President's Blog - How Do Your Clients Compare?
10/4/2017
A popular life lesson taught to Americans from Day One of their schooling is to be themselves.
We are all unique individuals, and children are encouraged to embrace their uniqueness, to celebrate those attitudes and behaviors that make them someone special and different.
Many of the most successful people in America got to where they are today by taking advantage of their unique abilities. Innovation comes from deviated thinking. Success comes from going beyond the norm.
But investors can also gain insights and improve their retirement plan and modify their portfolio by knowing how others like them are investing, and what other investors are thinking about financial matters, national and personal topics, and other related habits and behaviors.
The
Investor Profile Tool is an online interactive dashboard which allows advisors to filter pertinent demographic information related to a particular client and immediate receive a full description of what investors in the same demographic are doing or thinking in regards to any number of key topics. While those topics do include financial and investment matters, they also include personal and national concerns, advisor relationships and social media usage habits.
Advisors can assist investors in finding out how others just like them are living their lives, and act accordingly when the information directly relates to them.
When an investor is considering changes to his or her portfolio, or when events in their life cause them to rethink their investment strategies, it is not uncommon for the investor to say “What are other investors doing?” The
Investor Profile Tool answers that question.
Your 40-year-old female client wants to know what other 40-year-old females are investing in, or how the average portfolio of a 40-year-old female with $500,000 in investable assets is investing. She wants to know whether other investors like her are worrying about government gridlock or the national debt. She wants to know whether other investors have similar concerns about paying for their offspring’s education, or taking care of aging parents and their health care concerns.
The value in the information the
Spectrem Investor Profile Tool provides is that the demographic information from which the profile is created comes from the wealthy investors who Spectrem interviews and surveys every year in our wealth segmentation studies. An advisor can say “this is what other investors in your wealth segment, with your number of children, and in your marital status, are doing with their investable assets.”
When the client sees this information in front of them, they are able to consider their current choices to the choices of the group and perhaps see ways in which they want to affect their own decisions.
This is not to say all investors must invest in identical manners. Many investors do indeed want to go their own way. They may have personal pressures, or personal financial histories, which prevent them from going along with the group think.
But there are many other clients who will see the information in the Investor Profile Tool snapshot and get “woke’’ to the possibilities that others are exploring, and being successful with.
The value of the
Investor Profile Tool to advisors working with new and prospective clients is unmistakable. With the demographic information an investor usually provides to you, an advisor can determine advice approaches that are likely to work with that person. The Investor Profile Tool provides insights that can take hours to acquire in interviews when time can be better spent on moving forward. Investors who have considered other advisors are likely tired of the interview process as well; this tool enables an advisor to ask pointed questions rather than general ones, moving the process of building a portfolio along and saving time and money.
The uses of the
Investor Profile Tool are, in some ways, limited only to the imagination of the advisor or provider using it. Marketing, advisor education, understanding trends – all of these functions can be addressed quickly and efficiently. You will have the information on your desktop; you just need to figure out what question to ask.
