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- [00:00]
A
If you allow your client to dictate the flow of the conversation and spend 25% of the time on investments in markets, they will leave on average with lower sentiment than if you reframe that conversation to goals and planning to say, hey, I know you're afraid of tariff mania. Let me show you your Monte Carlo or let me show you your probability of success of retirement. This is why this doesn't matter to you. And, and obviously that's a dumbed down version of someone who's not licensed to give advice. The point is adhering to the CNBC assets and the macroeconomic fears within conversations only eats away at time, very limited time. You get to have the most valuable conversations of your year with your client.
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Foreign.
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C
What is up? And welcome back everyone to another episode of the Practical Planner podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Coleman. Here with me, as always, is Ann Rhodes. And then we have Liam Hanlon here today with Jump. Liam, thanks for joining us, man.
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A
Thanks for having me, guys. Excited to be here.
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C
Yeah, excited to have you. I think, you know, generally this podcast is like really in the weeds of estate planning. But then we kind of weave in some different episodes here talking about like, you know, how practically to be better advisors, you change things about process, what we can learn from others. And I think today's episode will really kind of fall into that second bucket because, you know, obviously if you're an advisor that is not using some sort of note taker, you're way far behind what's going on in the industry today. But you know, besides the use case of, you know, we have our note taker, we can research and think, you know, see things about clients, what we used to talk about. We can create follow up tasks, we can, we can write those emails. We can, we can actually learn a lot about ourselves, our conversations, what we could do better, you know, where we could improve, all kinds of stuff like that. And so I think that's really where this episode is going to go today and where I want to start. This is just, you know, from you guys, your research, what you see, are advisors actually being proactive or are they actually bringing up estate planning? Are they actually bringing up tax planning? Is this something that's driven from the client side? You know, what have you guys seen?
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A
Yeah. If you look across like the four major planning topics, or at least how I bucket them tap retirement, estate and insurance, across each of those advisors are responsible for initiating the discussion about 70 to 75% of the time. So largely it is on the advisor to say, hey, let's have a discussion about X, Y or Z. Estate planning is one of the lowest of the bunch. It's 71% of the time the advisor is initiating it, which just shows that clients are initiating it through either macroeconomic events that are happening and bringing this topic up more likely fears or desires that are tied to specific life events that are going on in their own life. We do some deeper analysis to find correlations between planning events and life events that we track. For instance, one of the simpler ones is you're going to talk about retirement planning. If you've just set a retirement date, sure. That one's easy to to kind of figure out. There's one though, that was shocking to me, or not shocking, but more surprising if you're going through losing a loved one. That's really when estate planning comes up most often for the first time because you're inheriting this money and now you don't know what to do with it. It's basically the beginning of the next generational wealth transformation that we've been talking about in practice. It's actually happening now. So I would say that it is on the advisor. They are being proactive and that have come to exist in the past five to 10 years that have really enabled or empowered advisors to have more meaningful conversations. Jump is great because we capture the data. You know, wealth.com and others are great because it allows advisors to be confident about the analysis, which was probably stopping them from having these discussions 10 years ago.
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C
I'm curious, so like in those four topics, I mean, maybe investments fall under retirement planning, but like all of these were like, you know, either a hundred percent of the time advisor brings it or you know, a hundred percent of the time client brings it. But I'm curious when you think about how much time is spent on these different buckets and they all equal 100, right? Like how much time is actually spent in investments versus some of these other buckets? Because my guess is, you know, like training. If you're in broker dealer life, you're trained to talk a lot about insurance products and then maybe some investments. If you're in normal rea world or big bank or whatever, you spend most of the time talking about investments. So I'm curious because I think this can also tell us a lot about what type of advisors are actually using this type of tool.
