With the end of the year quickly approaching, now is an excellent time to start scheduling annual review meetings to position your clients for success in the coming year.
Today, we’ll look at how you can use eMoney as your centerpiece to prepare for meetings, drive impactful discussions during client reviews, and follow-up with actionable items.
Preparing for Annual Reviews
Before meeting with your client, you’ll want to confirm that their data is accurate and that you’re familiar with any financial updates they’ve provided since your last meeting. We suggest the following to prepare a comprehensive client review:
- Verify Client Connections and Facts
- Confirm the status of connections and ensure values are up to date. You can easily do this by navigating to Connections > Sort by User. Take note of any client actions that need to be completed, such as updating credentials.
- Go through each section of Basic Facts to verify that you’ve entered all necessary data. Take note within Observations and Next Steps if there are any pending tasks a client should complete prior to your upcoming meeting.
- Review Select Reports
- To prepare for client questions about their plan, familiarize yourself with their Cash Flow, Income Tax, Tax Event Ledger, and Plan Summary reports. This review will also enable you to proactively troubleshoot any errors you may find.
- Build Advanced Planning Scenarios
- Use Scenarios to add your plan recommendations that you can later illustrate with the interactive tools.
- Consider Client Portal Usage and Onboarding
- Click the globe icon to see when the client last logged into their Client Portal. If they aren’t actively engaged, consider your Onboarding Options. You can request that they go through our onboarding wizard again to verify information and update their financial goals.
- Coordinate with Clients
- Reach out via email to ask clients to update connection credentials, complete outstanding tasks, or complete the onboarding prompts upon login, if needed.
- Confirm how you’ll be hosting your annual review. If virtual, provide eMoney screen sharing, Zoom, or any other dial-in instructions.
Presenting in Annual Reviews
During client meetings, you’ll want to review their information, present your recommendations, and encourage engagement. We suggest the following:
- Review Their Basic Facts
- Take the time to verify the client information in Facts with them. Talk about any new updates that the client may have added since you last met.
- Check-in on the client’s financial goals and discuss how you can help alleviate any financial concerns. To start this conversation, go to Observations and Next Steps. If the client completed onboarding, you’ll find their responses, including what they hope to achieve and what keeps them up at night, here.
- Re-introduce the Client Portal
- If you noticed in your preparation that the client hasn’t logged onto the Client Portal or hasn’t completed onboarding, demonstrate the Client Portal benefits. Build out a sample client and walk through how you can personalize the Client Portal, view a full financial picture, and track spending and goals.
- Illustrate the Impact of Your Recommendations
- Navigate to the Decision Center. Show the client’s current financial situation first, and then use the advanced techniques to toggle on your recommendations. This tool will help clients visualize the impact of your recommendations in real time. You can use techniques to add on-the-spot suggestions made by clients. Also, you can view Monte Carlo from the Decision Center to see the plan’s probability of success.
- Collaborate on Next Steps
- Go back to Observations and Next Steps to add your notes from this meeting, and assign clear action items with due dates to both you and your client.
Follow-Up After Annual Reviews
Finally, you’ll want to provide a clear and comprehensive meeting summary and remind clients of any upcoming tasks. We suggest the following:
- Send Deliverables/Presentations
- Share the Decision Center presentation or create a customized presentation to summarize your meeting conversation. You can add these presentations directly to the client Vault to use as a reference point in the future, or download and send via email.
- Share Summarized Thoughts and Tasks. Copy and past any observations and next steps, and then send via email to keep actionable record.
