Monday Morning Jumpstart with Dan Richards

10 minutes to drive your week

Topic for February 8, 2010: Rethinking the fundamentals of client communication

Listen to the interview

1. The vast majority of investors are working with the same advisors they were with a year ago.
2. What has changed is how clients are working with those advisors. Advisors will need to fundamentally rethink both the information they communicate and just as important how they communicate.

3. Until recently, most investors would respond to a recommendation with "If that's what you think, fine."

   Today, even if the same decision is ultimately reached, conversations are taking longer and investors are asking tougher questions – and often looking for back up via direct access to experts.

4. Many Canadians are also looking to collaborate on decision making – that's especially true of younger clients in their forties and fifties, but in fact can cut across all ages.

5. There's nothing new about more skeptical consumers – starting in the 1960s, the baby boom generation led the charge on questioning authority. You can see this in attitudes to just about every traditional institution – churches, Government, the media, big business.

   What's different today is how this skepticism has translated into changed behavior, with the internet playing a crucial role since becoming a mass vehicle fifteen years ago.

   It's also led to much tougher questions from consumers to everyone they deal with – for instance, doctors talk about patients coming in with pages of questions they've printed off the net.

6. It's not just the amount of evidence needed to back up recommendations that's changed – it's how Canadians want to receive that evidence.

   There's less appetite for reading generally. Historically, financial communication was paper based – articles, newsletters and lengthy reports – yet more and more investors are looking to online videos for information.

   What makes video so powerful is not just the fact that clients are more likely to watch a video than read an article – it's also the impact of the sight and sound that video bring.

7. Radio and television revolutionized advertising by introducing the emotional impact of sight and sound – video is doing the same in the online space. One result has been phenomenal growth in online videos – Cisco Systems predicts that by 2012, 90% of consumer internet traffic will consist of videos.
8. As we move into 2010, advisors need to take a hard look at every aspect of their business. As part of that, it's essential that advisors closely examine WHAT information they send to clients, the FREQUENCY with which they send it to them – and also HOW they communicate that information.