The Million-Dollar Question

I help a lot of advisory firms optimize their scheduling software to increase back-office efficiency. Schedulers are a great tool for eliminating an often time-consuming task without sacrificing much in the way of service. In fact, most clients these days don't want to call the office to change an appointment - they prefer to self-manage through an application. It's an easy win for an advisory firm with very little downside.

One of the other neat features included in a scheduling app is the ability to gather bits of information about the invitee before the meeting. Whenever I'm building a scheduling event, I always ask my advisors if there's anything they want to ask on the event's page. And the million-dollar question they have for me is "what should I ask?"

This is where some of you are already starting to bristle, I can tell. I see this 'to ask or not to ask' concept hotly debated by some advisors, especially when it comes to the prospecting phase. And there are two predominant schools of thought:

Advisors shouldn't ask any questions, because they add a layer of friction that could potentially cause a prospect to walk away rather than fill out a form.

vs.

Advisors should screen prospects that don't fit their preferred client avatar to save both time and frustration — for them and the prospect.

Personally, I don't subscribe to either of these hard-and-fast rules. The former misses an opportunity to prepare well for a better initial meeting, and the second can exclude potentially fabulous would-be clients based on a handful of datapoints.

When worrying about friction, it helps to know that drop-off rates on forms spike as the question count rises above five. Additionally, users find drop-down fields, radio buttons, and checkboxes to be less friction-inducing than open text. And for those advisors that worry about user distrust (the unwillingness to provide certain personal information to unfamiliar entities), it's comforting to know that making questions optional still yields data 80% of the time.

So, if we know we can ask five questions before worrying about abandonment, how do we make sure we're asking the right five questions? (BTW, that's Question #1, for those keeping count).

"There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots."

The key is to ask useful questions — make sure the precious data you are gathering actually has a purpose for you and your unique firm's way of prospecting. Here's how I counsel my clients on the "what should I ask?" question for prospect meetings.

Data Gathering for Marketing Use

Sometimes the prospect may schedule a meeting but then cancel before you meet or simply not show up at all. No worries, sometimes life gets busy, people forget, and calendars don't update. But that prospect could have been an ideal client for you.

Did you gather enough information when you had the chance to - affording you the option of at least keeping them in your marketing funnel? (Question #2) If not, you may want to consider what information is useful for that purpose since this could potentially be the only time you get a chance to ask.

Most marketing funnels today only require a valid email address, which is commonly passed as a required parameter for scheduling the meeting. But what is also nice to have is separated fields for First Name and Last Name. And maybe even their Employer if you want to try to connect on LinkedIn (who knew there were so many John Albrights on LI?!?). Are you getting all of those or are you just settling for the default "Name and Email" in Calendly which doesn't even break out the First and Last names, causing downstream problems when you try to Zap the data into your CRM or send personalized emails.

Another great question for marketing funnels is to gather some prospect attributes so they can be added as tags to your CRM or used as a filter into an appropriate drip campaign. For example, if you're an advisor that offers one-time planning engagements, ongoing planning, and investment management services — and you send different emails to those different segments — then by all means ask which services they were interested in learning more about! That way you can send targeted information relevant to the prospect's needs, instead of flooding their inbox with information they don't want.

Pre-Screening

If your firm has been around for more than five years, you're likely at a stage where you no longer have to take every Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks through your door. That's a wonderful place to be! But it means that you sometimes have to tell prospects that you're not the best fit for them, which can feel a tad... awkward.

The key here is to be clear and kind. If you only work with clients who have over $1 million in investible assets, you should say that somewhere on your firm's website. But don't ever assume that someone who doesn't currently have over $1 million in investible assets isn't worth meeting. They may have RSUs, an upcoming inheritance, or a property they will be selling soon.

Someone who doesn't seem like a great fit on a short screening questionnaire may, in fact, be an ideal client which is why the handling of these prospects is so important. This is where using a tool like routing forms becomes invaluable.

