A guest blog by Stephen Moses, Founder at Zenplans.
Lifetime value is a term most professionals will be intimately familiar with when referring to their clients, but if you are in the estate planning field now might be the time to start considering a new term altogether – ‘post-lifetime value’.
It’s always been a mystery to me why businesses seem to focus more on the front-end costs of drawing in new clients than the opportunities associated with perfecting long-term relationship building with them. What this tends to lead to, for estate planning professionals in particular, is a client half-life that expires as soon as they do, a finite end point to your professional relationship… but it doesn’t have to
More often than not, the relationships formed by estate planning professionals are limited to the ‘key contact’ – their client – with little to no engagement with or from the client’s wider family circle. This could be a commercial misstep as the value of investing in intergenerational relationship building could be significant.
Not only might this include securing probate and estate administration work, but it may also lay the relational groundwork that would enable you to follow your client’s assets as their estate passes into new ownership, allowing you to offer continuity of oversight with a new generation of clients who might otherwise have been persuaded to shop around or even handle all the legal and financial matters themselves using (brace yourself) ‘online solutions’.
If we were to plot the lifetime value of a client – measured by the fee income derived from them over time – it would likely be heavily skewed towards the right of the graph, due to the lucrative nature of probate compared to that of wills and trusts. Because of this, a will bank represents a treasure trove of future opportunities for solicitors with an eye on both client lifetime and post-lifetime value optimisation.
The risk of not including a client’s next of kin in your conversations, and preferably in your relationship building strategy, is the possibility that they may choose to instruct another firm to help them with probate, attempt to do it themselves or challenge you as the named executors. It is, therefore, imperative that you lay the foundations today to secure this work tomorrow. Even marginal improvements in the chances of being instructed to support estate administration and to continue advising a client’s beneficiaries can yield significant dividends in the long run.
So, what are you doing in your practice today to work towards securing the intergenerational new business of tomorrow?
This is not the forum for discussing specific strategies, but it is vital to highlight the importance of drawing your client’s beneficiaries closer throughout their lifetime, turning one client into many – encouraging your client to include them within the wider conversation, to discuss who would look after their day-to-day financial and legal affairs should they become unable to do so, alongside legacy planning, inheritance and digital asset management. Potentially to consider the convenience of having all their important information, for their life and legacy, in one secure place, so that when they pass, loved ones will know where to look.
Including a client’s family and other beneficiaries in discussions like this can be an important opportunity for any estate planning professional to demonstrate their expertise to an expanded audience, an audience that one day will likely also be the custodians of your current client’s assets.
About Zenplans
Forward-thinking firms embrace innovative tools to strengthen their connections with clients and their family
With Zenplans you can help clients to organise vital aspects of their lives and legacies in one secure place, accessible to chosen delegates at an appropriate predetermined time. Zenplans places your firm front and centre amongst your client’s inner circle, and offers unique opportunities for you to establish and enhance your relationships with them, expanding the potential of each client’s lifetime value to your firm beyond their actual lifetime as you invest in supporting the needs of their next generation.
Discover more at zenplans.com