One of our advisors brought something to a recent coaches call that I suspect a lot of you are quietly dealing with too: clients canceling client review meetings at the last minute. If financial advisor client cancellations keep showing up on your calendar, you’re not alone. And the real question may not be how to stop them.
When 20 to 30 Percent of One Advisor’s Reviews Get Canceled?
A good chunk of his client reviews, he said somewhere between twenty and thirty percent, are getting canceled the week of or the week before. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Maybe it’s technology. Or clients are just more comfortable with him after all these years. It could even be the cost and hassle of getting to a meeting. He’s a face-to-face guy at heart, and it was bugging him.
A Canceled Review Is a Vote on Priority, Not a Verdict on You
I don’t have one right answer for him. But I did give him a question to chew on. When someone cancels an appointment, at some level, it isn’t a priority. Think about the things you never cancel. A flight. A dinner you’ve been looking forward to. A tee time with your best friends. Nobody cancels those, because they matter. So when a client cancels a review, they’re telling you something about where it ranks, and it’s worth asking why.
“Fine” Is a Terrible Reason to Drive Across Town
Here’s the uncomfortable part. A lot of client review meetings are boring. You sit down, you go through the plan, you check whether anything has changed, and everything is fine. Fine is a terrible reason to drive across town. If the client’s life is going well and the plan is on track, a review that confirms what they already know doesn’t feel urgent, and why would it? A canceled appointment is a vote on priority, not a verdict on you.
How to Make Client Review Meetings More Engaging?
So what do you do about it? Two things.
- First, Give People Options
Maybe it’s a call, maybe it’s Zoom, maybe it’s coffee halfway between your offices. The virtual vs in-person question shouldn’t be your call alone. Ask. Meeting your clients where they actually are turns a cancellation into a different kind of meeting instead of a no-show. - Second, Add Some Excitement to the Relationship
This is the big one. The real magic rarely happens in the review. It happens when you invite a client to the fishing tournament, or take them to lunch at a place they love, or bring them into something you’re doing. Think of it as client appreciation events on a personal scale. That’s where trust deepens, and trust is what ends up getting you introduced to their friends.
Be Interested, Not Just Interesting
That’s the difference between being interesting and being interested, which I wrote about in The ‘V’ Word: The Fastest Way to Deepen Relationships as a Financial Advisor. The more interested you are in your clients’ lives, their kids, their boats, their weekends, the less your meetings feel like paperwork and the more they feel like something worth protecting. That’s how you deepen client relationships and improve the client experience without adding more paperwork.
If you want to hear how we think about building a client experience worth showing up for, the podcast Managing vs Growing Dilemma in Your Business walks through the First Class Cabin approach to your client service model.
This Week’s Quick Win: Find Out What Your Reviews Are Really For
Look at your last five canceled reviews and write down what each meeting was actually for. If the honest answer is “to confirm nothing changed,” you’ve found your problem. Then replace one upcoming review this quarter with an experience, a lunch, a day on the water, a game, and watch what happens to the conversation.
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Make the Shift Stick with a 120-Day System
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