User Defined Milestones

Building and maintaining relationships is the key to your success. Each and every day, you and your team must repeatedly demonstrate to clients that you understand their situation and their needs. Every interaction you have with a client must reinforce the belief that they are in good hands.

That can be challenging. You're dealing with many clients. Your team may change over time. It's all too easy for something to slip through the crack that results in the erosion of a hard-earned relationship.

That's where Investment Gold can help. It gives you the ability to centralize every bit of information about a client that you've collected over the years in one place, namely the client's contact record, where it's easily shared by your entire team. And even more importantly, Investment Gold can monitor that information and automatically tell your team when it's time to take action on behalf of a client. That action might simply be a call to touch base. Or preparing for a financial plan review. Or responding appropriately to a pending milestone, such as a birthday. These types of activity are the cornerstone of your front office operation. And it's absolutely essential that they be automated.

Client nurturing is the subject of this issue of your High Performance Newsletter. More specifically, automatically nurturing a client as the anniversary of each of their life milestones approach each year. It's extremely simple to set up Investment Gold to remind your team to take appropriate, personalized action on behalf of clients as these milestone anniversaries approach. And the vast majority of our clients do so to one degree or another. Birthdays, wedding anniversaries and anniversaries as a client are at the top of the list. But for some of our clients, the list ends there. It shouldn't! There are MANY other milestones in your clients' lives that are important and more than worthy of automatic reminders every year. And all of those milestones can schedule automatic reminders for your team via Investment Gold's User Defined Milestones. Unlike birthdays and wedding anniversaries, User Defined Milestones are unique to a client and differ from one client to the next. They are the ultimate in personalized client nurturing. And they literally just take moments to set up. If you aren't using them yet, you should be. And you can have your first User Defined Milestones set up and working in the time it takes to enjoy your morning coffee.

The following are just a few great examples of User Defined Milestones.

Example #1 - A Pet's Birthday

Some of your clients (and particularly empty nesters) will have pets that play a prominent role in their lives. So why not nurture on their pet's birthday? This is a perfect example of a User Defined Milestone. So how would you leverage this important date? That depends on the client. Some clients would love it if you sent their pet a birthday card! Or if they happen to be one of your platinum accounts, even a gift would be appropriate (perhaps a chew toy for Rover?). But for other clients you'll want to be more subtle. You can simply ask Investment Gold to issue a heads-up (called an FYI) when Rover's birthday is approaching. That way, you can invent a reason to call the client just before Rover's big day and work the birthday into the conversation.

Example #2 - A Grandchild's Birthday

For those of your clients that are proud grandparents, this is another great example of a User Defined Milestone for all the same reasons as given in Example #1 above.

Example #3 - Business Success

Did your client just launch a business? Or perhaps take a business public? Yet another nice example of a User Defined Milestone. If that business turns out to be a big success or the IPO is a hit, that date will remain very special to the client for years. And a great opportunity for nurturing every year.

Example #4 - Winning the Lottery

If your client just won a lottery prize, not only do they have more money to invest, they have another life milestone to celebrate every year.

Example #5 - The Passing of a Family Member

Milestones aren't all necessarily happy occasions. Tragic events are in some ways even more appropriate to track via a User Defined Milestone. In scenario A, imagine that you just got off the phone with client Sue. She is normally a very upbeat and optimistic person. And yet she wasn't her usual bubbly self during the conversation, she was quiet and seemingly in low spirits. You are mystified as to the cause. In scenario B, imagine that you are about to call Sue. As part of your prep for the call, in Sue's Pending tab you notice the Nurturing Engine is reminding you that Sue's husband passed away exactly two years ago. Now you're vastly better equipped to deal with this phone call as you see fit. And Sue will notice and appreciate the very personal level of care.

The Next Step

Are those examples enough to get you excited about User Defined Milestones? If so, the next step is the how-to aspect. As already mentioned, User Defined Milestones are much simpler to use than you may think. First, you must turn on User Defined Milestone nurturing in the Nurturing Engine, that will take at most 5 minutes. And then simply create your first User Defined Milestone for a client. That will take less than a minute. And last forever.

To watch a 3 minute video that clearly shows how to set up your Nurturing Engine to automatically schedule reminders related to User Defined Milestones, simply click here.

And to watch a 10 minute video that walks you through creating a number of different examples of User Defined Milestones, click here.

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.