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A
Yeah, okay, I see. So yeah, all of the planning topics, retirement, estate tax, insurance, there's also charitable education, planning, they're just much lower frequency. So I don't include them in My core four little little trademark patent pending on that. But those are all goals and planning. So I have a taxonomy that I use from academic literature that a conversation can be broke down into goals and planning, service and compliance, investments in markets, relationship and lifestyle, behavioral coaching, and then other is a catch all. So those six categories are the, are the taxonomy of a conversation between an advisor and a client. On average, advisors and clients spend about 32% of their meeting talking about goals and planning. That's the largest chunk. And it's about, I want to say 2015 to 22% on investments in markets. Now what's interesting is what we see is advisors with the highest emotional intelligence, which we characterize. It's a quantitative formula based on your talk time because there's a green zone for talk time that we can get into. Number of open questions asked, number of empathy statements made and number of emotional check ins performed. If you're doing all those things optimally or close to optimal, you actually spend your meetings differently than those that aren't the top ranked. Emotional or yeah, emotional iq. I don't even know what to call it. Anyway, so those like high emotional IQ advisors spend about 40% of their time on goals and planning. So this retirement education, insurance, tax, estate planning conversations, they're spending much more time on those portions of the conversation and much less time we see it taken away from investments in markets. So investments in markets with advisors that have the highest emotional intelligence, they're spending like 18% on investments in markets versus if you have very low emotional intelligence. I think it's 23% so 5% difference anyway. Insight. Yeah, go ahead Thomas.
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C
No, that's not as big of a difference as I thought. And I think it's interesting because I think a lot of the industry has move to talking about life planning and goal planning and things like that. And I think that's important. But what I found is like it's, it really depends somewhat on net worth level of clients. Right. A lot of times if you're in this like middle class, you know, there's a little bit less in the tactical space of what to do. Right. It really is like, okay, great, we have this money, you know, how do we have you live a better life? Like, you know, these are really good conversations to have. But when you move up like you know, probably the type of clients and used to work with on the legal side and a lot of the really complicated, complex clients I work with, you barely even have time to get into the like. So, you know, tell me about your Dream day, right? Like, what would be, you know, the perfect life in 10 years. And you know, all that because there's just so much in the weeds of the tactical side and so much to get done that they're like, can we just get to recommendations and implementation? Because I just do not have the time to spend, you know, three meetings on, you know, what would you do if money wasn't a goal and what would happen, you know, how much would you regret, you know, X, Y and Z if you were to pass away next year? And I think those are all super valuable. But I, I've just found it so interesting as I've moved up markets over my years of how the conversations change away from the, like, we have so much time and space to think and there's less things to do with our money to like, oh my gosh, there's so much complexity in our life. And when I think about like this estate and tax side, you know, I have some clients right now planning for, you know, 50 to $300 million events and like, you are just like the estate world itself. I mean, and I would love to hear you talk about this. There is just a million options of what to do that it's like so hard to actually make decisions in the complex spaces because there's so much to do.
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B
Yeah. I would say, Liam, it's so interesting when you talk about your framework because to me it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you can actually keep some statistical, like almost like heat maps, right? Of like of a four by six of categories. It's like the four big topics and then the six that's like along the process of like implementing those, like, where do you fall? And so I am curious if in the sort of conversations that you guys are, you know, getting to access, like to Thomas's point, like you're charting this on like the EQ of the advisor. But I'm sure that also the client's EQ and the client's willingness to talk about these objectives really does drive this to a great extent. And so if you can find sort of best practices for advisors who maybe even just are trying to like Thomas, kind of like break into like an ultra high net worth or high net worth, ultra high net worth practice. Like, what do you do you see patterns to that? I'm just very curious and I'm sure that as a lawyer, we judge EQ in a very different way within the legal space because of also the conversations we have to have about, about control and some of the like legal terms that we have to put in place into people's documents. But I'm just curious.
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A
Well, let's ask Thomas a question then. As, as the professional, our resident professional advisor here. So you said you, you're growing a book of high net worth. Ultra high net worth. Just take two clients within the same category of wealth. Is there an example where one of them wants to talk about crypto and the CNBC assets, real estate, how the market's doing, tariffs, and one of them who's all business, hey, what's my allocation? You know, what's my Monte Carlo? Do those two Personas and archetypes exist? Or are we saying that in the ultra high net worth space, it's basically one person, you know, just multiplied across a bunch of different bodies?
