Beacon Flash: Beyond Numbers: Using Communication to Drive Advisor/Client Relationships, a Conversation with Brendan Kenalty

Brendan Kenalty

Being an advisor in today’s environment is very challenging, right? I mean, it’s, there’s just pressure from everywhere, you know. And really, we’ve got to make it a bit easier for these folks or, you know, someone’s going to kind of give and you know why these guys are so swamped, or these folks are so swamped, you know, client commission, you just can’t, it can’t be the thing that gets neglected to your point about building trust. I mean, you’ve got to be present. You’ve got to be out there demonstrating your expertise, and that you’re on the job working hard for your clients. And, you know, I kind of always use the term low hanging fruit, but it feels like to me, the most simple thing my adviser can do for me, is be around.

Chip Kispert

Hi, Chip Kispert here. I am so excited. I have Branden Kenalty from ReachStack with me.

Brendan Kenalty

Thanks very much, Chip. Excited to be here. I love the podcast and appreciate the invite.

Chip Kispert

Well, you know, one of the things I’m super excited about is marketing, because I think when we look at firms, well firms are engaging with their customers, this is something that probably is we’re seeing the most dynamic change over in years. Right. And the expectations have changed so much over the years. Let’s just get right into it. Why is communication changing for advisors and wealth firms at this point?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I mean, I think it really starts with just the internet connected mobile phones really start right at it. And it’s changed communication expectations for all of us, including financial advisors. I mean, we’re accustomed now to having, you know, personalized news and information sent to us at all times of the day from anywhere, and we don’t just kind of expect it, we appreciate it. And we you know, we enjoy that right as just consumers. So you know, people are really worried about their money, and their visor plays an important role in their life. But surveys show that the average advisor only communicates with their clients three or four times a year, which is honestly kind of crazy in this day and age when you think about it. And there’s a belief that when I talk to people that clients don’t want to hear from their advisor, but the data saying that the opposite is actually true. 74% of clients say they would like more personalized communication from their advisor. So you know, it’s time to kind of pick it up. And it just, if you think about, you know, kind of the environment we live in, for contrast, you think about making a $10 purchase on Amazon, you’re gonna get four or five communications confirming your order, and firming the delivery date, you know, asking about your satisfaction post sale. I mean, that’s the level of communication that people expect now. And they appreciate that. So, you know, I really think that frequency communication is a big disconnect between clients and firms right now. And given the solutions available in the market that makes this a lot easier and affordable. This fixing this can be kind of low hanging fruit for firms.

Chip Kispert

You know, it’s interesting, because as we’ve worked with a lot of firms out there, you know, marketing was kind of put over here, right, and everybody was focused on the infrastructure, they’re focused on, you know, kind of portfolio management bowls of Jad and all that. Yet, right now, because of those customer changing expectations that you just talked about, we’re starting to see this growth of, of, of a bigger industry to support that. And, you know, I thought your comment about the average adviser touching their customer three times was actually pretty fascinating. You know, I think that in the old days, hey, here’s your statement, right? You get your statement once and if you get it in the mail, right, and maybe you have a needed knee and meeting with your advisor once a year. Now, you know, my advisor, right? I’m getting emails, social media, all that is coming in a fast and furious kind of, and it’s edits geared around my interest, right? So, hey, I got a kid in college. Right. So what are some of the things that you know, college stuff that was a big trend coming up? Looking at, hey, you know, I’m, you know, gonna retire in 1819 years, whatever they need to do this retirement. I just find it’s also fascinating, how it’s being customized and the content curation.

Brendan Kenalty

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big part of it. Right. And, but I think that, you know, getting over the first hurdle, which you know, having been out talking to people for five or six years about this, I think there’s an acknowledgement now that we have to do this, we need to scale up the communication, the question starts to become how do we do it? Right, which is, where did that go?

