Are you still manually calling up clients to schedule their financial check-ins? If so, learn how this financial advisor automated his quarterly check-in process to free up 10 hours every month using Zapier and Redtail CRM.
I’ll show you the setup I did for my client to automate his quarterly and annual check-in process to streamline communications, save time, and provide a better overall experience for his financial planning clients. I’ll cover the objectives, tech stack, and strategy of the automations, and then I’ll walk you through the zaps I built in Zapier.
The Objective: Automated Client Check-In
One of the primary roles of a financial advisor is to regularly check in on clients and make any necessary updates to their financial plan. But this task can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when you have to chase down clients to actually schedule those check-in meetings.
The financial advisor I worked with faced this exact problem. He had just downsized his firm’s staff to just a couple of assistants, so he needed to find ways to automate and remove as much manual work as possible.
He was working on building out a program to ensure clients received consistent check-ins throughout the year in addition to an annual review meeting, which is a more in-depth meeting to cover things like their financial planning score, taxes, and other comprehensive planning items.
As a lifestyle practice owner, he wasn’t interested in doing “surge” meetings where he crams all of his annual reviews at the end of the year, which would lead to a huge pileup of work. He would rather spread the workload throughout the year, so all of his clients have a designated month where they are due for their annual review.
So, he’s got the annual review meetings, which happen throughout the year across all of his clients, as well as the shorter check-in meetings which happen on a quarterly, semiannual, or annual cadence for each client, depending on that client’s service tier.
That is a lot of meetings and dates to keep track of.
And up until this point, my client and his staff had been managing the scheduling of these meetings by manually calling up clients and scheduling with them. They used a large spreadsheet to keep track of when each client was due for their review meeting, and there wasn’t really a formal process for scheduling the check-ins.
Because of this, the process had become very tedious for the staff to manually manage, so we figured out a way to automate it.
Strategy and Workflow Mapping
Let me walk you through the strategy we used to automate this process.
Like many financial advisors, my client was limited to using broker-dealer approved software. His tech stack included Redtail CRM, Constant Contact for email marketing, and OnceHub for scheduling.
The automations are split into two main workflows:
For the Quarterly, Semiannual, and Annual Check-ins automation, all three zaps follow a similar pattern:
Contacts are identified in Redtail based on their service tier tags
They're automatically added to the appropriate Constant Contact list
A tag is added in Redtail to track who needs scheduling
When clients schedule, the tag is automatically removed
For those who don't schedule, we create a note in Redtail and generate a follow-up task
Only quarterly and semiannual clients will have an annual review meeting, which is more comprehensive than a check-in. Annual clients only get the annual check-in.
For the Annual Review Automation:
On the first of each month, the automation identify all Redtail contacts tagged for annual review in that month
The system automatically sends out the annual review email
If the client schedules through OnceHub, they're automatically tagged in Redtail as "Scheduled Annual [Year] Review"
If they don't schedule within a week, a task is created and assigned to a staff member to follow up
Once scheduled, a task is automatically created and assigned to the lead advisor to prepare for the review
One limitation we had to work around was Constant Contact's automation capabilities. We originally wanted to create an automated reminder sequence in Constant Contact to follow up with clients who hadn’t scheduled their check-ins, but because of automation limitations, there wasn’t a way to remove clients from that sequence once they schedule. We considered a few different options, but ultimately my client chose the simplest approach which was to implement the reminders using Constant Contact’s “Resend to non-openers” feature. The downside was that this meant he would need to manually send out the campaign email to clients, but it’s only once every quarter and the automation creates a task in Redtail to remind him to send it out. And it also creates tasks to manually follow up with clients who didn’t schedule after the reminder emails.
The beauty of this system it automatically runs in the background with very little manual intervention. The only manual work required is following up with clients who don't schedule their check-in or review meeting, but all of the tracking of who scheduled their meeting and who didn’t is handled automatically.
Zapier Automations Walkthrough
Watch the YouTube video above to get a look at the zaps I built in Zapier for my client!
The Results
How did all of this work out for my client?
The impact was immediate. Before implementing these automations, my client and his staff were spending hours each month manually tracking who needed check-ins, sending individual emails, and making phone calls to schedule meetings. Now, the system automatically identifies clients due for check-ins, sends the emails, and tracks who has and hasn't scheduled.
The automation saves them approximately 10 hours every month, which equates to roughly $3,000 when you consider the hourly rate of a financial advisor. He can now spend those 10 hours on revenue-generating activities like billable client work or strategic planning.
And now that this check-in program is running like clockwork, my client can easily maintain high-touch client service without being tied down by administrative tasks.
Would you like to achieve similar results in your practice? Feel free to click the link in the description below to schedule a free consultation with me so we can discuss how to streamline your client communications and free up your time
And if you have any questions about the setup I showed in the video above, leave your questions in the comments of this post or the YouTube video and I’ll answer them for you.
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