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C
No, definitely not. But I actually don't know. If I find them in either of the two buckets, I'll have the one who's like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm this wealthy, but I don't. But I still have never felt more insecure about money. And so there's like this whole world of like, okay, well, you know, you're at this space where the only goal doesn't have to be maximizing wealth. It's how do we maybe use your wealth and create, you know, a way for you to feel secure? So, you know, I have a client, he's like almost 400 million net worth. He's sold part of his business, he has a second sale coming and he wants to buy in New York. Like, you know, to buy a place, he'd want like 5 to 10 million dollars. And he just can't stomach the idea of doing that because he grew up in a way. Like his parents, like live on Social Security right now. So, like, it's just crazy for him to be like, I am gonna have a 25 to 40 thousand dollar a month mortgage. And it's like he has enough in his portfolio that he could just literally lock in 30 year treasury bonds with literally just a small allocation to pay for, you know, basically everything that he ends up needing. And so even though for him, you know, it's not long, short direct indexing, and it's not private investments, and it's not focusing on growth. You can make some changes here to say, like, you know, all this, this is covered and you don't have to worry about money. But then there's another person you work with who is like, you know, maybe they're 80 to 100 net worth and all they can think about is Maximizing their wealth. It's like, you know, I would never think about a dollar in fixed income or bonds. Every dollar is going to private investments. I'm doing day trading. I'm doing everything to maximize it. And I don't really care about any of the other things other than I should never have one less dollar than I possibly could have. And so those conversations are very different and same with like the third person who's high net worth. And the only goal is to create, you know, generational wealth. So their kids, their grandkids, everybody never has to think about and worry about money. Maybe they got wealthy, but they had a horrible life to get there. And so they're like, I realize that this is amazing, but I would never want to do this again. So how can I carve out and create a life for my kids that they don't have to trade away their whole life for money? And so like there's. Those three people might all be really wealthy, but like the conversations and what you do are, are so different. And I think that's where like it being an advisor gets really hard because like you can be taught how to serve and help somebody, but like it does not do the same for any of those three.
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A
Yeah. And did you have something to add there?
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Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, you know, as an estate planner, I'm, I'm curious actually Liam, if your company works with any attorneys or really you are just targeting the, the wealth management vertical? Because I will tell you here@wealth.com, we're asked constantly, like, when do you plan on like releasing products for like attorneys, et cetera. So I'm curious about that. But I will say to piggyback off of what Thomas just said, where you find your conversations in like the ultra high net worth, private client, like planning space is actually very interesting also because that same person who's going to Thomas, you know, to talk about their investments have a different view of how it is that they want to protect their wealth and define their legacy. And sometimes actually we find that the client changes because you have spouses who are doing planning together and you can't forget that. Actually, you know, maybe one spouse is super interested in what's happening during life, right. Like to their money. So this, these are, this is growing the investments, paying less in income taxes because that directly impacts, you know, their, their spending, etc. And then you have another spouse who's super interested in like the post life. What happens, you know, the kids and the grandkids and so you might be actually talking to the different clients about the same wealth. That kind of, I'm, I'm kind of curious how that gets captured, you know, by, by your platform and whether or not you do end up working with estate as well.
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A
I'll answer the first question, which is we are a financial service vertical, focused and obsessed. Nothing that we've created has not been because of the direct result of an advisor or a financial representative or an estate planner or a tax planner or insurance representative saying, I want this thing. That's how we make, what we make is we do primary research on our users and our users are people who get paid to give financial advice. I would say attorneys, like the corporate attorneys of the world or you know, civil litigators. Probably not for them. But if you're an estate planning attorney and you are like a large part of your job is being a part of the financial ecosystem of a high net worth client jump is, is probably right for you. And we've seen that we don't market towards it directly, but a lot of those individuals have, you know, bought from us. We're at 32,000 advisors and representatives across the United States, so we can't keep track of everybody who purchases a license. But we know and are aware of a few groups of, of estate planning attorneys that use us. And they do because the advisors that they work with use us. So it just makes their life easier to share meetings, to interact with each other's notes, so on and so forth.
