In this episode Jordan reorients advisors to consider data gathering as an inherently valuable process for prospects. He dives into 4 tips to make a first-time data gathering less intimidating and more approachable for clients. These tips include:
- Encouraging prospects to be less precise in the information they add
- Sending a short video explaining the process
- The “trojan horse” of data gathering
- Requiring less from people.
Transcript
Jordan Haines:
Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of elementality. I’m Jordan Haynes, financial vital specialist here at elements and your host for today’s show today. I’m going to talk about something that’s near and dear to all of your hearts being sarcastic, which is data gathering. You love it and you hate it.
We love it because data gathering is essential to get the information that we need in order to provide recommendations, a financial plan, you name it, but we despise it because it’s like pulling teeth. To try to get people to actually give us the information that we need. And over the last few years, I’ve gotten a lot of information myself from clients and prospects.
I’ve also helped thousands of advisors get information using elements. And one thing is clear, and this is the same for me as it is for everyone else. Most financial advisors view data gathering as a necessary evil. The thing that we have to do in order to get the information that we need to then provide value to people.
And it’s taken a long time for me to reorient myself to think of data gathering as a valuable process in and of itself, rather than just being a means to an end data gathering can be an end in and of itself. We can deliver a lot of value through a really positive data gathering experience. And so to start our conversation today, I just want it to be clear that data gathering can be valuable to prospects.
It can be valuable to clients if we frame it the right way and we do the right things. And we’ll talk about that a little bit before I get into data gathering and some tips and things that I find really helpful to make it feel a little less scary, a little less big for clients and prospects. I want to tell you what my process is right now that I follow.
And I alluded to this a little bit last week. Um, my prospecting process, this is where I’m primarily gathering information is in prospecting. My prospecting process right now looks something like this. Someone will schedule a consultation with me. I’ll do 30 minutes where I’ll go through and just try to understand their situation a little bit.
I try to make that as approachable, as easy to access as possible in that conversation. I’m usually qualifying them and trying to understand if they’re a good fit. Or if we’re a good fit in their life, and if we feel together, like this is something that could work for them, I will schedule another conversation.
I’m, I’m calling it my financial assessment. After the conversation I have with them in that initial consultation, I will send them an invite to download elements and add their information now in that process. That’s when they’re actually giving me information. There’s a few important things to note about this information.
I’m using elements primarily as my data gathering tool for that. The information that I’m asking for in elements is pretty basic and pretty simple. If you’re not using elements right now, um, and you want to see that data gathering process in, in action, just schedule a demo with our team and we’ll be happy to show that for you.
So that’s essentially what I go through. And then in that conversation, I will clean up the data initially, just kind of make sure I understand everything. We’ll go through their whole profile, make sure that they understand what they’re looking at. I’ll give them a few pointers. And then if they feel like it’s good.
And it’s valuable to them. We’ll move forward and ideally sign them up to be a new client. That is the context here. So that is how I am doing data gathering today. Many of you might be doing more in depth data gathering. So once people sign up to work with us, we will run a very complicated, not complicated, it’s the right word, very complex data gathering process where we want to get all of their business information because we work with dentists, all their personal information, tax information, insurance investment.
So it probably looks very similar to what you’re doing right now. But we have already set the stage by getting a few pieces of information. Now, during this time, I have found a few tips to make data gathering less scary. Because in my experience, as it is with many of you, data gathering is hard. Having people actually give us information is tough.
To add to it, asking people to give us information without ever having met me or having a trusting relationship with me. Is equally as hard, if not more difficult, there is a lot of things to overcome in order to get people to provide me information. Now I can make that process valuable to them, but I also know that if I get this information, we can do a full financial assessment and that’s going to be incredibly valuable to people.
So there are four things that I’ve identified over the last few years working with advisors that I found really helpful to make data gathering less scary, thereby making it easier for people to give us the information that we need. To provide value to them. So let’s go through this one by one. Number one, you need to be clear initially that precision is not needed upfront.
You don’t, you just need good enough information to get started. This is by far the most valuable or effective. Tip that I have for people starting out or using elements for the first time, or frankly, building a data gathering process from the ground up, whether you’re using it and prospecting or not, if this is the first time you are getting information from someone, you need to be clear and it needs to be upfront and in their face that you just need good enough information, not precision.
If you neglect to say this or to disclaim this out loud to your clients or prospects, they will most likely do too much and they’ll get overwhelmed. And they will shut down. I’ve had way too many clients that get maybe a quarter of the way through my data gathering process, feeling like they need to have it be very precise.
They’re logging into all of their accounts. They’re getting me to the sent values. They’re getting me interest rates. They’re getting me in returns. They’re getting me all of these things. These are things that I don’t need. A really good rule of thumb for me is when I’m doing data gathering with people, I try to keep the surface level.