Chip Kispert

That kind of builds me up to kind of my next question, how are firms building their relevance using communication to grow? That advisor client influence? And quite frankly, the wealth firm advisor relationship? So I’m curious to get your perspective on that?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I think I’m kind of seeing or we’re kind of seeing three things that are kind of changing some trends, right. The first one is, there’s a huge shift from Do It Yourself tools to done for me type services, and specifically, communication, right, the second one is really about, you know, scaling out that visibility. And using personalized communication to kind of get in front of clients and help advisors have more visibility, which is kind of what you were talking about, right? Where you’re seeing stuff more and more right being present in their life, then the third one is really about providing more actionable information back to the adviser. So what should I do? Okay, I’ve got these, these communications going on, what do I do to help my business right, and if we just look at kind of go through these a little bit more detail quickly, you know, advisors, we’ve been told by advisors and by firms, they don’t want any more tools, right? Historic adoption of these, do it yourself, tools has really struggled to get past about 20%. And most firms, and what we’re seeing with more of the do it yourself, or sorry, done for me type services, when they’re provided a reasonable price, you see over 75% of advisors take advantage of that, because it’s much easier and much more efficient for them. So that’s a big, that’s a big help there, because that’s really starting to get things moving in the right direction. And I’d say the next one is just the firm’s focus on how do we get these, the scale of these things, these personalized communications up, and we’re starting to see some really great kind of examples of folks doing this, and kind of going from this three to four times a year, you know, to 15 to 30 times a year. And you’ve got to be able to do that efficiently. And that’s where you’ve got to have some of these solutions that people are starting to do. And just to share a couple of stories. I mean, one firm told us that there are top advisors, the one with getting the most referrals, communicate a minimum of 18 times a year, and they’re doing things like regular updates can be weekly, monthly bi monthly updates, they’re doing a lot of invites to educational webinars, where they invite friends and family on a particular topic of interest, which apparently does really well. And then kind of seasonal reminders, you know, tax season, that type of stuff. It just fills in the content calendar, and it lets them because people say how do you get to 30 times a year? Well, there’s a lot in there, think about it, that’s a long time, you can probably get how many do you think you get? Uh, how many times do you think you get, say, a year or a month from your folks?

Chip Kispert

You know, I probably get two a month. So it’s a little bit above your average that you gave.

Brendan Kenalty

Yeah, but that’s I think we think weakly even like we’re starting to see data that when you, when you send more, you actually see higher engagements. So it’s the opposite of what people think. And one of the interesting ones I’ll just share as a final is that we saw, we have a particular firm we’ve been working with, they went from three to six times a year, communication increased. So they do it for their advisors on behalf of their advisors, they saw a 44 point increase in NPS just doing that. So in terms of net promoter score, or likeliness, to refer, and they were shocked, they were like, this is pretty easy, a way to impact our business, if we can just you know, and they actually built out a content team to start to do more of this, they’re gonna go beyond six, but it just shows you there is impact in this, kind of by doing this.

