Written by: Jenny Good Widmaier | Bill Good Marketing

Most financial advisors have a CRM. Most have integrations. Most have data coming out of their ears.

And most are still spending roughly 70% of their time on non-revenue generating tasks.i

Data entry. Meeting prep. Documentation. Follow-ups. Reconciliation across multiple systems. The list goes on, and it’s not getting shorter.

But here’s the thing that nobody wants to say out loud: having data and knowing what to do with it are two completely different skills. And no amount of software is going to bridge that gap unless somebody sits down and figures out what "good" actually looks like in practice.

That's what we've been doing since 1977. Not theorizing about what should work. Sitting inside advisor offices, watching what actually does. And what we've found, over and over, all across North America — from big cities to towns that are proud of their one stoplight — is that the practices that grow a business aren't the grand ideas implemented sporadically. They're the small, consistent ones that show clients you're paying attention.

This is some of what we’ve learned.

It Started with a Beast Called Gorilla

In 1986, my dad built what we believe was the first CRM designed specifically for financial advisors. He called it Gorilla. And it was exactly that, a true king of the jungle.

Gorilla required a dedicated Computer Operator and forty hours of training just to keep the thing running. It was not sleek. It was not sexy. But it did something unusual: it produced real, measurable AUM growth. Not through fancy technology (though it certainly was fancy at the time), but through something much simpler: it taught advisors what to do, and more importantly, why.

My dad didn’t just teach advisors how to click buttons. He taught them why the processes behind those buttons mattered. He spent years inside advisor offices, testing techniques and studying what separated the practices that plateaued from the ones that kept climbing.

Over time, one truth became unavoidable:

Some processes work occasionally. Some work consistently. And the ones that always work can be learned, taught, and repeated.

Gorilla worked because it embedded proven practices into the daily workflow and made the "why" visible. The understanding of why created buy-in. Together, they changed behavior from the ground up.

That lesson has shaped our thinking ever since. And in the decades since Gorilla, we’ve continued testing, refining, and codifying what works across every type of advisory practice.

I grew up in the middle of all of it. My first real writing job was creating the birthday letters that became a mainstay of our entire etiquette program—letters that advisors still send today. I also wrote what turned out to be one of the most-used letters on the whole system: our Pet Condolence letter for clients who’ve lost a dog. (If that surprises you, you’ve never seen the response rate.) Those early projects taught me something that has guided everything I’ve done since: it’s never just the big, flashy moves that build a client relationship. It’s showing up, consistently, in the moments that matter.

How We Define a "Best Practice"

The phrase "best practice" gets thrown around a lot. Usually it means "something that worked for me once" or "something a speaker said at a conference that sounded smart."

We use a stricter definition. For something to qualify, it has to pass three tests:

  • Internal Debate. Our consulting team has to hash it out. Does this truly work, or does it just feel like it should? These conversations get spirited.

  • External Testing. It has to be proven in real advisory practices with real clients and real money. Not a simulation. Not a case study. Real production numbers over real time.

  • Universal Application. It has to work regardless of practice size, specialty, or business model. If it only works for a specific type of advisor, it doesn’t qualify.

That bar eliminates a lot of conventional wisdom. Which is kind of the point.

What follows are the four of these best practices where we see advisors leaving the most money on the table (by way of lost time and new assets in the door). And honestly? They’re the same four areas we’ve been fixing since the Gorilla days.

Best Practice #1: The Problem with "Flexible" Data Fields

Most CRMs let you create custom fields for anything you want. Sounds flexible. Sounds great.

Here’s what actually happens.

Advisors create fields that try to answer multiple questions at once. Or they don’t define what each field means. Or different team members use the same field differently. One person uses "Status" to track the client relationship. Another uses it to track service tier. A third person uses it for... honestly, nobody’s quite sure what Kevin is doing with it.

The result? When you try to create a list for marketing or client outreach, you’re always missing something. And that something can cost you in more than just time and money.

The Principle

The rule is deceptively simple: each field should answer exactly one question. Not two. Not "it depends." One question, one answer, every time.

Take a Status field. It should answer: "What is this contact’s relationship to my office?" The answer might be Client, Prospect, Strategic Partner, Ex-Client, or Deceased. One question. One answer. Always.

