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INPractice for May: Branding your practice to include retirement
Week 1: Define your practice’s retirement market opportunity
Week 2: Create your retirement resource branding statement
Week 3: Identify your top five retirement services
Week 4: Create a communications follow-up that reinforces your brand
Capturing the assets of retiring baby boomers involves positioning yourself as a trusted adviser who is knowledgeable about retirement. You can do that by branding your practice so that you highlight your retirement expertise.
Last week:
After focusing on your top clients’ retirement needs, we discussed incorporating retirement into a succinct yet distinctive branding statement for your practice. We explained that a branding statement helps clients and prospects answer their Who, What, Why, When, Where, and How questions about your practice.
This week:
Identifying your top five retirement services
To create a memorable and repeatable story about your practice and retirement services, you must go beyond your branding statement. You need a story. You’ve got to be able to tell clients and prospects about all your services — including retirement — and explain the way you deliver those services.
Let’s start by identifying the top five retirement services you currently offer to your best clients. I’ll make up a list:
1. IRAs
2. Long-term-care insurance
3. Annual retirement income reviews
4. Referrals to estate planning attorneys
5. Annuities
Now ask yourself, do you really deliver these services? Do you have a written program that incorporates these products and services into your client meetings and communications? If you are not delivering these products and services to the degree you would like, what is preventing you from doing so?
Think about that while you look at how The Cornerstone Practice, one of our examples from last week, identified its top five retirement services and developed a longer, comprehensive story about its services.
The Cornerstone Practice branding statement:
Our team brings more 120 years’ combined financial services experience to help clients meet their needs for sound financial plans and a secure retirement. Affiliated with one of the largest securities firms in the country, we specialize in working with active and retired military personnel across the country.
Here’s how Cornerstone incorporated retirement into its expanded story:
To help provide a well-planned and enjoyable retirement, our clients can count on us to provide the following retirement services:
1. Retirement rollover planning
2. Estate planning partners
3. Retirement income reviews and tools
4. Health care plans and options
5. Lifestyle resources, including information and referrals about relocation, retirement employment and nutrition
If these are the retirement services you offer — or would like to offer — here’s how to follow through:
1. Retirement rollover planning – segment your top 40-50 clients into three categories:
• Retired: maximizing income, estate planning and medical expenses
• Pre-retirees (50–60): maximizing accumulations, retirement transition, rollovers
• Prime work years (30–50): coordinating college and retirement investment plans
Track their 401(k) and IRA assets, consolidate their holdings, and suggest allocation recommendations.
Even if clients don’t move all their retirement assets with you now, you will have identified their overall financial assets and added value. Be sure to provide semi-annual or annual reviews.
Hold IRA and 401 (k) rollover seminars and welcome clients to bring a friend. This is a great opportunity to generate referrals.
2. Tax and estate planning partners – Team with a respected local estate planning attorney, certified financial planner and accountant and ask them to speak at a top-client seminar or event to meet your best clients. The next step is to ask these experts to take part in individual client annual reviews (ask clients’ permission first). This will reinforce your value and allows the experts to follow up with clients for additional meetings. Also, this helps ensure your clients are updating important tax and estate documents including wills and trusts.
3. Retirement income reviews and tools – Leverage your firm’s software tools with clients and conduct regular reviews. If you don’t have a planning tool, consider the new Retirement Income Strategist from Morningstar, which focuses on the years immediately preceding retirement and the retirement period itself. It is a web-based tool that assists determining if a client’s money may last throughout retirement. Visit http://morningstar.com/ris for more details.
4. Health care plans and options – The two ways advisers can handle the very critical area of health care advice is to either have a specialist on staff or leverage outside resources. The challenge is keeping up with all the changes. One excellent outside resource is GOODCARE.com , which has information about long-term-care plans, constructing retirement health care budgets, and Medicare benefits. It’s a full-time resource that can act as your assistant.
5. Lifestyle resources, including information and referrals about relocation, retirement employment and nutrition – Moving into pre-retirement and retirement can be a challenge. Help your clients ease the transition into each phase with lifestyle, employment and nutrition resources. This could take the form of a combination of seminars and websites. With nutrition, for example, you could team with a local nutrition specialist and have seminars around healthy eating. Visit startmakingchoices.com for a healthy eating website.
Once you identify your top five retirement services and can explain their value to clients and prospects, you’ll be ready for the next step:
Week 4: Create a communications follow-up that reinforces your brand
Our final week will focus on taking action. We will create a communications follow-up plan for all the work we’ve done this month on branding.
Maureen Wilke has helped thousands of advisers increase the value of their businesses. The founder of Wilke Associates Inc. (www.connectedadvisor.com) in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Maureen has spent nearly two decades in executive positions in wealth management, sales and training. She has been associated with several highly regarded firms, including Nuveen Investments, and currently advises many product and advisory firms on issues of practice management and adviser productivity.
Read our weekly online columns:
MONDAY: IN Practice by Maureen Wilke
WEDNESDAY: OpINion Online by Evan Cooper
THURSDAY: IN Retirement
FRIDAY: Tech Bits by Davis. D. Janowski
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