What Do Clients Want from a Financial Professional?

You may be well known for life insurance, established in providing retirement planning strategies or a professional in wealth management. But if you aren’t offering comprehensive financial strategies to your clients, you may be missing out on more than just additional revenue for your business.

When it comes to what clients want from a financial professional, the answer is often: as much as you can provide. While it may at first seem daunting to add or deepen areas of service within your business, the benefits of offering comprehensive financial services are hard to ignore.

A powerful opportunity to deepen client relationships

At Ameritas, we take pride in the enduring, trust-based client relationships our financial professionals have fostered with their clients. Adding additional services can strengthen those relationships even more.

“Providing comprehensive financial strategies benefits the clients, first and foremost,” explains Shannon Berry, vice president of advanced planning at Ameritas. “Without reviewing a client’s full financial picture, any transactional recommendation may have risk to it. A particular product may seem ideal for a client’s stated need, but if I’m looking at everything in their portfolio—life insurance, retirement plan, investment accounts—I can help ensure all their products fit together for long-term protection and growth potential.”

A holistic approach to financial services also allows you to adjust to change in a client’s life, whether that change is personal or market-driven. Because you manage your clients’ complete financial picture, you can help them pivot as needed. This is especially important in volatile financial markets and frequent regulatory changes. Read our blog about supporting clients during volatile markets for more tips on this topic. You’re also there for each new life stage your client experiences. Starting a new family or a new business, navigating retirement or facing the death of a loved one.

Adding new clients to your practice

Offering comprehensive financial services doesn’t only provide the potential to enhance the lives of your long-term clients. By adding new services, you’ll also be able to strengthen your value proposition for new clients who are looking for a “one-stop-solution” for all their financial needs. Now more than ever, clients are seeking out financial professionals who showcase a depth of knowledge in different financial domains. Such experience can help clarify a client’s decision-making process and help them feel that all their financial needs are being addressed.

Importantly, this approach may allow you to welcome clients into your practice no matter where they are on their financial journey—and then help position them on the path toward long-term success.

Taking advantage of cross-marketing opportunities

The additional opportunities provided by offering comprehensive financial services will help strengthen your business’s revenue potential. A diverse portfolio of financial services allows you to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities with life insurance, investment strategies and retirement planning, just to name a few.

Taking a comprehensive view also creates the opportunity to find suitable products for multiple client needs, such as living benefits that can help provide funds for a chronic illness. The conversation becomes about multiple ways to help clients reach their goals and protect their futures.

For example, while life insurance is a key protection component of any financial strategy, it often represents a single sale. Permanent life insurance works best when reviewed regularly to ensure the policy chosen still fits the client’s needs. In addition, ongoing financial planning can serve as a long-term revenue stream that may help you grow in all market conditions—and increase your value long-term.

These cross-marketing opportunities pay dividends in client loyalty as well. “What makes offering comprehensive financial services so appealing is that the conversation shifts,” says Shannon. “The client has incentive to grow with you, because you already have so many pieces in place. If you’re handling all elements of their plan, it will be difficult for an outside financial professional to be able to come in and take one piece away. That doesn’t make sense for most people. And they also become less concerned about a single element in their portfolio, or whether the market goes up and down in a particular quarter, because they’re looking at where they are in the plan overall.”

Are you preparing your clients for headwinds ahead?

Without a comprehensive financial strategy, it’s difficult for most financial professionals to recognize a potential estate tax issue or design effective tax strategies for an efficient retirement. A client may be charitably minded, but may not be making their contributions as efficiently as they might. Financial software can help demonstrate upcoming challenges and how proposed strategies or products can help. With the possible sunset of the Tax Cuts and Jobs act of 2017, it’s more important than ever to prepare clients for the future.

Where to get started

It can seem daunting to expand your business to offer additional services. Fortunately, Ameritas is dedicated to helping financial professionals overcome those challenges. Once licensed with affiliate Ameritas Advisory Services, LLC, financial professionals may be surprised to learn how much we have to offer to train and support your staff.

“Adding these financial services doesn’t mean that the financial professional is doing additional data entry or managing the details—not at all,” explains Shannon. “We help every day with training on the tools available to help build these services into your practice. Whether you start with existing staff or add interns, we can provide training and support for them every step of the way. There are even portals that allow the client to do some of their own data entry, which helps as well. Bottom line, we’ll ensure you have the systems and structure in place to confidently enter the market with these services—and a support system to help you succeed.”

That support team goes beyond the Ameritas home office, too.

“We’re lucky to have a number of financial professionals with Ameritas who are skilled at comprehensive financial planning with well-trained, caring teams and a truly personal engagement with their clients,” Shannon says. “These financial professionals are willing and eager to help others expand their practices in similar ways. It’s an extraordinary collegial atmosphere. They learn from each other and grow from each other—and they are incredibly welcoming to new financial professionals who want to learn the same. So for financial professionals who are interested, we have everything you need to get started.”

Ready to get started? Learn more about growing your financial practice with Ameritas and how we can help you succeed.

In approved states, life insurance is issued by Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. In New York, life insurance is issued by Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. of New York.

Securities offered through affiliate Ameritas Investment Company, LLC and investment advisory services offered through affiliated Ameritas Advisory Services, LLC.