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B
I think, Liam, we'd find we'd say very much the same thing@wealth.com. so I just wanted to say like, yes, we get asked, but we are singularly focused also on the wealth management financial advisor space.
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C
Yeah.
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A
The second part of this, I was trying to lead Thomas towards maybe an answer that I wanted him to say. He was very nice about his clients and, and bifurcating them into Personas. And I can respect that. Okay. But what we see is, let me give you an example, Thomas. Do you ever talk about bonds or fixed income with your clients?
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C
Some.
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Yeah.
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A
Okay. If bonds are talked about 93% of the time, it's the advisor who brings up bonds. Do you ever talk about real estate or crypto with your clients?
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C
Yes, but you're going to say it's the opposite. It's like 93% of the time it's brought up by the client.
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A
It's about 50. Okay. Which is the, which is the highest initiation rate of any asset. My point of this is clients like myself, I'm not an advisor. I would be a client. I'm not. I don't have enough money. But Thomas, you know, talk to me in 50 years maybe. So clients are subject to macroeconomic conditions and it really impacts what they're coming to the table with. We see this because we track client sentiment at the beginning, the middle and the end of conversations. On average, clients come in with 6.44 on a 10 point scale. That's pretty normal, right? People are a little bit happier than neutral and they leave with 7.47. So advisors in general, great at increasing sentiment. That's kind of your job in a way is to like make the client feel confident about their financial journey. They're coming to you with problems and you're the professional giving them advice. Okay. However, sentiment dipped last year in two months. You want to guess which two months?
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C
April.
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A
It was. It was March and April. Okay, Tariff mania. So it had nothing to do with life events. It had nothing to do with fears and desires. I mean, it did have to do with fears. It was tariff mania and this like, you know, macroeconomic taxation strategy impactor that really scared people. It doesn't impact like the day to day person outside of inflation. And you know, the numbers have been somewhat confusing and the impact that tariffs have had and we don't have to get into that, but people are just afraid when there's a big headline and they want to talk about it. And what I'm telling you guys is this. If you allow your client to dictate the flow of the conversation and spend 25% of the time on investments in markets, they will leave on average with lower sentiment than if you reframe that conversation to goals and planning to say, hey, I know you're afraid of tariff mania. Let me show you your Monte Carlo. Or let me show you your probability of success of retirement. This is why this doesn't matter to you. And obviously that's a dumbed down version of someone who's not licensed to give advice. The point is adhering to the CNBC assets and the macroeconomic fears within conversations only eats away at time, very limited time. You get to have the most valuable conversations of your year with your client. That's the message. Anyway, let me pause there. Thoughts? Yeah.
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B
Liam, it's so interesting you should, should say that because I think a good advisor is a, is a coach, right? And getting the client to focus on the things that actually will make the greatest impact for their plan. And this can be, you know, I think about estate planning, for example, and one of the things that I worry about is this idea of like, well, you have a conversation with a client, you recorded, you know, you have notes and all of a sudden that becomes somehow like what the client is expressing through those notes becomes the, a estate plan that needs to be implemented. But if you didn't have that ability to have a conversation with a professional and in the estate planning space, it very much would be like an attorney rather than just the advisor. And for good reason. Right. Practice of law, you know, they've seen all the things that can go wrong after death, et cetera. But I worry about this because sometimes clients do come in having like just read something in the headlines, read about somebody dying, a celebrity. Right. That's the macro event perhaps. And just reacting to that and a good estate planner in our world is able to then redirect them and say actually flexibility in your plan is a good thing for XYZ reason. Are you sure? Like it's, it may not be a good idea to lock in this rule that you think would be really good for your kids to follow. Right. Like so, for example, the most typical one is like I, before receiving distributions, the child needs to go to college. Well, what's really, let's unpack that. Why college? Right. And are you sure that in the future college will still be so valuable that it's the only way to show that this child has maturity and is sophisticated enough to handle wealth, et cetera, et cetera. So it's so interesting to me because what you're doing is capturing those conversations, raw as they are, and kind of tracking the flow of them and trying to get data, statistics out of them. But I'm sure if we did the same thing for any type of advisory relationship, you would probably find the same themes coming up.
