When creating a tool, it’s always important to think about your advisor base – whether these are the folks selling your products, such as advisors, personal bankers, brokers, financial planners, or investment representatives or the group providing customer support. Make sure you’re arming your team with the best possible tools they need to help your customers.
Provide a visually appealing branded experience
Whether this tool is just for advisors or also available for customers, it’s important to create a tool that’s innovative, engaging and intuitive. And even if your main goal is to create a tool just for advisors, it’s fair to assume that your advisor will turn their screen and show the customer, so make sure the tool will have as much impact as one you create directly for customers, and leaves a lasting brand impression.
TIP: Both consumer and advisor tools should be similarly fantastic!
Give them a way to personalize
Advisor tools should allow customization. Ideally, advisors should be able to fill in their information and their clients’ information, which would then be provided to the client on their takeaway (a print report or PDF from the tool). This way, potential or current customers can easily figure out how to stay in touch with their advisor. Also, the ability to add in the client information can help advisors with lead generation and provides a level of personalization for each customer.
TIP: Consider offering functionality that lets advisors send the results to either themselves or their client.
Give them more detailed features
Consider adding more fields or functionality to a tool for advisors. Preserving the advisors’ value add is critical. That will help reinforce that you know advisors are educated users and that they’ll want to provide their clients with more than what’s just available to the public. Also, giving advisors that extra functionality gives them a reason to use this tool over one that’s publicly available.
TIP: If the advisor version offers advanced features, include a call to action that encourages the users to meet with an advisor to learn even more.
Provide sales tips
Use the tool to help advisors through their sales conversation. Make sure the tool follows a logical conversational order and provide helpful tips for the advisors as they progress. Consider perhaps even having a full “tips” section with sales tips or other important reminders and key benefits.
TIP: Help advisors by including some tips on things that are easy to forget like documents to bring to future meetings or any pre-work that they might want their client to prepare for future meetings.
Teach them how to use it
It’s not enough to just create a great tool and put it out there. Provide your advisors with the training materials they need to learn how to make the most out of the tool or offering. And don’t just give them a 500 word write-up and hope they’ll read it. You’ve spent a lot of effort in making an amazing tool that you want them to be excited to use – make sure that your training is also exciting to use! Consider creating a video demo of the tool, which can have a host walk through it, can show real advisors talking about the tool, or can be animated. There’s lots of engaging training options.
TIP: If you have a lot of complicated information to teach, try using gamification!
