How well do you know your clients?

Do you know their interests and hobbies? More to the point, for financial advisors the question is how well you know your clients' families, observes Patricia J. Abram in Research Magazine. Do you know the names of their children? Their parents? Their pets?

Financial advisors seeking business success need a systematic discovery process, she says, but too few are acting consultatively enough even to know the basics about their clients' families. This is not only shocking — it's bad business.

Abram lays out a process from CEG Worldwide that consists of five client meetings, including three initial meetings and two followup monitoring meetings. The idea is to learn about children, grandchildren, parents, pets, interests, and "everything else that is important to their financial lives." The takeaway is this: a recommended minimum of twenty-four non-investment focused client contacts a year. This system has the potential to generate a great deal of knowledge that most advisors simply do not have. Advisors are coming up short in their personal willingness or their professional capacity to know their own clients on a basic, let alone an in-depth, level of effectiveness.

Instead of "systematic discovery process," I would like to think of this approach as common sense and empathy. But it's true that the scale of business has grown to the point where personal contact is at a premium and that new ways are needed for the client to share personal information in a sane and safe way, and for the advisor to receive it and use it to help the client achieve his and her dreams.