- [21:57]
A
Yeah. And look, the conversational intelligence, which is, I guess I really didn't introduce myself when I started at Jump a year ago. I had actually I met the CEO because I interviewed him in front of 300 consultants. I was working at Ernst Young, introducing AI Wealth Tech to our practice, which was wealth and asset management business consulting. So working with, with the blue chip really Wirehouses in the U.S. wealth management divisions of what are majority investment banks by revenue. So like the Morgan Stanley's of the world and the JP Morgans. I interviewed Parker and right away I saw the value of JUMP because I was doing time in motion projects at a bunch of different clients and we were analyzing how their advisors spent their time and you could see, see the pain that documentation, post meeting documentation and Pre meeting prep had. But beyond that, I called Parker after and I was like, you guys are sitting on what is probably the most valuable data set that's ever been amassed in financial services. And it's not a mass or it's not as valuable at the highest level, but for each individual firm or each advisor, this is gold. And so conversations, because we're able to now capture the full conversation raw and then turn this unstructured data into structured insights, have become more valuable than any other data source that you have. That's why jump. One of the indirect benefits of JMP is that because the note taker is on, you can focus 100% on the conversation itself. And I would tell advisors that to get really good or the best advisors in the next five to 10 years will be like therapists in a way that can ask the question that just hits the client just right to get them to expose as much information as possible. Now you just want the client to talk as much as possible, reveal as much as you can get out of them. Instead of these closed ended questions like Thomas, like what's, you know, is your net worth 5 million? Yes. That gives me nothing, right? It's a binary response that is already structured data. What you want is unstructured data like Thomas, why do you do what you do? And if you give me a five minute response, there's probably 180 data points like why this matters, your fears, your objections to service. Do you think that the value of my advice is worth it? So on and so forth. So anyway, just Ann, I couldn't agree more. And really the this in financial services we think is probably the most mature version of conversational intelligence to date because of the value that it has. No other industry we're seeing a product or a feature being developed this quickly, although it will start happening for anybody who gives advice, not just salespeople and advisors.
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C
I love that you went through the conversation because I think it's interesting. I actually hired an advisor to work for me a long time ago, before note taker basically came out. So somebody could take notes for me and calls so I could listen. Because I watched when I was younger people be like, remember, wait, what did you just say there? Like you'd stop the conversation to write something else. You'd be like, wait, oh, what did you say? And then you like, right? And then you're wrong. And like conversation is entirely ruined, right? And like I know prep is so much of what we have to do. And before you'd be like, oh man, that was Three calls ago they talked about something. I can't figure it out. Now it's go to AI, Ask the question about the client that's put in front of you. I think, like, all of those are just super valuable. But I love what you said about what you can learn about yourself through this because you're right, this data is huge. We can talk about all these points about, you know, 73%, blah, blah, blah. But when you actually boil it down to you and your practice, I think this is where things start to get really interesting. You know, I've seen people use different forms of AI to be like, to be the strategic coach, you know, prompt it really well, what am I doing wrong? Like, am I talking too much? You know, And I also think there's a whole nother side of it of, you know, I think sometimes we're pushed advisors to just make people happy. And I love your point here of like, you start here, you maybe you're not feeling as good, you end the call feeling better. And I think that's super valuable for people coming in, they're worried, you kind of remind them about, hey, your, Your goal is 30 years away. We don't need to worry about tariffs today, like, blah, blah, blah. But I think there's the flip side of it, of am I having the hard conversations with my clients I need to have as well, because a lot of advisors are so scared about losing clients that they won't tell them what they need to hear. And Carl Richards had this awesome quote, quote I heard maybe like five years ago that he said he tells his advisor that he would never fire him for telling him what he needs to hear, but he'll fire him if he doesn't. And so, like, I've really tried hard to incorporate that in my practice of like, when I see things that people are doing wrong to facilitate that conversation and, you know, we're all here, you know, so many people are going to make excuses, right? We overspend because of X, Y and Z. We make a bad investment decision because of X, Y and Z. But sometimes we really need somebody to kind of be the tough love and tell us, like, you make $700,000 a year and you save $0 last year. Like, there, there's nothing else to blame other than you have to get in the weeds and make changes and make decisions because this is a bad spot. And so I'd be really curious for advisors or I would challenge advisors to like, use the AI to learn about what you're doing right and wrong and like, See what it would say about you. And if you're willing to have hard conversations, do you facilitate them well? But also ask like, like, are you helping people feel better Post call too? Because I think that's a really interesting one where at the end of the day, our advice is becoming commoditized. Products are becoming commoditized. Like people are hiring people to make them feel better, make the right decisions, understand them and guide them. And you can probably learn pretty well from AI if you are hitting those points.