Chip Kispert

And absolutely, you know, the flip side of that, though, is you have to make a commitment to do it. And it’s not the easiest thing to weave together, you know, the hub spots, the, you know, marketing clouds, the CRMs it takes work, right. So it’s a big commitment and both dollars and time, at the end of the day. So you’re on the marketplace, right? You have your own tool that you’re promoting, which I think is really, really cool. But what are some other tools that you see out there? They’re helping advisors and wealth firms really upgrade their communication efforts at both the investor prospect and client levels?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I think there’s some terrific you know, communication tools and services I mean, if I just stick in that vein for now, I think there’s a lot of pros and cons at you’re seeing a lot of these coming to the market even more depending on a firm’s objectives and their operating model so you know, your size and other ways you operate, but most are now incorporating some sort of intelligent AI powered content sourcing to your point like how do we how do we get the content to be able to to to share that out a lot of you know, automated distribution elements in there somewhere. So again, making morphia is all about efficiency and, and making it easier and easier, you know, you’re seeing the ChatGPT type AI content generation as well as sourcing it. So looking on the web for articles that match your interest profile, a lot of data driven stuff, you know, and we’re seeing more and more around the performance reporting. And as I mentioned before, you know, our kind of focus is really around the advisor’s insight, like, give me tell me what to do today, tell me who to call, tell me what to say. So that’s, that’s something that, you know, we’re kind of focused on again, all this is in that kind of data driven space, I’d say like Snappy and FMG are popular with the small RAS, don’t really provide that enterprise level control kind of efficiency and impact that the larger firms want, you know, they want a more centralized, how can I run a program for my advisors? How can I run a service? And that’s so they do well, with the smaller? I think we’re seeing more conversation, we have more around the enterprise, where do I get scale in this? How do I see the impact? So a couple of examples, I think, Catchlight, I don’t know if you’ve seen Catchlight, I think they’re really interesting. They have a tool that plugs into an advisor, CRM dashboard, and it’ll serve up, it’ll analyze all of the data points within it, as well as some other external stuff. And they’ll try to serve up some kind of opportunities or the advisor based on this data set that they have. And so some of the AI and analysis that’s pretty powerful, like, how do you help the adviser and those are, the folks that we kind of partner with and follow are the ones that are really making it easier for the adviser to do their job and to service their clients better? Because I mean, there’s a lot of stuff you can do on your own as an advisor, but it’s really about what you can do for them, I’d say another one is up to you. And again, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them, they’ve launched some new iterations of their product, their new new one is really slick. So they provide a tool for advisors. And it will actually suggest based on a client’s interest profile, so they track interests, they’ll suggest three or four personalized articles for that particular client based on this, and they do have some AI and stuff in there. And then you can send those out to folks. And then they go out. And they find over time as they refine that profile, they go out and source it. This is all kind of free content on the web, they source that for you to share. And so again, it’s maybe a bit of what you’re getting when you receive articles. But it’s all based on what the client’s data profiles say they’re interested in, that can be based on other things, you reacted to websites, you visited web pages, you visited blog posts, you visited that type of thing. And I think one of the third ones, and this kind of goes to your point about, you know, I need help doing the content that we really like is a company called bill, good marketing. So they’ve been around for 30 years. They’re well now automated. Yeah. And then people. And I think they’re, you know, for firms that want to outsource this whole thing, having a partner like that they don’t do canned content. No, they do very strategic content. That’s all custom written. And they’ve recently launched this ability to have a more efficient centralized distribution, they have a new protocol presence. So they’re able to actually do that for a larger firm. They’re able to distribute content from every advisor to their clients, but in a personalized way. And then they have all the data tracking on the back end for the advice. So they use our platform to do some of this, but they’ve had some real interest from firms that want the efficiency, they want it all outsourced, but they want the advisor intelligence advisor, what should I do today? On a piece of it, so I think those are the ones that there’s a million out there. But those are a couple.

Chip Kispert

So I’m up or throwing a kind of a one off question out there. Right. So there’s also this, this idea now about the quick one off video message about that?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I think it’s great, but it’s time consuming. And I think you know, II come from, you know, the web, digital marketing, social media marketing World. I’ve worked at John Hancock, lead their social media, social marketing digital marketing team for a couple years and one of the things we were trying to do is get executives be comfortable with that, you know, with the compliance layers and stuff that’s going on, especially in wealth management. It’s been slow. But if you have the personality to do that, it’s great. You know, you see people now do it in their car, they do it, it’s just any way you can find to efficiently create content. And if you can do these little quick video messages, I mean, I’ve been trying personally to try to get comfortable doing that, you got to have a point to it. So you got to think of an idea and whatever. But if you’re comfortable doing that, I think it’s great. And I think, you know, anyways, it’s good stuff.

