Case Studies
Financial Advisors of all backgrounds can realize the benefits of having access to an automated system for maintaining a high level of client communications. The following are just three of the many stories we hear about on a regular basis.
Phil of St. Paul, Minnesota
Phil in St. Paul, MN, had a client whose oldest son was murdered one year ago. Phil had followed up with them every couple months to see if they wanted to review their beneficiaries to make sure everything was updated, but received no response. He sent them a currency portfolio last month, and then sent them a second piece. The day after the second piece was sent, the client called him to set up an appointment to manage hundreds-of-thousands of dollars from the sale of property!
Jim of Scottsdale, Arizona
Jim, an Advisor with a practice in Scottsdale, AZ, relayed a story about how his HOARD program paid for itself 5 times over in just the first month. He had lost touch with some of his clients that he had not reached out to for a long time. He was somewhat timid about beginning to touch these people because he was afraid they would be irritated with him because of the time that had gone by.
After his first mailing, a female client that had invested $54,000 with him over three years ago and he hadn’t talked to since called him. She was ecstatic that he had contacted her! She said she had just inherited $365,000 and had been to a seminar about selling Equity Indexed Annuities and wondered if she could come in to talk to him about it before she did anything. Of course he said, YES!!
Two weeks later she had invested the full $360,000 with Jim. She said she preferred to work with someone she knew! That is a valuable client that Jim almost missed due to his fear of contacting “lost” clients.
Bryan of Indianapolis, Indiana
By utilizing the newsletters, Bryan has seen a huge amount of traffic coming to his office. By using the referral program within the HOARD system, he is now generating more referrals than he had in his whole career before using the newsletters and referral program.
From one newsletter alone he had several positive responses from clients. Based on a recent article in a newsletter he sent out, he had several people come into his office to pick up their Medicare Handbooks and calculators. Each has said they enjoy the information and find it very helpful. Every client is very appreciative. They are seeing the value!
John of Trenton, New Jersey
John, a New Jersey Financial Advisor, began dripping on people that had been to his seminar for the past 3 years. Just two months into using HOARD marketing he received a phone call from a prospect, Jim, that had attended his seminar almost 3 years earlier. The prospect told him how glad he was that the Advisor had sent him the correspondence. Jim said that he had been thinking about John for months but did not know how to contact him. He said, “I wasn’t ready to make any changes when I saw your seminar but I knew that you were the one I wanted to make changes with when I was ready.”
Long story short, Jim had just sold his business and had over $3 million to invest. He put it all with John. John made over $100,000 on just that one case. Jim told John the advisor at closing that he had felt so happy things had worked out and that John had contacted him because he had been just about to give the $3 million to a friend of a golfing buddy that worked at Merrill Lynch.
James of Des Moines, Iowa
James, a banker in Des Moines, Iowa nearly lost a large account but saved it by one small gesture. The amazing thing is that it was an account that he did not think he was in danger of losing! George was a long time client of the bank and they always made sure that they took good care of him when he came in. James thought he was a satisfied customer.
However, George, a farmer had begun to feel taken for granted. The bank no longer had coffee and cookies when he came in to make deposits. He felt that they were pushing him to bank on line instead of coming in to see real people. He began to feel like a number instead of a valued customer.
After receiving James handwritten notes for four months, George asked to see James one day he was in the bank and relayed to James how much he appreciated the notes and wanted to know how James knew that he was thinking of moving his business to the bank across the street. James was absolutely shocked when he heard that George had been thinking about moving his very profitable account away from the bank! He kept his cool and said that he wasn’t aware that George had been thinking about it but that he just had wanted George to know how much he appreciated him. Needless to say, any account that makes James over $100 a year now gets his monthly notes.
Bobby and Drew of Minnetonka, Minnesota
Bobby had been pursuing a 401k at a large local company for over two years. He just couldn’t crack the hold the current administrator had on the Drew, the president of the company. Drew was always friendly and willing to meet for a few minutes with Bobby but always ended up saying that he was happy with his current plan. Bobby had tried everything…bribing Drew with football tickets…bribing the staff with bagels and lattees on Monday mornings…sending reams of data proving that his plan was better for both the employees and the company…having big wigs from the company he represented meet with the Drew…nothing worked. He just didn’t want to move.
Bobby finally got the call from Drew to move the 401k to him. After the deal was signed, Bobby asked Drew what had caused him to finally change his mind? Drew said the fact that Bobby took the time to personally send him articles regularly that helped him and his family. He said it was apparent that Bobby was not just concerned about the account but about the people it affected. Drew said he wanted to work with people that cared about people not just money
Susan of Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Susan had built a profitable practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She had figured out that her best clients were widows. She got along best with them and they really seemed to like her. She just couldn’t get in front of enough of them. Susan tried seminars…taking her best clients to tea with their friends…Senior Centers…everything was moderately successful but seemed to take a lot of time, money and effort. She had seen over 630 widows using those methods over the past couple of years but had only brought on 62 clients from the effort.