- [27:43]
A
I love this. And Thomas, like the exact thing that you just said is what we've heard from advisors. We show them insights and then they say, okay, great, like my talk time is whatever. And you know, I asked this amount of questions and like, okay, these are the assets that are trending. Give me coaching. So we're, what we're developing right now, it's in beta, is the ability to just ask our AI associate, hey, how can I, like, increase my client satisfaction from the beginning to the end of the call, it looks at all your conversations that you've saved. It knows what the client sentiment is at the beginning and end. It knows what you did in the call, and then it'll come back and say, here's what you do when you really increase satisfaction. And here's what you do when you don't. Like, when you increase satisfaction. You do these three things consistently. I call it really like the, the whoop. I don't know if you guys are whoop or like Apple Watch. Yeah, so this is the whoop of financial services, right? So my whoop, I, I started the year with a heart rate of X percent or, you know, X beats per minute. And then it was going up for some reason and I was like, oh, maybe I'm not exercising as much as I used to be, you know, a month or two months ago. And I looked at my exercise, it was also going up. So these are like two things that should be inversely correlated. And they were correlated. So I was like, okay, that can't be it. Then I looked at my sleep and my sleep debt. I was getting like two hours less of sleep because of this job. And no, I'm not going to blame the job, but anyway, so I found the correlation through the data. Now what you can do now on whoop is chat with the AI and just say like, hey, why is this happening? And so that's what we're starting to do is the first part is educating you, making you aware, giving you the data back. We're having an. We're 20 minutes into or 28 minutes into this interview, we've gathered so much data. I want it structured and I want it put back in a way that I can digest and is salient. That's number one. And then number two is like, I do a ton of these podcasts, interviews, events. I want to know how I can do better, right? So, like, tell me when Ann or Thomas, like, maybe their sentiment dropped in this call. What was I doing? Should I talk less? Should I ask more questions? Probably say, yes, you're talking too much. But the point is actionable insights is part two of this journey. Journey education, and then action. Without the action and the coaching, it's not useless. But you put it on the user to have to figure out why or what. And it's really difficult. It's like, do the math for them is what we used to say in consulting. Don't put a formula in front of somebody and have them have to calculate their own costs. Give them the full number and then just tell them how you got there. So anyway, agree, no, super good points.
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C
One other thing I kind of want to hit on here is how to interpret the data, because I think what's interesting is like, you know, we, everybody. I think there's such a push right now of like, here's how much advisors talk, and the goal is to drive it down as low as possible. But I actually don't think that's the case. I think you actually have to make it way more specific to what the meeting is about. Right? So, like, you know, your first call, bringing out a client, that meeting should be about them, getting to know them, their goals, their values, what's important to them, how they feel about money and debt, investing and bonds and stocks, like, whatever, like, open the door so they can talk as much as you can, so you hear them, you understand them, and you can guide them in the correct way. But like, for me, for example, like, right now, we're going into tax reviews. We're reviewing their tax return. What happened last year, you know, how projections were, what it looks like for this year, what we're doing for Safe harbor, what tax planning moves we make. That's a call they're probably going to talk 10 of the time. And so I think, right, like, you know, you have different meetings and different things where you're like, this should be all about the client, and there's different meetings where it should be be all about you. So if you said, hey, you know, AI, how much of the time am I talking? It was like, 60%. It might be really misleading than if you said like, how much am I talking in my goals and values call? How much am I talking in my annual review? And those might be like, you know, 30%. You're like, actually great, I'm doing all these right things. But you don't want to be technically pushed into saying like, oh, wait, I should talk less, when in reality, maybe you are doing it right. And it's just different meetings and cadences. So I think we get all this industry data, but then it's like it has to be specific to what you are doing in that situation.