Chip Kispert

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because, again, we kind of were talking all about some kind of attack goals, right. And, you know, weaving that together, I think, you know, firms. It’s interesting, because I recently took a look at Ficons. They have a boot camp, right? What they really work with their customers, their advisor customers to kind of bring these things together. And so that, so that the advisors can actually kind of have the engine write the campaign. And so it all works together. I think one of the challenges that we see out there, and quite frankly, we go through it, because, you know, we’re, we’re doing similar things, if you have all these great tools. But how do you work? How do you get them to work together? Sure. And so, those are some things we like to sing. So, you know, hey, I love to dive into the wealth side. Well, firms right, so who’s doing a good job out there? You know, when it comes to communication, who you see out there that, you know, you’re going, hey, they’re doing a pretty good job?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I think there’s a couple that, you know, and I think you mentioned Viacom, I think they’re doing a really good job. You know, it’s really about that enablement, that education, trying to show people. But then there’s that side. But there’s also like, who provides a platform or some sort of a service solution that makes it really easy, right? And I think, you know, I use LPL as an example. So I think Sara LeBlanc, she’s got a big team there. But you know, she’s always active, I see her all the time, them and their marketing support team, they’re doing a fantastic job. And to your point, they’re really focused on education, and enablement of the advisors, doing things like you know, showing them how to do digital marketing, giving them the tools, the communication platforms, social selling programs, which is a big part of how you prospect these days, teaching them what you can and can’t do. And then you mentioned the content creation best practices. So Sarah, in particular, you mentioned little short videos, she’s a whiz, right? She does videos on videos, doing videos. So I think she’s one that I see a lot, and I think she does a good job. Another one, you know, kind of along the same lines is Penny Phillips. So, you know, again, folks seem to know her, she’s always out there. But she does very, you know, she’s got this upstart journey, strategic wealth that she’s launched. And I think they’ve come out of the gate, you know, really trying to help advisors provide a more modern approach to their client experience, which again, they don’t necessarily have the legacy. But she talks a lot about integrated solutions, making it easy for advisors, having a lot more data that’s available to action for advisors. So I think they’re doing some interesting things that you talked about video content, I mean, Penny’s another whiz, with the video content with their short little tips and tricks all the time. So you know, and I think that’s, those are a couple that I you know, I always see out there doing great things.

Chip Kispert

I think, you know, I think those are great. It’s funny, because we tried to do kind of a Weekly Flash 3, and it is so hard to do it just to get to it every week is brutal, right? And now I’m now at like, maybe I get once a month, but anyway, got to do better on for sure. Um, one of the things we always think about is that fear side, right? So in your mind, what should be keeping these Well, firms and their advisors up at night as a look at growing and maintaining trust with their clients and building that trust with prospects to be able to get them what they should be concerned about right now?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, I mean, just to start off, I think being an advisor in today’s environment is very challenging, right? I mean, it’s, there’s just pressure from everywhere, the firms are looking for more, the clients are looking for more, there’s competitors kind of everywhere, you know, and really, we’ve got to make it a bit easier for these folks, or, you know, someone’s going to kind of give, and you know, why these guys are so swamped, or these folks are so swamped, you know, client commission, you just can’t it can’t be the thing that gets neglected to your point about building trust. You’ve got to be present. You’ve got to be out there demonstrating your expertise and that you’re on the job working hard for your clients. And, you know, Oh, it’s you know, I kind of always use the term low hanging fruit but it feels like to me the most simple thing in the My adviser can do for me is be around, be present. Let me see your name. And we have one client that we work with. He just wants to be in the feed every week. He doesn’t care if they read the note he wants his name to pop up, right. Frank’s around prankster Round. But that’s such a smart play. And then he’ll have meat on the bones if you’re interested, but you’re always there. And I think that that, to me, is just not being present in their clients lives. And thinking that, you know, as we head into this, this great wealth transfer. So, you know, the children of your clients, which a lot of folks now are trying to get into this multi generational wealth transfer, if you’re not kind of a digital native, or you’re not kind of engaging with them, and providing the experience, they expect, you’re going to be in in a bit of trouble, right. And I think that if you’re, you know, if you’re, if you’re a younger adviser, and you’re, you’ve got a longer term horizon, I mean, some folks are kind of getting ready to, to exit the business or sell their book. Now, it’s different, right, you’ve got your clients, they like the way you handle your business. But if you’re after the friends and family and referrals, and the next generation, you’ve really got a, you’ve got to learn how to do this and do a good job on this, have different expectations, and just to share a bit of data. So 84%, of advisors say staying visible with clients is vital for growth. And nine out of 10 clients say that frequency of communication by their advisor plays a big part in making a referral. So it’s, again, we’re seeing more and more data come out showing how important it is that you are present when your client is having. So if you and I are having a discussion about something to do with a fine mansion, like all you got to, you know, oh, my advisor just sent me this great piece, I’m going to send it over to you. That’s the way you get referrals. That’s how you build trust. Now I am your expert. So I mean, you’ve got to be present. And if you’re not around and present, I really think you’re in big trouble, to be honest with you.

