What are Client Education Seminars?
Educational seminars aren’t exactly new. In fact the healthcare profession has held patient education seminars for many years. From weight-loss programs to Lasik eye surgery practitioners, potential patients have learned a lot from doctors willing to teach, and healthcare providers willing to partner with those practices.
In the financial world, insurance agents, financial advisors, investment specialists and others have a number of prospecting tools including educational seminars, but may have found them unsuccessful or cumbersome to execute well and at scale.
What if it were easier for brands like Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Ameriprise and others to put educational seminars to work to empower their representatives to educate clients and build profitable portfolios?
What if your advisors’ clients were empowered and delighted?
A solution like Client Event Services can help financial advisors, investment specialists and others put on educational seminars to empower clients. Empowerment and success lead to delighted ambassadors who send their friends to their favorite financial professional.
We understand that local advisors and reps get pulled in 100 different directions. Maintaining current business, running your office daily, behind the scenes needs like certification renewals and continuing education, compliance… who has time to run client seminars?
All is not lost. Client seminars don’t have to be complicated.
Here are a few tips to running a successful client education seminar.
Keep it small to start
Scale is great, but a smaller event is easy to manage and duplicate. Starting with a manageable event can ease advisors into the seminar world through smaller wins.
Whether it’s 10 people at a local brewery, 15 people at a popular lunch spot or 30 people in a classroom setting at your local college, smaller crowds are easier to feed (we all love free food), easier to teach and easier to follow up with after the event.
Once your partners create a successful event and get a taste for client interaction at this level, simply duplicating the program makes it much easier. Plus, it’s easier to double attendance each time rather than start with 100 people.
The last bonus to this process is that you get to test what the ideal crowd is for each representative. Some may thrive with 15. Others may wow a crowd of 100. As the company behind the rep and the event, you can help manage the most successful events that bring the most return on marketing investment for you.
Keep it close
The fewer miles we have to travel, the more likely we are to make a meeting. When considering the venue with your local reps, focus on a specific and reasonable geographic area. Whether it’s social media advertising in a 20 mile radius or a specific set of ZIP codes close by that venue. Then, expand as you explore other venues.
Keep it short
Sure, we’d all love to get clients in a room for an unlimited time to really dig into how we can help. That’s just not reasonable. Once again, it’s best to start small.
A lunch and learn is great, so you can start with a reasonable presentation that turns into longer conversations, capped off by a free meal for attendees.
You could also keep it to a cocktail hour, serving hors d’oeuvres and refreshments.
Keeping it short shows the attendees you respect their time. It also helps the facilitator by keeping their “stage time” manageable. Creating a 30-45 minute teaching presentation may be less daunting than a 4-hour workshop.
An additional benefit to keeping it short but full of great information (more on that below), is the idea that you always want to leave wanting more. If you deliver just enough information to excite attendees so they walk away ready to take their financial portfolio to the next level, they’re more likely to come back with more questions and more likely to become a client.
Keep it educational
People don’t want to attend a sales pitch. However, they do appreciate learning how to manage their finances. We could all use help in that area.
Of course, the goal is to build a relationship and develop trust, turning attendees into clients and taking current clients to a deeper level. That happens when you educate, empower and elicit emotion.
This idea of helping is the crux of a presentation I gave to hundreds of marketers at an international marketing and sales conference. We all want to be the “sexy marketer.” We all want to sell. But what moves consumers today is trust. Trust is gained through service and helping others. That’s why helpful is the new sexy in the world of consumer interactions.
You can learn more about educational seminars, connect with a Client Event Seminars specialist and learn more about EPI in general here:
Client Event Services
Financial planning photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Budget planning photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Map photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
