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Family Matters: How High Performing Advisors Engage the Families of Their Clients

May 30, 2019 5:29:53 PM / by Pat Spenner

baby-black-and-white-child-with-creditsAnother area we benchmarked in the State of Client Understanding study is how advisors engage the broader client family—spouses and adult children, in particular. 

Our benchmarking data show some stark differences between high performing advisors and the rest of the pack when it comes to family engagement.  Thankfully, one-sided client conversations that marginalize spouses or partners are becoming less common—most advisors recognize the importance of balancing their attention (a foundational building block in our client understanding model).

However, most fall short when it comes to working with adult children of clients and balancing the full family dynamic.  Here’s what we found.

To start, we sliced the data set by high, average and low performing advisors, as indicated by key outcome metrics (see the graphic below—the high performers are the green bars).

 

Screen Shot 2019-05-28 at 9.25.00 AM

We then studied the differences in how each of these segments engages client families.

For starters, high performing advisors right out of the gate spend more time getting to know the partner/spouse of the primary client.  They spend over 6 hours getting to know partners in Year One of a client relationship, compared to under 5 hours for average performers and under 4 hours for low performers.  At some level, just taking the extra time to go deeper with spouses and partners pays off.

Screen Shot 2019-05-28 at 9.26.58 AM

Similarly, we saw important differences in the extent to which high performers engage the broader family in a variety of aging and financial issues.  (in the graphic below, high performers are the green bar, average are blue and low performers are grey).

Screen Shot 2019-05-28 at 9.27.59 AM

High performers are much more likely to engage the family (not just the primary client) in conversations about legacy and wealth transfer, as well as aging.  We know from our qualitative research with advisors that these aging conversations focus on key transitions as clients age—their living situation, driving, long-term care, and so on.

 

A very small portion of advisors facilitate financial competence building in the adult children of their primary clients, but high performers are about twice as likely to do so.  And, high performers are more likely to try to detect cognitive decline in clients.  So, painting with a broad brush, high performers tend to facilitate discussions in important, emotionally-sensitive topics that affect the whole family’s financial life.

 

As we conducted best practice research behind the benchmarking, we came across a variety of tools that advisors can use to up their Family Dynamics game.  Among them, T. Rowe Price provides some very practical frameworks and exercises to do with the broader family.  Whealthcare provides tools to help advisors manage key transitions related to aging (e.g., living transitions, driving transitions).  The Family Dynamics resource center on the study web page has links to these and other advisor resources. 

 

Interested in seeing how you benchmark against your peers on Family Dynamics and 9 other areas of client understanding?  Take the 20 minute online survey, and we’ll send you a personalized benchmarking report

 

Take the US version of the Survey

Or

Take the Australia/New Zealand  version of the Survey

 

 

Topics: family dynamics

Pat Spenner

Written by Pat Spenner

Chief Marketing Officer and Global Head of Product at Capital Preferences

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