Chip Kispert

I think that’s great. I think you’re spot on. So I got a question. You’ve come up with some great stats. Where do you get these?

Brendan Kenalty

Well, you know, we’re all in the sales and marketing business, Jim. So I constantly scour. I read a lot of the reports. And I think we’re seeing more and more. I mean, wide charts is a great source of, they do a lot of because they’re all about communication and content sharing and an education. There’s a lot of data and stuff that’s available. We also do some of our own surveys, we also look within our platform to see what’s working, what’s not working. So there’s a bunch of different ways, but I’m, you know, I think, you know, you and I connected, we had some conversations about We’d like some data on the bones. And it’s certainly executives like to hear, you know, there’s some, some facts in your, in your comments or your opinion, right.

Chip Kispert

Absolutely. All right, Brandon, we’ve had a great conversation, I always like to give you 60 seconds for your final word.

Brendan Kenalty

Okay, well, I don’t know if it’s exactly 60 seconds. But I think, you know, things are improving, and, you know, again, around communication, but I still think we have a long way to go in the industry. You know, as an industry, I think it feels like, you know, we agree advisors need to be more present and costly demonstrating their expertise and communication is, uh, you know, it’s kind of a fundamental way to do this. And like I say, low hanging fruit, frankly, these days. You know, the question really becomes how do you do it easily and efficiently. And that’s the shift that we’re now I think, heading into, you know, luckily, these new solutions that are available that integrated, like we said, into your CRM, they’re supported by an ecosystem of content partners, which is, it’s robust enough now to provide affordable solutions for most firms or independent advisors, like it’s reasonable. You know, and frankly, I’m just kind of worried about the firms and the advisors who don’t at least investigate this and start to look at how to build it into their business. And how are they going to keep up with the client, the changing client expectations, especially as they try to build, like we mentioned this next generation of relationships or relationships with the next generation. I mean, this we talked about before this digital generation, they’re wired differently. And they expect their service providers to use technology available to understand and service them. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine. But you’re going to miss out on those, those expectations, which is a lot of people. And if something I say to people all the time, advisors are not competing from an experience perspective with others, other advisors, you’re competing with the experiences, and the expectations of providers that we use all the day, the Amazons, the Tesla, the Google. We just got a Tesla, my wife and I, the experience at the dealership, the experience in the car, and when I look at that is now my baseline or whatever or the way. Amazon knows you suggest things. These are things that someone who is managing our money should have a sense of that they have tons of data about us, but they’re not using it to kind of service us better. So I think that’s something that I think we’re just going to watch over time. As I say , we’re making a lot of progress. As you’re hearing more and more, just get you’re talking about it all the time. Lots of folks are so interesting to kind of see, though, how we adjust these, these client and advisor relationships over the next few years.

Chip Kispert

Excellent. Excellent. Brendan, thank you very much for joining us on the Beacon Flash podcast, I’d loved our discussion. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Jeff.

Brendan Kenalty

Great, appreciate it.