So my instruction to them when it comes to precision and, and just getting good enough information is often, if you’re thinking that you need to go log into somewhere or download something in order to write that information in you’re doing too much, I want best guesses. I want big round numbers, and I just want you to put it out there.
I don’t want you to spend too much time on this because, because in the first conversation I have with you, we’re going to clean this up a little bit. Now, the only way that this works is if you run what I call an organic data gathering process, that’s to be clear that that’s different from what I refer to as a binary data gathering process.
Binary is often what many of us expect. When we go through like a CFP program or any sort of educational program where we have nothing yesterday and we have everything today. It’s like going up an elevator. You hit the second floor. All of a sudden you’re at the second floor. You’re good to go. Most advisors view the data gathering process that way.
It’s binary. It’s Hey, here’s a long list of a dozen different things that I need. I need everything. And before I can give you any value, I need everything in one place. That’s very binary. The way that I approach data gathering, especially in prospecting and while using elements is more organic. We get a little bit here.
Then we get a little bit more than we get a little bit more. The reason that that works and that I’ve shifted my mindset to be more organic in nature. It’s because most people are going to receive value from doing it that way, because this is probably the first time most of your prospects have ever gotten everything in one place, or maybe they have with another advisor or another financial professional in the past, and they have no idea what it means to them.
So helping them just slowly accumulate, slowly get that information into one place is going to be really helpful. That means that your first interaction with them, the first time you ask for data, you need to be very clear that you don’t need precision right now. That’s something that you’ll arrive at over time.
Good enough is your gold standard. That’s where you’re trying to get to that. My friends is tip number one, tip number two. And I found this one to be so effective. The tip is this. I want you to record and send a short video showing them what the process looks like and what a completed. Situation looks like, right?
So whether you’re using financial planning software or you’re using box or, or whatever it is, you’re storing information, show them what that thing looks like and what you’re going to do with that. Let me give you an example here. A few years ago, I had a client who passed away. Uh, this client had six children and a pretty big estate and they were splitting their estate evenly across these six kids.
This was back when I lived in Utah and we went and visited them and we sat down with the six kids and just. Talked about, you know, next steps just to kind of make sure that they’re on the same stage. We then offered at the end of it, again, we only work with dentists and most of these were not dentists.
Um, so we said, we’re happy to talk to you. We’re happy to give you any sort of pointers, help you find an advisor, whatever that is in our conversation. There was, um, one in particular, she was the youngest in the family who had a lot of questions. She kept asking a lot of things during the conversation.
And when I offered to do a financial assessment for anyone that that would like to, with this newfound, um, Inheritance that they received, she raised her hand. She said that she’d like to do that. Um, so she had a really busy schedule the rest of the week and I was going to be out of town. So we just said, Hey, I’ll connect with you in a few days.
And we’re going to schedule a time to kind of go through your information, but here is element. So I gave her a link to, uh, onboard to elements and provide some information. Well, she wouldn’t do anything. I kept following up with her and she kept not responding. And finally, one day, this was probably five, six days later, I called her.
And I said, we’ll call her Candace. I said, Candace, um, w it sounded like when we first talked, this was going to be a really valuable interaction for you. Why are, have you not filled out this information? And this is what she said. And I kid you not, this is exactly what she said. Um, she said, well, I was talking to my sister in law.
Um, on her husband’s side, talking to my sister in law and she said that if I gave away and she, this, um, keep in mind, she’d never worked with a financial advisor or investment guy ever before. And she said her sister in law told her that if she were to put in the value of her home in here, that I would take away the deed and steal her home from her.
And so she got really nervous and very fearful and decided she didn’t want to engage. And so she wouldn’t respond. And it took a call for me to say, are you fine? If I just send you a short video. Of what this process looks like that you’re going to go through and what I’m going to do with that information.
And so I went through it and I showed her all I need is an estimated balance. I don’t even want your address. You don’t need to put any, any personal identifiers. You can just put home and a value on here. And that’s good enough for me. Notice that I’m not getting personal information from you. Notice that I’m not doing this.
Notice that I’m not doing this. And then finally, here’s a completed. Profile here is what I’m going to do with that. I’m going to talk with you. I’m going to give you a few pointers and then it’s yours. I’m not going to do anything else beyond that. And that was all that she needed. This is a way that we increase certainty.
We increase and reduce anxiety because anxiety oftentimes is just the fear of the unknown and many times when we have a data gathering process, it’s just unknown what’s going to happen with that information. Are they going to take it from you or are they not right? So I think recording just a short video, no more than 60 seconds.
Here’s what you can expect. Here’s the questions that we’re going to ask. If you need anything, you can reach out to me. This is what we’re going to do with that. I find that to be a really effective blocker. And that’s something that I just have like a, a sample video that I share. It’s generic. It’s not, I don’t have personal identifiers in it.
