Couples Therapy: Working With Widows

We experience a similar friction when those consultants team up to work with advisory firms that have both male and female owners. When that happens, we tell our consultants: "Of course you have differences. Your team was designed to have differences to better serve your clients. Get over yourselves, learn to work together and do what each of you does best." This usually works in our business, and we find that it works in most advisory businesses, too.

Focus your service model on working with both partners in a client couple. The TIAA-CREF survey found that 41% of couples did not include one spouse in the decision to hire a financial advisor; 44% assign one partner to handle their advisor relationship; and 60% entrusted one partner to make most of the financial decisions. Is it really any mystery why most widows leave the couple's advisor?

To keep those widows as clients, advisors need to change the nature of those relationships. Working in teams that relate to both partners helps, but firms need to do more: If you're going to work with couples, you have to insist upon working with both partners, equally.

Sure, some of the partners in client couples won't like it. But we believe owner-advisors need to stand firm on this point: Can you deliver professional-level financial planning without getting the total buy-in of both partners? Would that really prepare the surviving spouse to manage her financial affairs alone? Yes, insisting on having a real relationship with both partners might cost you a client or three, but we find that the stronger relationships you do form more than make up for any losses — in increased client trust, higher client retention rates, higher widow retention rates and much higher referral rates because, as it turns out, women tend to be better referral sources than their husbands.

Market your services to couples. Once you've gone to all the effort of creating advisory teams to work with couples, maximize your return on investment by attracting as many couples as possible. That means marketing directly to couples, just as you would to any other target client market.

The first step is delivering great service to all your client couples. The goal is to give every client couple the same experience every time. To do that, advisory firms need to create a client care process, which details what each member of the firm should do and say at every point of contact with client couples: when they initially contact the firm, during sales meetings, when onboarding them as new clients and during each phase of delivering client services. Every employee should know exactly what he or she is supposed to do at every step in the client process — and how they are supposed to do it. Everyone who interacts with a firm's client couples should be trained and supported to deliver the best service possible.

The second step is creating a consistent message, so that everyone in your firm can describe the firm's services for couples exactly the same way, time after time. A firm's message should be short enough that employees can remember it, but detailed enough to resonate with the firm's target clients. Some advisors resist making their message "niche specific" for fear of losing other types of clients. In our experience, not only does this undermine the foundation of a target clientele, but a properly described niche will actually increase prospect interest by focusing on a group that many people are a part of. "Couples" is a perfect example — it's a group that many people belong to, yet it's specific enough that prospective clients will feel that your firm works with people exactly like them.

We've found that including couples as one of an advisory firm's target markets (or even its only target market) can be a very successful strategy. But to reap those benefits, firm owners have to do more than just talk the talk; they have to walk the walk. That is, they have to create a firm or at least part of a firm that truly addresses the needs of both client partners. Equally important, they have to build a staff that can make solid connections with both client partners.

— Read "Financial Advisors Get 'Horrible' Grade From Working Women" on ThinkAdvisor.