Lauren Farasati :: The Gifted Practice

The art of debriefing a client meeting and delegating the tasks.

How do you debrief a client meeting? Do you have a process or is it “seat of your pants? Let’s assume you have twenty client meetings per week and out of each comes five “to-do’s”…that’s 100 new tasks coming into the practice each week. How quickly and effectively those tasks are delegated has everything to do with how smoothly your practice runs and how unburdened you feel. Here are my favorite debriefing strategies:

1. The no-need debrief. There’s no need to debrief because a Client Relationship Manager or Associate Advisor participates with you in the client meeting. They take notes, quickly verify the action plan with you and delegate the tasks to the appropriate staff people on your team. Because I try to keep my clients free to spend all their time in front of clients and prospects and not chasing tasks, this is, far and away, my option of your choice. It is a luxury to have a staff person with you at every appointment, but for high-end advisors, it’s an investment in freedom.
2. Dictation service. We stole this idea from physicians, who typically dictate case notes immediately after leaving a patient. With this option, your assistant builds in a “cush” of 20-30 minutes following each appointment. From your office, car or home you dictate your notes using your phone and one of the low-cost dictation services like Copy Talk, or Wordzxpressed. Your dictation – whether it’s a debrief to your staff or a summary letter to a client will be in your assistant’s email box in a matter of hours.
3. Live debrief with a key employee. This is the old fashioned way, but it can work great if you use it with discipline. Here you’re just saying, “Jenny, let’s meet at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon to debrief my meetings with the Seaborn’s and the Smith’s”. In order for this system to be effective you need to hold debriefing sessions at least every other day.
4. A voice mail here, an email there. This “non-system system” is widely used. Unfortunately, it keeps staff in the dark, in reactive mode and pretty much guarantees that stuff will fall through the cracks.

Whatever debriefing system you use, use it religiously. The alternative is to procrastinate until the memory fades and hope for the best…and you and your team are much to good for that!

This article was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 8:07 am.
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