Financial professionals who are looking to grow their businesses often concentrate their efforts on acquiring new clients. However, there’s another, more efficient way that financial professionals can expand their book of business and provide a better client experience: by offering financial planning to their existing clients. Sometimes your best “new clients” are your existing clients!

Or, you can expand your planning services with existing planning clients. While doing planning for non-planning clients is relevant, what if you’re already doing “some planning” with your clients? It’s time to get more holistic and address all their needs – not just retirement planning and investment management. There’s good research out there that shows many advisors aren’t addressing things like estate planning, protection (insurance), cash flow, and taxes. Create a financial planning business plan to start expanding into adjacent areas for new revenue.

We’ve identified three key strategies that you can use to find new revenue opportunities and expand your existing client relationships to include more financial planning.

Identify Potential Investment Opportunities

One of the simplest places to start is by reviewing your investment management clients’ assets. When you have assets under management, you know what assets the clients have with you. But where are the rest of their held away assets? Target the clients who could have money in motion and identify competitive opportunities among their held-away assets. One important thing to note is that your ability to uncover these opportunities is only as good as the data you have – garbage in, garbage out. Your fintech needs to align with your objectives so you can effectively capture this type of information.

Ask yourself questions like these: Do you have a certain strategic advantage over another competitor? Has there been turnover in a local advisory office where you could gather assets? Is there highly appreciated stock or a stock in the news inside your clients’ portfolios? Have they switched jobs and have other unaccounted for retirement accounts?

Once you have identified the clients with the most opportunity, schedule an investment review to discuss your findings and demonstrate the value you can bring to your clients. Through this review, you can expand your business relationship by bringing more assets under your management and uncovering additional needs that require financial planning or other solutions.

Take a Holistic Approach

Holistic planning is top of mind for many clients, so look beyond investment management if you want to find new opportunities for revenue in your client base. Besides investment management and retirement planning, clients may be looking for services such as business planning, insurance planning, estate planning, cash flow and budgeting, and charitable planning. If there are gaps in your service offering, you can turn them into opportunities to expand your service list and better serve your clients.

If you are looking to work with your clients more holistically but don’t know where to start, there are several approaches you could take to identify which clients are the best leads to start with. You could start by discussing estate planning with your highest net worth clients. Another approach could be to look at your clients’ liabilities held away to see who may benefit from a conversation about refinancing or consolidating their liabilities.

As you begin to expand your service offering, consider creating a service calendar that will outline which services you will provide to your planning clients and when. Along with ensuring that you stay organized, a service calendar will help you effectively present them to your prospective planning clients and show them the value that you can provide beyond investment management.

Introduce Estate Planning

Individuals of all means can benefit from having an estate plan in place, which makes estate planning one possible starting point for expanding your services and boosting your revenue. Estate planning can be an uncomfortable topic for advisors and clients alike, but there are common triggers that can cause your clients to realize that they need to address their legacy.

The most prominent triggers are major life events, such as a new child or grandchild, marriage or divorce, or when their children become adults. Others include changes in health, disability, or death of a spouse, guardian, executor, or trustee. Lastly, others are more financial in nature, such as increased value of investments or assets, changes in debt, major purchases, income or job changes, or even receipt of an inheritance.

The topic of estate planning may come up naturally in conversations with clients who have recently gone through these triggering events, but you can also build an estate planning review into your standard service offering. Setting up a client review schedule where an estate planning review is conducted every other year will help ensure that legacy planning conversations don’t fall through the cracks.

Grow Your Business with More Planning

Introducing financial planning to more clients is key to building a future-proof business, but it can feel like there just isn’t enough time in the day for you to do it. Fortunately, you can leverage your existing client relationships and the data you have to scale your financial planning efforts and deliver an unparalleled client experience.

Download our ebook From Portfolio Manager to Financial Planner: Using the Data You Have to Evolve Your Business and Client Relationships to learn how you can use key data points, technology, and repeatable workflows to introduce financial planning to your clients.

DISCLAIMER: The eMoney Advisor Blog is meant as an educational and informative resource for financial professionals and individuals alike. It is not meant to be, and should not be taken as financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Those seeking professional advice may do so by consulting with a professional advisor. eMoney Advisor will not be liable for any actions you may take based on the content of this blog.

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