor at Luma. Luma events focus on ways to empower women and bring the generations together in events that attract both clients and prospects. For example:
Focusing on wellness in Vegas
Brianne Soscia, at the Wealth Consulting Group in Las Vegas, brands herself as a “financial yogi” on her website and social media accounts, and often makes wellness a feature of events that also offer financial tips. Her events have included:
Fulfilling hoop dreams in Kansas
Ray Evans of Pegasus Capital Management in Kansas City hosts a monthly lunch-hour meeting that brings clients and prospects together. Given the frequency of these events, he and his team are always looking for creative ways to keep attendees coming back. To take advantage of the March Madness fever around the annual tournament, he brought together a roundtable of the area’s prominent sports journalists to hash out all things college basketball. “That event drew a big crowd, because people in Kansas City love college basketball,” Evans said. “We try to make some of it work, some of it fun.”
Read on for a few other ideas that might get your creative juices flowing:
3 stages to successful events
Successful events are about more than just the day itself. The preparation and post-event outreach are just as important, says consultant Dan Sondhelm. Here are a few things to think about before, during and after an event.
1. Pre-planning: For attendees, virtual events are as simple as clicking “join” on a Webex or Zoom call. Hosts should be aware that planning those require almost as much effort as an in-person event. Here are a few specific tips to help you plan both the event and how to stay connected afterwards:
2. The day of the event: Event scripts will vary as much as the events themselves, but it’s important to anchor them in a way that delivers real value for attendees. Here are a few basic tips and issues to consider that apply in most cases and should help keep your event on track:
3. Post-planning: Once everyone leaves — or signs off from a virtual event — there’s follow-up to do.
Still wondering if hosting events is worth it? Think of it this way: If you’re serious about growth, you can’t just manage money and wait for referrals. Events are a great way to get your expertise in front of the right people — and connections that can lead to new clients.
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