Transform Your Financial Planning Meetings by Ditching Spreadsheets and PowerPoint
After 10 minutes, most audience attention plummets to zero during a PowerPoint presentation. Spreadsheets aren’t much better, especially since close to 90% of spreadsheets contain errors. So why are financial advisors still using these tools as their preferred media when presenting vital financial information to clients? In this blog, we explore why financial advisors should move away from outdated presentation tools and how The Conversation Hub makes this easier.
Challenges in Traditional Presentations
In-person financial advisor meetings historically consisted of a stack of printouts and binders full of paper that were mostly ignored. In an effort to save all of those trees and as technology evolved, these meetings moved on to computers. PowerPoint and Excel became the tool of choice for advisors to present data. But these applications are only as good as their users—most financial advisors aren’t expert designers who can build compelling slides or Excel wizards who can take large data sets and shape them in ways to easily facilitate decision-making.
In addition, PowerPoint and Excel are usually only good at looking at the past—what about scenario and what-if planning? Then you need to switch over to yet another set of tools. All of this interchanging between reports and charts in different applications that may or may not integrate well can make you look unprepared and increase the likelihood that you’ll lose your client’s attention. Once you add all this complexity into a virtual meeting on a platform like Zoom, potential issues compound. So why are financial advisors still running meetings this way? It only increases their stress and adds no reassurance for their clients. Thankfully there is a better way with The Conversation Hub.
Preparing Your Virtual Meeting
The Conversation Hub solves many of the problems inherent in traditional financial meetings. First, we make it easy for advisors to create prepared meeting steps and agendas to stay on track and on topic. In addition, advisors can combine all client-specific documents into a patented meeting management interface, reducing the need to toggle between applications.
To make it easier to bring data systems together, The Conversation Hub allows advisors to automatically pull information from host systems like CRMs and financial planning tools into meetings ahead of time. This saves time (and reduces errors) from manually sourcing and saving individual reports and then trying to find the filesystem during the meeting.
Features like look-ahead to the next stage, dynamic presentation of meeting topics based on pre-selections before the meeting, and the ability to seamlessly go forward and back via the meeting interface ensures that all necessary topics are covered and no important steps missed. Afterwards, all meetings are automatically scored for Meeting Quality, allowing you to continuously improve your performance over time.
With these purpose-built features, advisors can be confident in their meetings and clients are reassured that their financial futures are in good hands. If you’re interested in learning more about The Conversation Hub, book a free demo and see how we can help improve your financial advisor meeting planning!
