Video Meetings Just Changed Your World
Respected journalist, the publisher of Inside Information and the godfather of US Financial Planning, Bob Veres, wrote about four years ago that the biggest disruptor in financial services might just be video conferencing technology.
I’m still not sure if he was being facetious or incredibly insightful.
Pre-coronavirus, whenever the idea of holding video meetings with clients arose, most advisers were pretty closed-minded. It was only the younger (or young at heart) advisers who saw the obvious potential.
Now all advisers can see it. And it’s massive.
Both advisers and clients have been forced to get to grips with the technology.
And guess what?
Both parties are loving it.
Well ok, loving it might be a stretch, but both parties are seeing plenty of benefits.
I held one of my regular Office Hours calls yesterday on Zoom, for members of my Uncover Your Business Potential Online community. One adviser described holding a client video meeting, where in the past, he’d had to drive 3 hours each way.
It was the client who said, “When all of this is over, there’s no need for you to come to me again. This works great.”
I’m hearing similar stories left, right and centre.
But how does it change your world?
Think of your ideal clients; the ones that are nice, love your work and pay you the chunkiest fees.
Up until Coronavirus (assuming you had not embraced the video meeting), your potential pool for these clients was a 25-mile radius. I realise some advisers were happy to travel much further afield, but it’s not a scalable strategy.
Post Coronavirus, with your new-found love of the video meeting, you have the potential to work with ideal clients located anywhere in the UK.
Just think about what that does for your business
If you are prepared to niche and become known as one of the go-to advisers in that niche, people will work with you over a video call. You’ve learned some skills and broken down your own barriers to that approach and so have your potential target clients.
The evil spell previously cast over the video meeting has now been broken.
Hallelujah! (Sung with gusto)
5 or 6 years ago, I remember Michael Smith from Chamberlyns holding a first meeting with a new client via video. It went really well.
You see, in a first meeting, it’s all about the quality of the questions you ask. When you ask a great question, the client feels the emotion of their answer viscerally. You don’t have to be sitting across a table from someone to generate that response.
Michael Kitces, the US blogger and creator of Nerds Eye View, also wrote about the benefits of video meetings with existing clients. He said that a review meeting held via video is much shorter than a face-to-face meeting.
Why?
On a video call, once the main information has been covered, it’s often the client who’ll say, “Are we done?”. They’re ready to leave and get back to their day. That might happen naturally after 30 or 40 minutes.
However, when you’ve made the client drive an hour each way to see you, you can’t really wrap up the meeting in 30 minutes, can you? It needs to take an hour or so to make it seem worthwhile.
To Sum Up
If you can find ideal clients from across the UK and if you can eliminate or greatly reduce travel time for you and your clients, how much more productive could you be?
The world just changed.
Have you?
