A Clearer View of Advisor-Client Meetings with Liam Hanlon

[00:00:41] Doug Heikkinen: Before we get into your recent study, which we're going to cover extensively, give us a nutshell on what Jump is for advisors.

[00:00:49] Liam Hanlon: Yeah, Jump as a company started really two years ago, January, 2024, we had our first customer and now we have over 25,000 advisors. These advisors have all signed up for one thing really to date, which is reducing or eliminating the administration and the maintenance work that comes along with having client meetings.

Traditionally, if you were to look at Kitces research circa 2018, you would see advisors are spending 10 hours a week doing pre-meeting prep, post-meeting notes, post-meeting documentation, syncing to their CRM, updating financial plans. It was an extensive amount of work that took them out of their client meetings. Only 17% of their time in those years was spent actually interacting with clients.

So we wanted to change that. Our mission was eliminate the admin and maintenance while elevating the advisor and client experience. And to a large degree, we've succeeded. We have a suite of AI products that do just that. They take your notes for you. On this call they could record our entire conversation. And after, if there's a note that's needs to be synced to the CRM, it's a one click update.

If I gather financial planning information about you, Doug and I have a plan within E-Money or RightCapital, I click one button and your plan is updated as well. So, it's reduced the maintenance and admin for our advisors by two to three hours per day and they're spending that time with clients, and I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit more, but that's the lay of the land.

[00:02:27] Doug Heikkinen: That's great. So let's talk about your study. And as we know there's no shortage of industry studies on advisors and clients. What did you feel was missing from traditional surveys or market research that led Jump to create insights and a report based on 12,000 real advisor client meetings.

[00:02:48] Liam Hanlon: Yeah, so we call it the 2026 Financial Advisor Insight Report.

It's our first ever, but there will be many more to come. Why we did this was we felt we had this obligation to the industry to bring to light some of the answers to questions that we've always had. Now we've had surveys, we've had traditional primary research methods to try to answer these questions.

But the problem with traditional primary research methods is they're largely unreliable. And I'll give you an example. If you ask advisors who talks more in a meeting, you or your client? Advisors want to believe that they're great at what they do, and a part of that is listening. And so 84% of them say, my clients definitely talk more than I do. I'm a great listener.

When you look at our data, which I call ground truth data, it's actually the exact opposite. 87% of advisors talk more than their clients, which is not necessarily a bad thing our research finds. But it's the complete opposite of what advisors believe is happening. So not only is it unreliable, but if you're making decisions based on survey data, it can be counterproductive.

So within the wealth industry, we wanted to expose this ground truth data. This can tell us things like what's actually trending in advisor and client conversations, you may look to surveys to say, what are the products or services that clients are going to be asking about in 2027 or in 2026? And you will get their response.

But if you look at our data, you'll get the truth of what's actually trending. What products within conversations are moving up month by month? What's moving down, so on and so forth. There's, endless possibilities.

[00:04:34] Doug Heikkinen: What are the one or two widely accepted narratives in our industry that the data clearly challenged in your survey?

For example, how much advisors talk versus clients, you mentioned that, or what really drives client follow through?

[00:04:50] Liam Hanlon: Great question. One of the things that I think, that I've personally heard a lot, is that the movement of the market is your greatest driver of client sentiment. What we found was market movement, the ebbs and flows of the S&P 500, it does impact sentiment. But there are other characteristics of what's happening in a client's life that we've revealed have a much larger impact.

One of those is life events. If you are a client and you have recently experienced taking on elder care, for instance, that's more meaningful than the S&P 500 dropping 20%, right?

That is a larger emotional impact. And why that matters is because if you're coming into a conversation with low client sentiment, and we measure client sentiment at the beginning and end of each call to see how it begins and how it ends, is it going up or down? But if you're coming in with low client sentiment, you're less likely to accept advisors recommendations when it comes to investment positioning, planning topics like starting an estate plan and much, much more. So really important to know that things like life events and major macroeconomic news actually dictate the sentiment of a client more than the ebbs and flows of the market.

