There are several reasons why adding fee planning into your practice is a smart business decision. Historically, insurance and investment professionals have provided many levels of advice for free. Financial advice and council is often needed to clarify a need and manage clients and their other advisors through implementation. Financial projections and comprehensive plans have been used to strengthen relationships and produce deliverables. Today, there are a growing number of insurance and investment professionals charging for their time and financial deliverables. Due to an increase in financial choices and access to information, prospects and clients are more often in need of advice and place more value on that than on the product or strategy eventually implemented.
WE ASKED SOME OF OUR CLIENTS WHY THEY CHARGE A FEE. HERE ARE THE TOP 10 REASONS:
1. Clients Are More Engaged
“When the client pays a Fee, it assures us a couple things. It assures they’re going to show up, ready for the appointment and it shows they’re going to be participatory in the process, just like they have been with their CPA and attorney.”
2. The Process Moves Faster
“You get documents almost immediately now because they have paid a fee. I used to wait months on it.”
3. It Weeds out the Tire Kickers and Time Wasters
“The beauty of fee-based planning is we are generally working with people that are serious about planning. They’re interested in our help…and I think they look at us differently as well, so for me, I think it’s just a better way of doing business because in a sense, we’re eliminating the tire-kickers.”
4. Avoids the Elephant in the Room
“What’s amazing to me is the difference in the confidence my clients have in my recommendations when we’ve gone through the fee-based process; how there have really been no objections to the specific product recommendations.”
5. Clients View Me Differently
“Once I adopted the fee-based planning mentality, clients didn’t see me as their insurance guy or the investment guy or pigeonhole me. They started introducing me as their advisor and some even say, most trusted advisor, which was a shift for them and for me because I started to see how much they trusted me with all aspects of their financial life, not just one.”
6. Implementation Increases
“Clients are actually more likely to take my advice with regards to insurance and investments and convert, as we call it, to an insurance or an investment client nearly 100% of the time, after charging a fee for planning.”
7. Heightened Quality of Referrals from Clients
“Clients feel more comfortable referring to their friends and family when they know there will be a fee charged instead of the advisor trying to sell them insurance or investments to make a buck.”
8. Heightened Quality of Referrals from COI’s
“Fee-based planning has allowed me to get referred to clients like business owners that may have no need for an insurance or investment product right now, but really need a trusted advisor.”
9. Compensation for Advice, Wisdom, Knowledge and Time
“I have a lot of knowledge capital to share, and unlike a lot of my colleagues in the marketplace, I wanted to be in a position to sell that, rather than just give it away.”
10. An Additional Stream of Income
“The fees we get paid are real dollars that offset some significant overhead costs in our business. In the past, we received no compensation for the successful plans we implemented.”
Planning isn’t a one-time conversation, it’s a recurring conversation, and therefore you can and should attach a revenue stream for the value you are delivering. We often hear the term balanced practice when referring to revenue drivers between insurance and investments. Adding consistent and growing fee revenue to your business takes balance to an entirely new level.