- [32:10]
A
I come from a background of statistics, so I'm going to try not to get a little too nerdy with you on this. But let's just take the talk time use case. Let's break it down into just client reviews and prospecting. Now, for each of them, is there a right. Talk time is based on what you believe success is. That's called a dependent variable. So every meeting you're going in with an intention, if you want your client to leave you, then you should probably act in a certain way if you want them to be happier and stay with you. There is a talk time that has a correlation and potentially a causal relationship with success. For prospecting, the intention is always very easy to distill. You want prospects that are eligible for your services to become clients. In most cases, right, you're trying to grow your book of business. So if you're having a prospecting call, you want that person to, if it's your first call, agree to join a second call. We analyzed like 8,000 conversations in this exact use case. What we found was any talk time below 66%, you're fine, okay? But the moment you go over, you start decreasing by about like 3% every 10% or so. But above 75%, you've now reduced your likelihood of success that that prospect will agree to a second call by 11%. So above 3/4 of the meeting, if you talk for more than 3/4 of your prospecting first calls, you have reduced your likelihood of success that that prospect will join you for a second call by 11%. And this is like through predictive analysis, double machine learning. There are a few different tests that you have to do to prove that this thing is actually causing something to happen. And we've done that work. So for prospecting, there is a green zone, an orange zone, and a red zone. For client reviews, it's not that simple. Like client reviews, you have a different intention each time. Maybe you want them to start an estate plan, maybe you want them to create a financial plan, or maybe you want them to update your asset allocation, or you want to capture net new assets based on each of those dependent variables, the objectives that you want to achieve. There's probably talk time that differs. That's optimal, right? It's a, it's a quadratic equation. So you can talk. Not enough. You can talk too much. But for the most part, we don't see a lot of relationship, causal relationships between talk time and client review objectives. So you're spot on, Thomas. It is context specific and it also really only matters in very, very specific contexts. Prospecting is easy to like, hypothesize. If you dominate a prospecting conversation, the prospect's like, I'm not even getting to tell you about myself. I haven't revealed anything to allow you to react and give me like sound advice. Anyway, that's what we find in like the data.
- [35:18]
C
That was super interesting as we wrap up. What is a question that we did not ask you that we should have that'd be super valuable for audience to hear?
- [35:28]
A
I would say, you know, what's the future of AI within wealth management? Is the question that I'm getting now every single day. It feels like we have now hit a tipping point, if you will. Craig Iskowitz, Ezra Group just came out with their 2026 report on note takers Friday evening. I'm sure you guys spent your Friday like I did, reading through that robust document. And he says 1 in 10 people use 1 in 10 advisors, use jump in the United States, which is pretty crazy. We're at about 32,000, probably 33 by the end of this interview. Zox has a lot, Zeppelin has a lot. Zoom and Copilot. There are great competitors out there. The point is almost every single, it's the fastest growing category that's ever existed. Almost every single advisor is using one today. And they're using it because it saved them time. But what comes after that? Right? Does 60% of our users save between one to three hours per day? But that's not the promise of AI is just to save time. It's to also enhance the time that you've been given back to optimize that time to make you a better practitioner in every critical conversation. And so the question that we're asking is what is the answer to that? We see conversational intelligence as the engineering that really makes advisors for the first time ever, really educates them on how they can be better and then gives them that actionable coaching. So we touched on those components. But that's what I'm looking at and that's what the advisors that I speak to are looking at when they're making decisions now about which tools to go with. And I'm sure wealth.com feels the same. It's a little bit of a different business model, but the analysis and the advice that you can provide, the recommendations are only getting better, right? It's not about just the time that it saves an advisor to do these tasks, but now the recommendation itself is better than it was in the past. So to me it sounds like if
- [37:38]
B
we're here on the practical planner, and there's one practical tip that we can get out of this is that if you are a JMP user, the time that you're saving the one to three hours a day, which is fantastic, is like a direct benefit of using one of these AI notetakers. But you're not getting the full benefit unless you're taking some more time. So out of those one to three hours of savings to then go through the data to actually learn what you can take from it. Because it sounds like JMP is actually not only telling you, playing back for you, your own statistics, but actually also giving you sort of statistics across the board of best practices, other data that they're getting from just all their users to be able to enhance your own practice. And I will tell you this, Liam, if you have a way to not only improve the satisfaction of the clients and their satisfaction score, but to also teach somebody how to fire a client very softly through a conversation, I think that data would be very interesting too.
