Seeds looks to offer a more personalized profile for prospects and clients, according to Zach Conway, CEO & Founder, who kicked off the discussion. Advisors should want to deliver a personalized experience to clients that’s specific to them, and that keeps them coming back, he explained, offering companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Youtube as examples of firms that consistently provide personalized services.
“For many of us, it’s more like an assembly,” Conway said of how advisors take on prospective clients.
The investing assembly line right now, he explained, takes prospects’ personal needs and stuffs them into a cookie-cutter portfolio with third-party investment products in an “off-brand PDF proposal.”
“Very often, it’s like I’m speaking French to the client, but I speak German, and then I have to move on to the next in the assembly line,” he added, pointing out that the average RIA firm had net negative revenue growth over the past five years.
In developing Seeds, Conway looks to build a multi-dimensional profile to better understand advisors’ clients, but with customization that can be scaled to save time and use engagement to retain more clients.
For example, an advisor may meet with the Crockett Family, who are listed in a dashboard; advisors can access an assessment to complete with the client in the first meeting they have. The advisor can ask the family about how much risk they’re comfortable with, how much risk they need to take to meet their objectives, their financial goals, and more.
“I want to know if he’s more of an emotional or analytical thinker,” Conway said of James Crockett, a member of the family in this case. Seeds prompts the advisor to ask how the client sees things like conventional wisdom about investing: whether they’re traditional or someone who would call on a Saturday to sell their stocks and buy NFTs.
Finally, the Seeds assessment tries to assess client values, not on a thematic basis but instead ranking preferences like climate protection or waste mitigation.
Taken together, that produces a personality mindset for the advisor to share with the client. In this case, James is a “scorekeeper,” measured on approach, perspective, and mentality. Seeds then populate graphs comparing what James Crockett currently owns compared to what might be the portfolio that fits his “scorekeeper” investing personality. Sales cycles can be cut from months, Conway said, to minutes, thanks to Seeds.
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