Don’t let challenges stop you from giving advice

With the pandemic preventing face-to-face meetings, advisers have had to adapt.

But for more involved discussions like those needed for estate planning, it’s made the process more challenging and it can take longer for some clients to reach decisions.

“I think with inheritance tax you can often hit the client with an unknown,” says James Hawkins of Isca Wealth Management.

“I find clients tend to spend a long time getting their heads round it. And face-to-face meetings used to be the answer to that.”

David Hardman of Ludlow Wealth Management agrees: “Having a physical meeting at the right time, either to gain commitment or move a client along the journey is easier than it is remotely.

“It has been a little bit trickier trying to engage with clients,” explains Paul Robinson of Moneyweb.

“But I don’t think it’s stopped us from providing advice.

“You can’t stop providing advice for your clients, whether we’re in a pandemic or not in a pandemic.”

“You can’t stop providing advice for your clients, whether we’re in a pandemic or not in a pandemic.” – Paul Robinson, Moneyweb.

Tip – Use SOLLA’s tips for providing advice remotely

We spoke to the founder and joint chair of the Society of Later Life Advisers (SOLLA), Tish Hanifan, to get her thoughts on advising elderly clients remotely. Read her thoughts here.

Tip – Progress conversations outside of meetings

There are a number of things you can do outside of a client meeting to help advance their estate planning.

What you send a client ahead of and following a remote meeting must work harder than when having physical meetings.

“Because estate planning can be fairly complicated for clients to understand, I tend to send them a series of emails with small amounts of information, rather than bombarding them with too much at once,” says James.

“It’s about warming them up for when I next speak to them.”

Videos are a great way to introduce complex information.

For example, our animated video introducing the basics of inheritance tax could be useful to send to a client to watch. You could also send our popular, client-friendly guide to inheritance tax to a client in the post for them to read over in their own time.

These useful tools can be found in our client conversations toolkit below.

Client conversations toolkit

Use our resources to educate and nurture clients when having conversations about estate planning.

See our toolkit