Vaneesa started her financial advisory journey eighteen years ago after she worked in fund development at a non-organization. She discovered how insurance could be used as a solution for planned giving strategies in the charitable gifts industry. Armed with curiosity and a passion for helping others financially, she carved a path for herself in insurance. According to Vaneesa, "insurance helps to protect the foundation of a person's financial life."
Today, she runs Let's Plan, an advisory practice that offers a wide range of services covering insurance and investment planning, estate, tax, retirement planning, and cash flow management.
She holds the Professional Financial Advisor (PFA) and Certified Health Insurance Specialist (CHS) designations. She is working towards completing the Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designations in 2023. She is an avid technology user and has been using AdvisorFlow for the past year to streamline the client discovery process. Outside work, she enjoys art and watching live shows.
Before using AdvisorFlow, Vaneesa relied heavily on clunky, fillable PDF forms to collect clients’ financial information. Typically, she would send out PDF documents through emails to gather some preliminary information before and after a client discovery meeting. However, she noticed that prospects and existing clients were reluctant to fill out these documents and other paperwork. The forms were rarely completed thoroughly, and she had to follow up with clients several times before they were submitted. With the low completion rates, Vaneesa and her team spent hours on administrative tasks that would have otherwise been used to serve clients better.
During client discovery meetings, Vaneesa and her colleagues found it challenging to collect clients’ financial information and engage them in thought-provoking questions. While she may have noted all hard facts about a client’s financial situation, this process did not give her enough room to build rapport and trust, which form the foundation of a long-lasting client relationship.
By multitasking during meetings, Vaneesa could not give her undivided attention to clients during onboarding because she was consumed with collecting nitty gritty financial details. As a result, she failed to capture all the information correctly and missed out on other crucial details mentioned by clients.
Altogether, these challenges led to lost time, revenue, and mental capacity that could be channeled to increasing her client book and providing the best value to her clients.
How did AdvisorFlow change this narrative?
With AdvisorFlow, Vaneesa can now collect information from her clients irrespective of where they are in the world without a long, physical onboarding meeting. As a cloud-based platform, advisors can access the AdvisorFlow portal on a desktop or mobile device.
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To maximize the first client meeting, Vaneesa sends out AdvisorFlow’s introductory survey before meeting with prospective clients to prepare ahead and ask meaningful questions.
By sending out these surveys, automation has been introduced into her onboarding process, as she spends little to no time manually collecting basic information.
Instead of the long PDF documents routinely sent to clients, Vaneesa can now send pre-built and customizable surveys that ask the right questions based on industry standards needed to provide clients with quality and comprehensive financial advice. The flexibility that AdvisorFlow provides in its surveys has given Vaneesa and her team the autonomy to tailor each survey to her client’s specific needs and goals.
“Having used and tested financial planning tools and surveys, I find AdvisorFlow unique because I can customize my client questionnaires to reflect my practices' philosophies and client needs.”
In Vaneesa’s eighteen years of experience, she has observed her client’s financial goals and needs are “never simply about money”. In reality, some underlying issues and concerns will surface after engaging with clients and asking the right questions.
“AdvisorFlow has helped me build strong client relationships. It has removed the distractions of focusing on hard facts during client meetings. Instead, we focus on what is important and get to the real reasons and motives for their financial goals”.
With AdvisorFlow’s white labeling option, Vaneesa has personalized and branded her customer discovery webpage to link directly to AdvisorFlow’s surveys. The client profile feature provides an opportunity for Vaneesa to create a personable yet professional bio that prospects and clients view on the client registration page.
Vaneesa’s experience of slow and poor completion of paperwork changed drastically with AdvisorFlow’s surveys. Instead of feeling unmotivated and procrastinating completing paperwork, Vaneesa’s client are at ease and have gained confidence in filling out AdvisorFlow surveys. This has, in turn, become more rewarding for her and her team while saving them ample time in their overall financial advisory process.
“From my first client and every other client since who has filled out AdvisorFlow surveys, they complete and engage with them much faster and with positive feedback. My most recent client, who filled out a survey, is 68 years old, and she had no issues completing it. She was very impressed with our onboarding process and is keen on working with us.”
To manage and track survey submissions, Vaneesa can access client profiles and their completion status in real time instead of digging through several emails for an extended time per client.
Another valuable automation for Vaneesa’s practice is the email reminders sent out to clients who have yet to complete surveys after a certain period. With this in place, Vaneesa has sent awkward follow-up emails to clients to remind them to complete forms or surveys.
Clients' privacy and security concerns are top of mind when they share their private financial information with advisors.
With AdvisorFlow, Vaneesa’s clients are safe from having their data leaked through email hacks or lost through insecure storage spaces.
Our digital tool is a secure platform that stores clients’ information AWS ecosystem, which is SOC 2 compliant.
As a financial advisor, Vaneesa uses different digital tools to manage and store client data. She uses them separately and has to enter information multiple times into various systems. Vaneesa began using Equisoft, a leading provider of digital business solutions, in 2017 as a customer relationship management (CRM tool)
WIth AdvisorFlow’s recent integration with Equisoft, Vaneesa is excited to see the seamless and secure transfer of clients’ information from AdvisorFlow to Equisoft.
This automation will save time on admin tasks and empower her staff to perform more meaningful and engaging activities.
“We use technology to serve our clients better, provide a better secure means of communication and data collection, and ultimately become more efficient with resources.”
High-performing financial advisors have mastered the act of using technology to handle time-consuming admin work, so they can focus on what truly matters: your clients’ financial well-being. AdvisorFlow is a digital tool that makes clients onboarding and building stronger relationships much easier now and in the future.
How can financial advisors maximize their limited in providing seamless client onboarding in their practice?
AdvisorFlow steps in by reducing the hours spent on client onboarding per client. Here’s what Vaneesa had to say:
“AdvisorFlow saves at least 2 hours in every new client onboarding relationship. For example, we could spend up to ten hours per client, but now we might spend six to seven hours on different client-related activities like meetings, collecting statements, creating a financial plan, etc.”.
AdvisorFlow is an intuitive platform with simplified questions and survey categories for clients at different financial literacy levels.
Within a year of using AdvisorFlow, Vaneesa and her team have seen tremendous results in how efficiently they use their time and resources and the quality of their client relationships.
Are you ready to make a difference in your discovery & and onboarding process? AdvisorFlow is the right tool for your practice!
