Your clients’ children will be the largest-inheriting generation on record, plus many of them are high-income earners with great COI potential. Not to mention, they want and need your advice.
It’s a natural evolution of your relationship with the parents. Ultimately, if you’re providing holistic wealth management, you’ll need to work directly with them. We use the term “children”, but many of these people are welllll into adulthood.
All that said…we only have so many hours in the day. Depending on the size of your client base, there may be more children than you can reasonably contact. This means you’ll need to prioritize and create a strategy. We’ll save you some legwork on this. Here’s a process we’ve seen work with fantastic results:
1. Profile Your Top 100 Clients
Make a list of your top 100 clients. This might be very simple for some of you, more difficult for others. We suggest ranking them not just by their assets, but by other factors like advocacy, willingness to take your advice, and potential for upgrade as well. Beside each top 100 clients’ names, list their children’s names and ages.
2. Score Their Children
Take your list of clients’ children and create the following spreadsheet:
Scoring Criteria (1-5 scale; 5 being the highest):
- Inheritance Potential – This factors in the parents’ assets, number of heirs, and spending habits. Reserve a 5 score for those who stand to inherit serious money and 1 for those who may inherit nothing.
- Current Income – Some of your clients’ children are high-income earners already. There is a little guesswork involved here. Sidebar – LinkedIn is a tremendous tool for finding client family members and viewing their job titles.
- COI Potential – Assess their current ability to connect you with potential clients.
This exercise may take a little effort, but you’ll be glad you did it. You’ll have much better knowledge of your clients’ families and their needs for wealth management.
3. Make Contact Strategically
Work through your list in order of total points scored. In the example above, Joan Smith scores a 14, so she’d likely be near the top of your list.
It’s also important to work through the parents. You could say, “I was thinking about your son Kevin the other day. Seems like he’s got a lot going on with his family and at work. I’d love to reach out and connect with him. Anything I should know about him before I call?”
No matter how you slice it, Millennials and Gen Xers are soon to be in dire need of financial advice. Contrary to popular belief, they’re not all going to use robo-advisors. Make contact now and reap the rewards for the rest of your career. Keep us posted with your successes!