Let's look at a familiar example: the AUM hurdle. It's perfectly fine to ask someone for the value of their investible assets. I prefer drop-down or radio boxes for this, as you really just need a general idea and ranges feel much less intrusive to ask for at this stage. The multiple-choice options may be something like this:

• Less than $1 million in investible assets
• $1 – 2 million
• $2 – 4 million
• $4 – 6 million
• More than $6 million

If a prospect selects any answer that is above $1 million, they continue on to book the standard one-hour discovery call event as usual. However, when a prospect selects "less than $1 million," you can have your scheduler route them to a static page on your website that gently explains who you do your best work for and why. Alternatively, you route then to a "quick chat" phone meeting event of 15 minutes to see if it might be worth having that full discovery meeting after all. Firms with multiple advisors might want to use routing forms like this to send HNW clients to a senior advisors and less complex clients to a junior advisor.

Meeting Prep

If your introductory call is truly just a "call me and I'll tell you my fees and planning approach" then gathering information probably won't change how you run the meeting. However, if your call is more in-depth or could be tailored so that it is a better meeting for the client, then it may be worth asking a few questions.

For example, if you're a financial planner that serves various demographics, it might make sense for you to ask "Where are you in your financial stage of life?" with a drop-down list that offers five choices:

• Early Career / Wealth Building
• Mid-Career / Family Focus
• Late Career / Retirement Curious
• About to Retire / Newly Retired
• Retired

Depending on the prospect's answer, those are going to be five very different conversations. Knowing where they are in their financial journey can allow you to customize the meeting agenda and visuals — whether they're charts, handouts, or even a checklist — so they are tailored to their specific needs. Heck, knowing their stage of life may even dictate which advisor on your team is best suited to meet with them which is another use case for routing forms.

A favorite question of mine to ask is "Have you ever worked with an advisor before?" This helps you to know whether this meeting should focus on a high-level overview of how financial advisors (and your firm in particular) work, or if this will be more of a this-is-what-makes-us-different conversation.

Previewing Your Service

A fun way to use your alloted questions is to actually preview a little bit about yourself and your firm. This is especially helpful if you have a really tight niche and want to convey to your prospects that you understand their unique needs.

For instance, if you have a niche that serves strictly doctors, you can reinforce your area of expertise by having a question or two related to the specific financial challenges that are unique to doctors. That could mean asking about any outstanding student debt, whether they have completed their residency, or what setting they work in (private practice, hospital, teaching, research).

Or maybe you serve accumulators who work in tech — that's a big market and those individuals often have special planning needs such as dealing with ISOs / NSOs or RSUs. Even asking which tech company they work for can be helpful.

Not only do the questions illustrate that you understand their needs, but the responses also allow you to be better prepared for the meeting. If you know you have a programmer from OpenAI scheduling a call, you will likely research where the company is with their IPO and search your CRM to see if you've met with other employees from that company. At the very least, you might check to see if you have anyone in your network that is also employed at that firm so you can mention the common bond.

Reducing Future Friction

If we can assume that you will have a second and perhaps third meeting with a prospect (and that IS the goal, isn't it? (Question #3)) consider gathering a few relevant bits of data before each unique event, rather than bombard them with a mile-long questionnaire after meeting two. Of course, you'll want to ensure these datapoints are added to your CRM as they are gathered, slowly building a more detailed picture of the prospect.

We already know that form-fatigue kicks in after five questions, so why not make the most of each interaction to gather what you can so that future data-gathering is less painful? (Question #4) Things like household structure, high-level goals, industry sector, or life stage can all be helpful when it comes time to building a financial plan or filling out account forms. Grabbing pieces of data in small chunks as they work through the prospecting phase can make the onboarding process a little less arduous.

Questions such as "Who is in your household?" with dropdowns that include:

• Just me
• Me and my spouse
• Me, my spouse, and kids
• Me and my children

can help to create a more nuanced picture of the prospect. As an added bonus, your rapport with them will build more quickly when your meeting feels more like a conversation and less like an interrogation.

The Answer to the Million-Dollar Question

So when I get asked the Million-Dollar Question of "What should I ask on the scheduling form?" my answer is often the same evasive response given by holistic Financial Planners since the dawn of time: "It depends."

It depends on what information is most helpful to you and your firm. I will use my fifth and final question to ask you this:

What are you hoping to achieve?

• Improved marketing campaigns to turn prospects into leads
• Pre-screened prospects to save time on calendars for ideal prospects
• Better preparation for more tailored prospecting meetings
• Instilling confidence in prospects by showing you understand their needs
• Reduced future friction for prospects who eventually onboard as clients

Answer that question and deciding what to ask in the scheduler will become obvious.

Any questions?