And that I can just copy and paste. I had just have a link to my Google drive that I can just share that with whoever needs it. And that’s tip number two, tip number three to make data gathering less scary. This is probably one of my most favorite ways to do this. I call it the Trojan horse of data gathering.
Essentially what we’re going to do here is you’re going to mad annual, sorry, mix up my words, manually, add not mad, manually, add some basic information into a client’s profile or wherever you’re using to store this information. And then you’re going to create a short recording or a deliverable where you show them this place and their name on it.
Let me give you another story here. So at the original, the OG version of elements was within dentist advisors. And what we had was a series of spreadsheets and PDFs and Adobe InDesign and Salesforce. It was all kind of this conglomerate of information. And essentially what we would do is we create their elements profile.
We’d, we’d calculate all their scores based off of the information that we got from them. And then we would send every single month, a specific element report to them. So for example, January was liquid term month and February was. Savings rate month. And in those months, we would deliver them a specifically savings rate report about all of their savings information.
We’d give them their savings rate score and maybe a little bit of commentary around that. And so our team would reach out at the beginning of the month. And we’d say, Hey, we’re going to run this report this month. We want to deliver it to you. We just need a little bit of update. The last time we updated this was last year.
So give us your information, so on and so forth. And what we found, if I’m, if I’m honest, I think maybe 20 percent of people will actually responded to the first or the second, or even the third request for information. Most people didn’t give that to us, but we were also very clear that if we didn’t get information, we would produce a report anyway and send it to them.
And so then at the end of the month, we would send out these reports and we would get a ton of requests. And this actually made us so that we sent this out earlier so that we could update these, but we would get a ton of requests because when we would send that report with their name on it, with incorrect information, it was like this, um, instinct that we have as humans to correct the record.
We would see that and we’d say, well, that’s wrong. And so then they’d reach out and they’d respond and say, Oh, Hey, can you actually just rerun this? I did this, or I forgot to update it or whatever it was. And so this tip, this tip number three to make data gathering a little less scary. I call it the Trojan horse because essentially what we’re doing is we’re just making up things.
We’re putting it on there and we’re saying, this is an idea for what you can expect. And when we have their name on it, people tend to want to do this. Now, I only pull this out if it’s like latch last ditch effort. Ideally at this point, I’ve been very clear that I just need. I don’t need precise information.
I’ve also sent a short video showing them what this looks like. And then if that doesn’t work, and if I’m like the day before I will send them, uh, like a one page plan or a balance sheet or whatever that is. And I might throw in like a home value because I remember them talking about their home, or I might throw in a brokerage account cause I heard them talking about that and I’ll say, this is what I know about you so far.
Will you just come in here and clean things up for me and fill in the gaps? And nine times out of 10, they’ll do it. There’s something about seeing my name on an incomplete profile that I just. Need to adjust. That’s one of my favorite tips that we go through the final one. The fourth tip to make things less scary is going to be pretty obvious, pretty easy for most of you just consider limited data entry.
So if you have a long list of things that you need to do, get one of them, then maybe get two of them, maybe get three more, right? So just make it a little bit more digestible. If you know that this is going to be overwhelming to people, start with something that you know, that they, they know on the top of their mind.
Right. So if trying to figure out, so for me personally. When I work with a dentist, most dentists don’t know how much they actually make in a year that would require them to know how to interpret their P and L. It would require them to know what other sources of income they have from rental properties and whatever it is.
And so asking them right out of the gate what they make is kind of tough. But if I can coach them through that, it’s a lot more effective. So generally what I’ll do is I’ll ask them just for their balance sheet. We’ll start with just that assets and liabilities. Most of the dentists that I, that I work with can get that information for me.
You know, they get 90 percent of the way there and then I can coach them through the rest. If I give them one small win with that limited data entry, it keeps motivation high so that I can then ask more.
And this is the genius of the organic data gathering process. If I get a little bit now. Then I can get a little bit more later and I can get a little bit more. And if we deliver them these short wins and they can start to see everything in one place, well, then my friends, we have a process that’s actually valuable to clients.
So let’s go full circle back to the original part of this conversation today. Data gathering does not have to be a necessary evil. Especially in prospecting. In fact, if you run it the right way and you can keep it less scary, more approachable data gathering in and of itself can be incredibly valuable for most of the people that I do deal with and prospecting, I very rarely will give them any advice most of the time.
I’m just getting them organized and putting everything in one place. And I’m explaining what that means to them. We can spend other conversations going through that. Uh, we’ve done some episodes in the past about how to run a perfect 30 minute consultation, and maybe we need to revisit that again, but this are, these are kind of the best tips that I know of that are really helpful in helping people get started, helping you provide information for 📍 the first time.
If you have any questions. Please let me know. You can find me on LinkedIn at Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S got a CFP after my name, all that fun stuff, or you can email us, uh, email us at podcast at get elements. com. And with that, my friends, we’ll see you next week.