Need to track service tier? That’s a different question. It gets a different field. Combine them and your lists will be incomplete at best. At worst, they’ll be an absolute and unusable mess.

And here’s the part that trips up even experienced teams: everyone in your office must agree on what each field means. If some contacts are sorted by service level in one area but by relationship type in another, your data is broken. And when your data classification is garbage, that trash heap floats downstream into every report, every campaign, and every decision you make.

This seems basic. It isn’t. If you take nothing else from this article, audit your fields. You might be surprised by what you find.

Best Practice #2: Why "Staying in Touch" Isn’t a Strategy

How often should you contact a client?

If your answer is "it depends" or "when I remember," you’ve got a problem.

Most advisors fall into one of four traps: they contact everyone at the same frequency (inefficient), they contact people randomly based on memory (inconsistent), they set arbitrary schedules that don’t match client value (unprofitable), or, worse, they wait for clients to contact them. Sometimes they do all four simultaneously, which is honestly impressive in its own terrible way.

The Principle

Different clients need different contact frequencies, and those frequencies should be tied to the client’s value tier, not to your memory or your mood on a Tuesday morning.

The specifics matter more than most advisors realize. There are real intervals, tested over decades, that build rock-solid retention and keep you top-of-mind without overwhelming your calendar or burning out your team. The difference between contacting a top-tier client every 60 days versus every 90 days may sound trivial, but compounded across your entire book, it’s the difference between a practice that grows organically and one that slowly leaks.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about that leak: those clients don’t fire you. They don’t send an angry email. They don’t even complain. First, they’re a little harder to reach. Then they stop showing up for appointments, especially reviews. Then you’re no longer top-of-mind when someone at Rotary or on the golf course asks for a recommendation. And one day, quietly, they become your competitor’s next appointment (think about it, how often have you gained a new client who just didn’t want to take everything from their poor current person? You don’t want that to be you). Not because that advisor is better. But because that advisor showed up.

Different tiers get different levels of attention. That’s smart. But no tier gets zero. That’s malpractice.

The fix starts with tiering your clients based on value and service level, then assigning specific contact cadences to each tier. The key is that every morning, you should know exactly who needs a touchpoint today and why. No guesswork. No scrolling through a list trying to remember who you haven’t talked to recently.

Most advisors think they have a system for this. Most don’t. They have a habit, and habits break under pressure or when assigned to a new team member.

But don’t think for one second that your service should have a “pruning tier.” It sounds strategic. It sounds efficient. It sounds like it will help you "focus on your best clients." It won’t.

That client with $15,000? One of our advisors had exactly that account. Small. Easy to prune. Then that client married into the Walton family. Guess who became her new advisor? It’s happened more times than I can count. I could even tell you a few horror stories of the pruned client’s revenge.

You don’t get to pick which clients become your biggest accounts or your best referral sources. You just have to treat all of them like they could be – at a level that makes business sense. And some of them will be. As long you have a service model that works, and you stick to its practice.

Best Practice #3: Delivering Productive Client Meetings (without loads of prep and follow-up admin)

We all know you need to meet with clients regularly. Of course, the same principles apply from the last best practice; it must be systematized. But that’s not the problem we need to point out here. The bigger, often unspoken problem we see is that more time is spent preparing and following up to those meetings, than the meeting itself.

Research from Kitces shows that advisors spend an average of 5.3 hours per week preparing for client meetings.ii That’s more than a full hour per workday spent digging through files, piecing together what matters, and trying to remember what you talked about last time.

Integrations and AI notetakers have eased some of the burden of capturing information. But here’s the irony: we got better at collecting data and somehow made it harder to find anything. Retrieving what you need has become its own process. And figuring out what actually matters for this meeting, with this client, today? That’s still on you.

The Principle

Meeting preparation should take less than 15 minutes per client. Not 15 minutes of skimming. Ten minutes of focused, efficient prep that gives you everything you need to walk in and have a productive conversation.

That’s not a fantasy. It’s a direct result of getting the upstream best practices right. If your data is classified properly and your contact rhythms are documented, the information you need for meeting prep practically assembles itself: portfolio changes, open action items, upcoming life events, and talking points that are actually relevant to this specific client.

The difference between a 15-minute prep and a 60-minute prep isn’t lack of depth. It’s architecture. Each best practice compounds on the others. That’s not an accident. It’s the whole point of building a system rather than collecting a pile of individual habits.