And then I'd say the second thing is, depending on who brings up a topic, there could be a very big impact on client sentiment within the meeting. For instance, if clients bring up layoffs or the fact that macroeconomically, it appears that a lot of people are losing their jobs, and the advisor addresses it, there's a large impact, a positive impact on their sentiment throughout the call. If the advisor brings it up, there's actually a negative impact against the baseline. It might be, and I'm no psychologist, but it might be because you're bringing the problem to the client instead of the client bringing the problem to you and addressing it.

I think this challenge is the narrative in the industry that advisors need to be proactive about every problem or challenge that exists in the market today. Instead of being proactive about some of the things that could inspire fears, you may want to wait for your client to bring those subjects up for you to address them.

So be prepared to address them, but maybe don't bring them to the front of their mind.

[00:07:19] Doug Heikkinen: Yeah, so advisors often assume that if they cover the right technical content, clients will act. So what did the report reveal about the role of emotion? And you started to talk about this a little bit. Emotion, fear, and life stress in driving or blocking their decisions.

[00:07:37] Liam Hanlon: We developed this proprietary index known as the Advisor Emotional Intelligence Score. It has four components: talk time, number of open questions you ask, when you asked them, empathy statements made, emotional check-ins performed. What we found was when we developed the score, what we were able to do was bucket advisors into ranks from high to low. You either have rank one, your highest emotional intelligence advisors or rank five, your lowest. The ones that are in the highest category, who perform the best when it comes to increasing client sentiment, they spend most of their meetings a large percentage, 40% on goals and planning.

So not necessarily the technical aspects of financial planning or wealth management, but addressing and discovering client's goals and then determining how to reach them. And the second thing that they spend more time on is behavioral coaching, right? Telling the client or coaching or educating them on how to act or behave when there are market movements, life events, or macroeconomic events that make you want to do something irrational. That's the biggest difference that we found with advisors with a high emotional intelligence score.

And again, those advisors have the largest positive impact on client sentiment from beginning to end of the call, which also means that their clients have a higher susceptibility to engage with their recommendations, the product recommendations and planning recommendations. So overall this is one of the things that again, challenged our narrative about the technical content being the most important.

This really changed our perspective on where advisors should be allocating their time during the meeting.

[00:09:28] Doug Heikkinen: When you and the team first saw the findings, what was the "wait, is this real?" moment, or an unexpected pattern in sentiment, advisor behavior, or outcomes that surprised even you?

[00:09:43] Liam Hanlon: Two things come to mind.

The first is this theme of tax planning. If you go back five years, you would see tax planning is probably coming up in 50% of conversations. It's a complimentary piece to advice. What we found in 2025 was tax planning is the foundation of the advisory relationship. It comes up in 75% of all client and advisor meetings. That's more than retirement planning. So that really blew our minds. And when tax planning comes up, clients ask more questions, they're more engaged, and they have a higher impact. They have a higher degree of change in their sentiment, a positive impact in client sentiment, when they address the topic of tax planning.

So that was number one. And number two was that conversations between advisors and clients can be leading or lagging indicators in different use cases. If you look at the stock market, you know, and you can determine that clients and advisors are talking more about Tesla. You could assume that maybe there will be an influx of investment in Tesla in the following month.

But what we actually find is the opposite correlation, that if Tesla drops, if the stock Tesla drops by 20%, the next month you see a huge spike in conversation. So the market, the stock market dictates conversations about the stock market. Not the other way around. Conversations don't dictate the stock market movement. But if you look at the housing market, it's the exact opposite.

You can actually predict the movement of the housing market based on conversations that are happening. If clients and advisors are speaking, and Doug, you're my advisor in this use case, and I tell you, "Hey, I'm thinking about selling my home." And we see that's happening across 20% of conversations and the month before it was only 15%. To a 90% degree of success we can predict that housing inventory is going to rise in that next month. So that really blew our minds that these conversations that are happening across the United States can either be lagging or leading indicators of some of the most important market signals that we have.

[00:12:10] Doug Heikkinen: If an advisor listens to this episode and has a client review meeting tomorrow, what is the one concrete change on how they open, structure, or close that meeting that they can test right away based on your data?

[00:12:24] Liam Hanlon: One big takeaway would be for advisors to start tracking sentiment. Measuring it in any form or fashion that they can.

