Counter Management’s Bad Ideas With Your Better Ones

Dear E.K.,

Your leaders are hearing directly from your clients already. If you are regularly doing client surveys and getting high NPS to validate how clients feel, unless your leaders are paying no attention to the findings, they are hearing directly from clients. I agree that asking a client to write an email directly to your leaders would put you in a negative light. You could forward any email a client writes directly to you, or you could write down exactly what the client says in the meeting and then share that with your leaders.

I’ve been in sales for my entire career, and while there is often a healthy sense of competition amongst team members to be the best, I’ve never been a fan of publishing names in a list to show who is lagging behind. This is mostly because there are often extenuating circumstances behind who is leading, and who is not.

I can remember once having my worst year ever even though I was doing all the “right” things. Timing, budgets and changes at the prospect firms in leadership meant I was showing very poorly. The next year, having done all of the right things, I was in the top position. I stayed there for the next couple of years. Did this mean one year I was terrible at my job and then for a couple of years I was the best? I don’t really think so. There are a lot of factors that contribute to success. Your team is obviously succeeding if the client retention is so high and clients self-report they would refer (NPS).

If you haven’t had a conversation with your leaders about this approach, maybe now is the time to do so. You need to go in with options. You can explain the redlining approach is actually dissuading people from doing their best because it is demotivating. In its place, you’d prefer they:

1. Have 1:1 conversations with each of you to talk about where you stand and what you need to do differently
2. Ask for a business plan — a short two-pagers outlining what you need to do differently
3. Hire a coach or send you to a training session to learn how to close deals most effectively
4. Consider any other idea you think would help!

These are my suggestions, but you know your leaders and your team. Perhaps none of these would work, so you have to find something that would. You can’t simply say you dislike what they are doing now without offering an alternative. Your leaders probably don’t know what the right thing is to measure and motivate, so they just picked something. Give them an alternative, while showing them you are engaged and want to grow. Their approach to motivateion might change as a result.

Dear Bev,

Our firm is implementing a new approach to reviewing client accounts. We’ve always done peer-to-peer reviews where we can choose any other advisor to walk through a client we are meeting with to get insights about what we might have missed. Our firm has grown exponentially, and often it’s hard to get the attention of the person we might most like to talk with. Our senior leaders wanted to come up with a workaround, and they hired a consultant to help with crafting a new approach.

Now, we have to write out a fully baked plan in advance of every meeting, share it (in writing) with a junior advisor on the team and have them write ideas about what they think needs to be changed. This is supposed to give the younger advisors a chance to learn and remove the time necessary for meeting with another colleague.

This is separate from logging notes in Salesforce, and it doesn’t connect to the CRM system at all. It has proven to be a waste of time for most of us, with no measurable outcomes we can point to. I don’t really have a question for you, just a comment that sometimes leadership is disconnected from reality and outside opinions aren’t always the best way to improve things.

A.D.

Dear A.D.,

I need to go on the record as saying I was not the consultant your firm hired to come up with this decision. That’s just in case anyone reading this might think you were giving me a hard time for a bad idea through writing to me for the column.

In fairness to your leadership and to the outside consultant who did the work for you, in many cases there are no easy answers to fix something that (a) needs to be done but (b) contains obstacles to doing it easily, quickly and most effectively. You had a system you were using that was a casual system where you were getting ideas from a respected colleague. That’s great! But not when the colleague gets so busy they can’t spend the time needed.

At one of the firms I work with, we created a cohort of advisors who come together once a month to look at a different client scenario each time — one that is working well and what the team did, and another that needs the panel to weigh in with some ideas. You could informally organize something like this.

You don’t say how long this new process has been in place. I’m respectful of the frustration with having to capture data in more than one place, but I’ll also say at times we take things for granted — especially when you’ve been working with a client for a while. The process of having to write out what’s happening and what you are thinking about doing, and having someone else look it over could prove beneficial.

That said, be sure the form you’ve been asked to fill out is short and to the point. It should also be easy for everyone to fill in and for the person reading it to understand. You could link some areas back to Salesforce such that the reader has to do a little due diligence to see what else is in the system before they provide feedback. This way you aren’t repeating all of the data, rather you are giving insights and asking them to confirm the rest on their own.

Although I understand a junior advisor may not have the breadth and depth you and your more senior colleagues do, there can be value to having someone with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions review something. You can always discard any ideas that don’t fit, but from time to time you may hear an idea that’s a good one. Try to remain open to this process for the foreseeable future.

Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).

She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.


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