(Replay) One Simple Rule for More Reliable Client Follow Up

Nick [00:00:00] building trust is quite simply just doing the things that you say you're gonna do. And so be bold. Hold your own standard, share those things and follow through. It's a great way of doing it, and everyone feels good knowing what's coming up.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the seven Figure Advisor Podcast,

Speaker 3 the show for financial advisors ready to scale their business to seven figures and beyond. Each week you'll get proven growth strategies, leadership insights, and best practices. From someone that's helped countless advisors break past the million dollar milestone.

Speaker 2 Here's your host, Nick Davies.

Speaker Something that I deal with every week, every day really for advisors and teams of advisors is consistency with the standards of the business. what I mean like baseline driving revenue, the input I'm talking about. [00:01:00] Reach outs to clients, follow up to prospects. I'm talking about, making sure I've got enough meetings on the books.

Speaker am I following through with, once I've got the first meeting on the book, does the client get the, how does the client get the next follow up? As I hand out to my team, how do I know that? I think falling through the cracks and, When the client's on, when it's on the client, do they know that it's on the client?

Speaker And when does a team follow up? Do I have my closing calls? Like all of that process overall can be taken into account with a robust team, the right people, and a good CRMA good system. And. We wanna come back to the basics. We wanna go back to the basics. So I call this the no drop system. A way in which that we are able to understand conceptually that you can teach this through your team as to how we think about follow through.

Speaker Look, we wanna keep it really simple here, right? This is essentially all about. Think future date, right? So this no drop [00:02:00] system can be used anywhere across your team. For anyone in your team and different types of client sets or prospect sets. The idea is the point is here that everything's based on that future date.

Speaker So we know at any given point that there's gonna be a follow up as well. So you can have a version of this, which is just for your advisory clients, like, here's how I wanna package my advisory clients and focus on this year. I know we, how the relationship set up with them. Or it could be four. Onboarding clients.

Speaker It could be for, prospects that are coming in make to make sure we've got the right follow up to, to build trust and do the things we need to do. The concept is really simple, right? We're not gonna drop anything from this, and we're thinking about the future date is how we think about it. So.

Speaker Real simple step number one, you've gotta define, okay, what are we using this particular version for? Right? And this lives in Excel to start, or, and then we can move it after that to a preferred tracking system. Something more autonomous, perhaps in a CRM. But this point is really to understand and teach the reason why it's important to think through, like it's, this is about teaching the [00:03:00] mindset about the follow through, right?

Speaker Such that if there are any gaps in our system, we can make sure that we kind of bolster in there, right? Because we know we're not gonna. Rise to level our goals, we're gonna force the level of our systems. And so putting this in place, so this particular one, let's think about it from a, an advisory point of view as well.

Speaker So if with you an advisory clients, I would, you might even split those depending on the size of your firm between platinum A, B, C, or whatever number manufacturer is that you might be using. And so one particular example is from a client of mine this week had top 50 clients. He said, I want to give them, I wanna meet with them.

Speaker Four times a year. I wanna have 12 touches in the year, but I wanna meet with him four times a year. So there are four things that he actually has to do in terms of the means to follow through as well. And so every person goes on the spreadsheet that is in that list and we understand. Exactly what the requirement is for that.

Speaker Right? So, understanding your capacity is important as well. If you haven't done that upfront, and it might be that, look, any given one advisor really between 50 and 150 relationships is the [00:04:00] kinda maximum you can get to in terms of really being able to serve them at the highest level where you feel good about it.

Speaker I did have someone this week tell me that, wow, he. It's that the best meeting of the day was the one at the end of the day because that meeting didn't have a limit to it. So he's able to go where he needed to go with that client and continue to add value 'cause he didn't have to rush off, get to the next call as well.

Speaker So, understanding capacity is super important. using the spreadsheet and think about in the context, the most important part, as we talked about already, is the follow up date as well, so that the spreadsheet needs to understand. It needs to show rather, when was the last time we met with this client and prospect, in this case, client, advisor, client.

Speaker When are we planning to meet with them again and really understand what that looks like? And then part of that is that an example I gave? I wanna meet with these people four times. People also need to agree that makes sense with them. Right? Okay. So you are the expert. Hey, amazing client. I worked with you for decades.

Speaker you, I want. I wanna [00:05:00] make sure that we, I'm meeting you four times a year for X, Y, and Z reasons. So that's really clear about what that is. And that also goes in the spreadsheet. So whoever's using the spreadsheet, and it's not you high level advisor, right? It's gonna be someone else in your team.

Speaker That's the point of this. So you can just show up for these meetings. Has a clarity and understanding that this client is gonna meet this, you gonna meet this amount of times, but this is what they prefer, how they prefer it, and when, what the cycle looks like as well. And so real simply thinking about when's the next step?

Speaker So let's just say you have the first or last interaction with this client on the 15th of March and that, and they're an annual client, meaning that you've agreed that what you want to give them is this one to one meeting a year, and that's best for you and them right now. That's the biggest outcome that you're gonna get.