- [38:40]
A
Okay, we're going to need to increase our sample size there. But yeah, Ann said beautifully. Couldn't have said it better myself. You should. I'll give you my hourly rate for this for this hour.
- [38:50]
C
Well, I think the other interesting thing and to hit on just as what you're talking about is like, so I talk to a bunch of people all the time. I talk to Jason Wank all the time. And like one thing that he talks a lot about is like, you know, the future of AI is actually like we will not have seven different softwares over here. Like, AI will basically have your own custom software. And I think the like voice to use AI will be really interesting of like clients ending call. And I'll be like, hey, book us a call for June 21st at 1pm Done. Email sent out, out. It'll be like, oh, hey, you know you have last year's tax return. What's 110 safe harbor for them. And it'll just be there for me, right? I won't go there. I won't type. I'll say, like, ooh, well, what happens if they have 300,000 more of RSU's vest in their new grant and they're withholdings only 22% again, like last year? Oh, great. And it'll give me the data. Right. Like, I think people and advisors are so worried about AI taking our jobs, when in reality, what we should be worried about is advisors who use AI better than anybody else else and making them better at the job than anybody else. Like, I think that's where the future goes. It's not replacing, it's enhancing. It allows us to spend less time in the background and more time with clients, less time in research and more time in education. And really just doing what we all really want to do is help people and not be like, let me go analyze this in Excel for three hours when I could just ask something to do it in three minutes.
- [40:04]
A
There's, there's no primary research to date that suggests that millennials or Gen Z's or whatever are leaning towards a AI driven or hybrid advice model. There is primary research that suggests they're more comfortable with AI being a part of the advice model. But actually, young people, millennials, have the greatest desire to work with another human right now in financial planning, which is, for me, spectacularly astonishing. Just because we hear all of these headlines and assume that the whole world is just going to be getting advice from AI, it's just not true. Not today. And we'll keep looking at the data. And I think you're right, Thomas, and I think it doesn't mean that there's going to be mass consolidation in tech. It just means that you're going to get tech delivered in a different way. Why we're really bullish at JUMP is because the meetings that you have are the meat of your relationships. And because we've connected to every other piece of the tech stack, we sit as almost a command center. We call ourselves an operating system because we think that we can do a lot of the tasks from jump. But that doesn't mean you won't use E money. It just means you could ask JUMP a question and it could go to Emoney for you and drag that information and then the recommendation. Emoney's great at doing the analysis, and we don't necessarily want to do that. So. So you can expose the analysis in one place. So what it's going to reduce is switching from one tech to the other. Doesn't mean there'll be less tech, just means the advisor won't have to go to as many pieces of tech. Anyway, super interesting.
- [41:48]
C
Really good conversation. Liam, we appreciate you joining us today, man. Really, really different for us, but a really cool episode. We have to talk about a lot of things that I don't think we normally talk about, but I think it'll be really helpful for advisors. So appreciate the time and good to see you as always. And everybody, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate five stars. Subscribe and share with another advisor and we'll see you back in a couple weeks.
- [42:10]
A
Thank you. And thank you Thomas. Really appreciate it guys. This was fun.
- [42:25]
B
Sam.