Desperate and tired she began utilizing the post cards revolving around fun dates and holidays like Blueberry Month. It didn’t take anytime and it was way cheaper than all the other things she had tried and an amazing thing began to happen. The phone began to ring. One call the first month, another the second month, two or three the next but it began to really explode for her as these widows began to call left and right. She had almost forgotten about the post card campaign as her assistant basically did the 3 minutes a month necessary to manage it.
One Friday afternoon after an extremely successful week, 3 new widow clients with a total of over $1.3 million between them, Susan commented to her assistant that something must be in the water with all the widow calling them. The assistant matter of factly said, “It’s not the water, it’s the post cards. They have been calling and commenting about the fact that no one, not even their children send them handwritten notes anymore and that they felt Susan really cared about them.”
Needless to say, Susan is now sending more handwritten postcards than ever!
Alan of Rockford, Maryland
Alan had a real problem sending out newsletters as he had done it for years, spending thousands of dollars and had barely broken even with them. On top of that this new HOARD newsletter looked so unprofessional as compared to the ones that he had been using that were slick and polished looking. He had some real success using some of the other HOARD campaigns so decided to just give it a try.
He immediately started to see results from his current clients. They loved the new look of his newsletters! They like the more homey feel and loved hearing about his family and seeing pictures of his kids! They also said they loved the recipes in his newsletters…HOLD THE PHONES! They liked the recipes? He had been sending newsletters packed with terrific financial information up to this point and only one client had ever called him about the financial information in the newsletters and that client only had $75,000 invested but loved to come in and talk about wealth management tools and how to use them with his $75,000.
Alan, was happy that his clients liked his new newsletters but what really got him excited was when he started getting referrals directly resulting from the use of the newsletter. He got over 5 times the referrals just using the newsletter than he had gotten in the past three years combined! He brought on 16 new clients just the first year from referrals. It amounted to $2,560,000 in new assets and $140,800 in commissions just the first year and the new people are already referring compounding the profits!
Mike of Indianapolis, Indiana
Mike had been sending Birthday cards to his client for years. Every once in awhile if an appointment occurred close to the date a card had been received a client would comment and thank him. He decided to use HOARD Formal campaign and send out the Birthday cards that way because it was much cheaper that going to the store and buying $3 cards and another 37 cents to mail them…not to mention the small hassle of signing all of them and making sure they got out on time
Mike was very surprised when his assistant said that people were actually calling in to thank Mike for the birthday cards he was sending. He couldn’t figure out why when they got the HOARD birthday cards it was such a big deal to them when with the store bought cards it was no big deal. Mike’s sharp assistant pointed out that all of the new Birthday cards had handwritten notes on them where before, he had merely signed them.
In just the first three months of using the handwritten Birthday cards, Mike has already received 4 referrals amounting to $612,000 in assets and $36,720 in commission.
Jerry and Elizabeth of Chicago, Illinois
Jerry had been in his downtown office for over 15 years and had always validated his client’s parking vouchers. As the city continued to increase parking costs, Jerry’s bill to cover his client’s parking continued to climb until last year it cost him more than $3,000. Jerry felt that he was making his clients enough money to finally just letting his clients pick up the $2 and $3 dollar parking charges(dumb move but that is not the point), I mean they have on average over $250,000 invested with him.
Elizabeth was 72 years old and had been with Jerry for over 12 years with $650,000 invested. They got along famously and Jerry had done a great job of managing Elizabeth’s money making here money year after year with never a loss. Elizabeth was very pleased with Jerry’s performance.
However, after coming to her annual review and getting socked with the huge $3 parking bill that Jerry no longer covered, she was livid! She thought that Jerry was getting too big for his britches! She set an appointment to go see the guy across the street from her apartment building who had been bugging her for months. Heck, then she wouldn’t have the hassle of driving, parking and dealing with the city traffic.
Luckily Jerry had just begun his handwritten postcard campaign and Elizabeth received the postcard day before she was to meet with Jerry’s competitor. Elizabeth was so moved with receiving a handwritten card out of the blue that she felt she owed it to Jerry to call him to let him know that she would be leaving him and the reason. Jerry was obviously alarmed and fixed the situation to Elizabeth’s satisfaction and conserved the account. (Let’s hope he also changes his parking policy!)