Speaker Then we wanna set it. We reach out in 10 months time, so whoever's running the spreadsheet can also have gonna say, okay, that next, the next follow up date. The next follow up date will be, mid-April of the following year. So it gives them two months wiggle room to get that booked and move in there.

Speaker You could [00:06:00] also add in, when you meet with a client and say, look, they already know it's gonna happen. We're gonna put this placeholder on the calendar, or My team's gonna put this placeholder on calendar. They're also gonna reach out to you two months before. Why is this powerful? Why is it important?

Speaker Everyone knows where they are. Even if it's a year in advance, a client walks away. Even if you've got a good relationship already and you've been with 'em for a long time, they walk away thinking, oh. He promised me something, I trust that he's gonna do it. And guess what? When you do it, they say, oh, look like they did it.

Speaker And that builds even more trust as well. And building trust is quite simply just doing the things that you say you're gonna do. And so be bold. Hold your own standard, share those things and follow through. It's a great way of doing it, and everyone feels good knowing what's coming up. And, you feel you're free to add in the specific value for that client as well.

Speaker So the person that manages it should always be thinking about how do I actually use it on a day-to-day basis. It should always be, it should always, we should always be just [00:07:00] looking for that day, right? So if we have all these clients, and let's say we fast forward a year, it happens to be mid-January, then you filter for the mid-January and you might have like, one or five or 10 things to do that day because that's the date you set.

Speaker So the system itself gives you. gives you the date to work on as well. So again, the core idea here is rather than remembering follow up or using a system to using a CRM, which is which you absolutely can do to get down the line, we wanna understand the concept first of how we think about what the follow ups are.

Speaker Every time you meet with someone, here's the baseline. Every time you meet with someone, you're either gonna meet them again or you're never gonna meet 'em again. and in this context, if you're never gonna meet 'em again, like they shouldn't be anywhere near what we're looking about here, like the different part here perhaps will be to think about what, drip system.

Speaker They're on some sort of nurture sequence as well. But for the context here of like media fo follow ups with the clients that are all existing, or prospects that are ready to go, there's always gonna be a specific follow up that you're gonna do as well. And so we're always [00:08:00] making sure that when we're having that conversation about where the meeting that we're in right now, we always know when the next follow up is gonna be.

Speaker This system helps to underpin that overall. So everything has a future update date, and that's how we know the spreadsheet is up to date. This is the key point here that as we actually use this, on a day-to-day basis, we know whether it's up to date or not, because we're checking the future date.

Speaker If a client doesn't have, or a prospect doesn't have a future update date, we know that's out of date and it immediately becomes something that we gotta work on. And that way you're not jumping around and going, where was this person? How do I follow up? What does it look like? Alright, so.

Speaker What does the spreadsheet itself look like? Really simple version of what we just talked about. So in this particular example, you could even have like multiple in the same spreadsheet, in terms of types of clients relationships here. And for the example we're using, which is the advisory client, we're gonna just click advisory client.

Speaker And this example, we've got one in there. Last interaction with this client was [00:09:00] three 15. So next, inter next interaction, if it's an annual client, is gonna be three 15 the following year. So next reach out is set for. in 10 months time as well. So it just has the, client name, perhaps the relationship that you can use it.

Speaker Multiple, multiple different advisors can use the same, especially if you want, or you could create different instances. It's super customizable. Again, once you feel like this is really robust, it's absolutely CRMs that you can move this into. This is a baseline, so it might be appropriate for your, for where your business is now.

Speaker It might, your business might be, further along in maturity and. It could be something, that you're just not doing anymore. It's worth resetting it back. Maybe you've got new team members, but understanding this basic, version of it really will underpin the culture that you are building in your team to how we follow up and what that looks like overall and any.

Speaker And then, so what happens is in any given day, the person that's working the spreadsheet will just flick to today's date, and that's how they'll know what to do that date, who they can reach out to. And who they're valu adding value to on that particular day. So important, the no [00:10:00] drop system to avoid those moments when you're in the middle of the night and you're like, wake up, you're like, man, did I follow up with that person when you're in the shower, like trying to wash your hair and thinking, oh, what happened to that guy?

Speaker Well, you know that what happened to the Smiths that, I've been clients with 'em for 10 years. Like, when was the last time I met with him? Just knowing that certainty allows you that excellent extra level of conviction as a high level advisor to go into those meetings and deliver the highest value.

Speaker Now in is not having this gonna prevent you adding the value that you are as advisor. No. But it might down, might bring down your conviction a few percentage points nick_1_03-19-2026_092137: And so I, I believe if you're watching this, you're listening to this, you wanna have a, a high level business. You wanna hold your standards high. nick_1_03-19-2026_092137: You wanna be a seven figure advisor, advisor and beyond. You don't wanna compromise time with your family or working on your health, and you wanna have that efficient business to make sure the system support the person and advisor, and the company and your clients and your family in the way that you must have it..

Speaker 4 [00:11:00] Thanks for listening to today's episode. Hit the Follow button to be notified of new episodes and visit seven dash figure advisor.com for more resources and to connect directly with Nick. See you next time.