Top 3 Challenges faced by Financial Consultants
Considering entering the financial consultancy industry? Every job has its downsides, here are 3 of the most common challenges you might face as a financial consultant.
1. Stigma surrounding the financial consultancy industry
Consultants are no strangers to the stigma attached to their line of work. Some might perceive consultants as overly motivated by money, employing sales-driven tactics to convince their clients to purchase financial products that may not even be suitable.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/nzdfqi/the_friend_on_instagram_who_probably_just_became/
Of course, we know that no rational consultant should be driven by selfish intentions. A good consultant should always help their clients achieve what is best for them, based on their unique financial background, circumstances and goals. Hence, it is crucial to build trust, and what better ways to do so than by being transparent and objective?
Through understanding each client’s current financial status based on their income, savings and expenses, we can project it against their short term and long term financial goals. This helps you to plan how much an individual can and should set aside for investments or insurance policies that best fit their financial needs.
GoalsMapper’s GM Planner is a financial planning software that visualises such data, with projections made based on expense parameters, scenarios and goals to predict the impact of various financial decisions on an individual’s long term financial status. This provides an objective way to justify which financial products best suit their needs, allowing consultants to demonstrate transparency in their selling of products.
2. Managing a busy work schedule
As the pandemic proliferates work-from-home culture across most industries, many of us have started to bring our work online. Apart from meeting clients online, consultants also spend many hours conducting and attending webinars. Webinars are the new norm to connecting with peers, networking with clients, and acquiring knowledge from experts, but they do result in zoom fatigue.
Source: https://marketoonist.com/2020/06/zoom.html
With that, you may find yourself struggling to schedule and keep up with your day-to-day online meetings and virtual events. Having a planner and reminder system to keep you organised and informed about all these commitments would be extremely useful.
With the latest integration of GM Connect, a digital Customer Relationship and Workflow Management tool specially built for financial consultants, you will be able to streamline processes and automate daily repetitive work.
Increase your efficiency by syncing Google Calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Calendly into GoalsMapper. Set reminders and notifications to better engage your clients through multiple channels and touchpoints, including email campaigns and WhatsApp.
3. Growing client base consistently
Prospecting is the lifeblood of financial advisory practice.
It is undebatable that building, maintaining and expanding your client base is key to earning revenue. However, this is not an easy feat as it goes beyond networking and connecting with potential clients, to the notion of personal branding.
Having a personal brand allows consultants to stand out by showcasing their personality while building credibility on their professional expertise. GoalsMapper’s GMBrand enables consultants to establish an online portfolio using a website builder, where they can display their financial consultant certificates and embed built-in widgets such as insurance and retirement calculators to drive site traffic.
Closing Thoughts
Being an FA isn’t always the easiest, but the value created for clients makes this job a fulfilling one. GoalsMapper develops financial consultant tools with these challenges in mind, and can help both new and established consultants expedite their day-to-day demands while serving more clients with ease.