You will produce a three-year plan that joins prospecting, advice quality, servicing and referrals.
Most representatives have a sales target for this year and a vague hope for the years after. Very few have a plan that connects how they find clients, how well they advise them, how they look after them and where the next clients will come from. Those four things are usually managed separately, if at all, and they pull against each other: a push on prospecting squeezes out reviews, missed reviews mean fewer referrals, fewer referrals mean more prospecting. This project puts them in one document.
Write a three-year practice plan that joins prospecting, advice quality, servicing and referrals. It should set yearly targets you can measure, name the file quality checks you will hold yourself to, and carry the comments of a supervisor or mentor who has read it.
The plan is for you, so it does not need to be long or polished. Two to four pages is plenty. It should be specific enough that, a year from now, you could check whether you did what it says.
You already have most of the inputs from earlier in the course. Put them in front of you before you write anything.
Your licence summary from lesson 1.4 tells you what you may advise on and what needs approval. The fact-find you used in module 3, whether your firm's form or the course template, is the core of your advice process. Your servicing calendar from lesson 7.4 shows the reviews you have committed to and the weekly time they take. Your 30-day prospecting plan from lesson 6.4 shows the channels you use and the rules that apply. And the two numbers from lesson 8.3, Plan a practice that grows from service, give you your capacity limit and your target referral share.
If any of those is missing, go back and finish it first. A practice plan built without them is guesswork.
For each of the next three years, set three targets.
Client numbers: how many new clients you aim to take on, and the total book size at the end of the year. Check the total against your capacity limit from lesson 8.3.
Reviews completed: the share of clients due a review who actually get one. This is the number that tells you whether servicing is keeping pace with growth. Use your servicing calendar's tracking column to measure it.
Referral share: the percentage of new clients who come from referrals, rising year by year if your service is working.
Write each target with the working behind it. A target with no working is a wish.
Then add file quality measures of your own. The balanced scorecard, from module 5, measures your files on the measures your firm and MAS set. Your plan should include file quality measures you track yourself, separately from that assessment, so you find problems before a reviewer does.
Choose two or three you can count. Some that work well: the share of files written on the day of the meeting, the number of self-audited files each quarter using your checklist from lesson 5.2, and the share of those files with alternatives recorded and the client's own explanation of what they bought. Pick the ones that match the faults your self-audit in lesson 5.4 found.
Give the draft to your supervisor, a senior colleague or a mentor you trust. Ask them three things. Are the targets realistic for someone at your stage? What would they expect to go wrong? What is missing?
Write their comments into the plan, with the date, and note what you changed as a result. If you disagree with a comment, record that too, and why. The point is that someone with more experience has tested the plan, and that the test is visible.
Daniel's plan is three pages. The figures are his examples.
Targets: year one, 30 clients in total. Year two, 24 new clients for a book of 54, with 25 percent from referrals and 90 percent of due reviews completed. Year three, 20 new clients for a book of 74, with 40 percent from referrals and 90 percent of due reviews completed. His capacity limit is about 110, so he has room.
File quality measures: every file written on the meeting day; three files self-audited each quarter against his twelve-item checklist; alternatives and the client's own explanation recorded in every file audited.
Mentor review: his supervisor reads it and says the year-two referral target is ambitious for someone with only a year of reviews behind him, and suggests 20 percent with a stretch of 25. She also asks where claims support appears, since it is one of the moments that drives referrals. Daniel lowers the target, adds a line committing to a claims guide for every insurer he works with by the end of year one, and dates both changes.
A finished plan lists the inputs it draws on, sets three years of targets for clients, reviews completed and referral share with the working shown, names two or three file quality measures you will track yourself, and includes dated comments from a mentor with your responses. In the activity below you write it, and then you have a plan you can check against in a year.
Write a three-year practice plan with client, review and referral targets, file quality measures and notes from a mentor review.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).