Best Practice #4: What Happens After the Meeting Can Matter More Than the Meeting

AI notetakers capture everything said in a meeting, generate solid summaries, and sync notes to your CRM. That’s table stakes now. If your meeting tool can’t do this, you need a new one.

But the problem was never about capturing faster. The problem is knowing what to do with what you’ve captured.

The Principle

A properly executed post-meeting process should produce multiple specific outputs from every single client interaction. Not just notes. Not just a summary. Actionable outputs that feed directly into other systems in your business.

Here’s what I mean. If a client mentions their daughter is getting married, that’s not just a nice detail for your notes. That’s updated contact intelligence that should be in the system before you walk to your next meeting. It’s a question you ask. It’s a gift you send. If a referral name gets dropped in conversation, that’s not a mental note. That’s a new contact record with a linked relationship and a follow-up task, created that day, not next week when you "get around to it."

If every meeting contains planning opportunities, data quality gaps, compliance requirements, and relationship signals, and most advisors capture maybe two or three of these consistently, then the value of that future relationship is going to deteriorate.

But what about the ones whose practices compound year over year? They have a defined process that captures all of them, every time, without relying on memory or good intentions. Or (and here’s my not-so-humble brag) they have a great AI assistant like ours that’s built into our CRM. We trained it on all our best practices. But that’s a story for another time.

The specifics of what to capture and how to route each output into your workflow is where the real leverage lives. It’s also where most advisors dramatically underestimate the gap between what they think they’re capturing and what they’re actually capturing. If you’ve never audited your post-meeting process against a defined checklist, you should. The results tend to be humbling.

Technology Doesn’t Generate AUM. You Do.

I want to be clear about something, because this is the part that everyone assumes about CRMs and what the entire industry gets wrong.

No piece of software talks to your clients. No AI asks that one perfect question that makes the light bulb turn on and their path forward suddenly seems clearer. No algorithm makes clients feel calm when the world goes crazy or the markets go haywire. No computer can see that when a client asks for one thing, what they really want and need is something totally different. No automation makes them feel seen when they’re nervous, listened to when they’re angry, or cared for when they’re confused.

You still need to do all of that. That’s the job. That’s the craft. And frankly, that’s the part you’re probably already great at.

What best practices do is make sure you never miss the chance to demonstrate that.

They’re the reason you know it’s time to call before the client wonders why you haven’t. The reason you walk into every meeting knowing what matters to that person right now. The reason every referral name gets captured, every follow-up gets assigned, and every planning opportunity gets acted on.

When you’re tired, when you’re overwhelmed, when your team members are on vacation, when the markets are in the doldrums, when it’s the dog days of summer or the winter-bear sleepiness of mid-December, best practices are the thing that keeps the engine running.

The advisors who win aren’t necessarily smarter or more charming. They’re the ones who never miss. They never forget. They never let someone slip through the cracks. And whether they know it or not, every one of them has at least some of these best practices running underneath everything they do.

Now here’s the part nobody in the CRM industry wants to say out loud: most CRMs were not built to run any of these. They were built by technologists to store data and automate tasks. The behaviors that actually grow a practice — the contact rhythms, the meeting prep sequences, the post-meeting execution — none of that is baked in. And you may have even bought the tool assuming it was. It wasn’t.

That’s not a training problem. It’s not a settings problem. Your CRM simply was not built by people who have spent decades inside advisor offices figuring out what works.

And that’s what nearly 50 years taught us: the technology was never the hard part. Knowing what to build it on was.

The Foundation Isn’t Glamorous. It’s Everything.

None of this is going to make a keynote audience gasp. Data fields? Contact cadences? Meeting prep checklists? These aren’t the things that win awards or make the trade magazine covers. But they are the foundation underneath every high-performing advisory practice we’ve ever worked with.

The best advisors we’ve worked with aren’t the ones who had it all figured out. They’re the ones who looked at their own processes, admitted what was broken, and did the unglamorous work of fixing it.

If that sounds like you, start here. Audit your data fields this week. Map your client tiers and contact cadences. Time your next meeting prep. And after your next client meeting, write down every actionable output you captured, then ask yourself what you missed.

The answers will tell you more about the health of your business than any dashboard ever will.

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