Let’s talk about the first 90 days of a client’s life in your business.
How important are those first days to the relationship? How important are they to future efficiency? How important are they to your long term success, and to the success of the client?
What’s your answer? I’ll give you mine.
I believe the first 90 days are the primer
They are first impression territory. Its the point at which that first seed of doubt, or the first shoot of advocacy, starts. Every moment from that first contact, one of two paths starts being walked down. The further along the path a client gets, the harder it becomes to reverse course.
One path leads to buyers remorse.
The other leads to endorsement and, critically, alignment with the way you work.
See, it’s not just about the impression. It’s also about the training.
Most clients don’t come armed with knowledge of how financial planning works. Once you’re done with delivering the plan, hopefully they’ll have understood the initial process, but what about the back end?
Do you teach them how to contact you, or let them lapse into the way they assume you want to communicate?
Do you show them where to get information, or mention it in passing and say no more?
Do you reinforce the things they may need to update you on, or wait until the Review to find out what’s happened without you knowing?
If you’re building an advisory business model that’s designed to scale, one of the things you need to define is how clients will and won’t engage. How you’ll communicate. When you’ll get things done. How to get help.
If you don’t, the challenge is people will work it out for themselves, usually multiple different ways.
Or they won’t, which may be even worse.
This is where the first 90 days is key.
Like teaching sports to kids, the earlier you start, the sooner you can embed the “how” of your service model to become an unconsciously understood habit.
You get to teach them how to love your business, without the data dump.
In those 90 days you have five themes you have to hit.
I’m going to give you three of them.
You’re going to INFORM.
You’re going to INVOLVE.
You’re going to PACE.
If you do INFORM right, you deliver exactly the information they need at the moment it’s relevant.
If you do INVOLVE well, you start the process of getting clients to react to requests for information and other small tasks that’ll make the process of working with them a hundred times easier.
If you PACE it out, you regularly communicate to clients where they are in the process and, ideally, manage expectations around achieving an outcome at the end of what is fundamentally a long-term game of being consistent over 10, 20, 30 years.
In other words, you wield influence by design.
You can manage this manually, but there’s a better way.
Within our program, we have a system for automating the first 90 day experience. It’s called The Warm Welcome.
It involves creating a sequence of value-add touchpoints, primed and ready to go in your workflow, enabled by an outbound email marketing tool, tested and proven to hit the right themes at the right time.
There are 22 touchpoint in ours, and a similar number in the version for our program members.
Some of the touchpoint are personal contact.
Some are physical things that arrive by post.
Some are invitations.
Some are emails; some with videos and even personalised audio messages.
If you can enable these for the first few days of your sequence, you start on the right track.
So, that’s the first 90 days. If that’s enough info for you to work it all out, go forth and design your sequence.
Want a next step?
Don’t hesitate.