On Jump, before you go into any call, we'll give you the sentiment of the day, the average client sentiment, how it's trending over a week. This is really important because if you have low client sentiment, you want to focus your time on goals and planning. If you have high client sentiment, now is the time to make recommendations and proposals because they'll be more willing to engage.

So I would say that's number one is if you can measure sentiment, it will dictate how your conversations go. But if we look back at the advisor emotional intelligence score, the advisors that performed the best, that were in our rank one, did things slightly different than all other advisors. They talked for about 60% of the meeting.

They asked eight to ten open questions on average. And they also made what's known as empathetic statements and emotional check-ins much higher than the average advisor. An empathetic statement is something like, "Hey, Doug, I hear what you're going through. That sounds very difficult." And an emotional check-in is more proactive, but based on a historical context, which is, Doug, last time we chatted, you told me you were going through this tough situation. How are you doing with that?"

The advisors that are performing the best. In terms of our proprietary emotional intelligence score, which signals higher impact on client sentiment and getting your clients to engage with recommendations. That's what they're doing differently. They're making more emotional check-ins and empathetic statements.

[00:14:07] Doug Heikkinen: Now taking that a little bit further, and you've seen how high performing advisors communicate differently, what are the two or three repeatable communication habits, questions, phrases, or pacing that the data associates with better planning follow through, or product acceptance.

[00:14:26] Liam Hanlon: Yeah, I'll go back to that score and talk about the allocation of time.

They're doing all of those things. They're spending their time very, very structured, right, around goals and planning as the foundation of the meeting. They're not talking about, or they spend the least time talking about investments in markets and client service. They're handling client service activities outside of the bounds of the meeting, and they're not wasting time talking about crypto's latest movement, or gold's latest movement. Oftentimes it's not up to the advisor to inspire those conversations. Clients are going to bring that up. But they're deviating away from it and going back to the foundation of goals and planning. So those are two things that I would say really differentiate the top performing advisors with the average, is staying away from losing a lot of your meeting to investments in markets and staying away from handling client service tasks live. Obviously you want to address them but not do them end to end and cannibalize what might be your one meeting with this client a year, and not using that valuable time to address some of the more high priority items.

[00:15:49] Doug Heikkinen: Alright, last one for you. So, as we said at the outset, Jump started by saving advisors time on meeting prep notes and follow ups. How is this new layer of conversational intelligence turning that saved time into improved performance, conversation, and client outcomes?

[00:16:08] Liam Hanlon: This is our big mission for 2026.

We believe we have an obligation to the advisory industry to address organic growth head on. We're in the perfect position. We're uniquely positioned. We have 25,000 advisors using the Jump technology today. And we're really at the center of the advisor's day-to-day workflow.

When advisors and clients have these conversations, right away we're providing advisors back with education on how they're having these meetings. How much are you talking? How many referrals are you asking for? How many net new asset opportunities did you discover yourself? Did you pursue yourself and did you succeed in pursuing yourself? So on and so forth.

So that's the education piece. The second piece is creating actionable insights. I think this is the one that's most important, is you can tell an advisor all day, you know, "Hey, you're talking 60% of the time." Well, what does that mean? It's arbitrary unless you actually give me some type of actionable insight associated with it.

So we'll give you benchmarks on, here's the green zone of talk time. Here's the impact of that talk time. Here's a playbook that you can use to convert more prospects to clients based on the hundred conversations that you've had with prospects to date. Here's what we know works or is correlated with successful outcomes that you've had.

And here's what we know does not work or is correlated with unsuccessful outcomes. So that's how it's coming to fruition within the product, and really where we see these conversational intelligence insights making the most impact in the next year and years to come.

[00:17:59] Doug Heikkinen: Liam, is there a place where people can go, advisors can go and find the study, look at the results, and live with it for a minute?

[00:18:09] Liam Hanlon: Jump.ai is your number one source. That'll bring you to our main landing page, and at the top of that landing page, there is still a banner that says New research. And there's a little link to view the report. The 2026 Financial Advisor Insights report, it is still there today and should be up for, weeks to come.

[00:18:31] Doug Heikkinen: This has been really interesting and really informative, and I think advisors should go to that page, "jump" on that page, and read more, get better. Thanks so much for being with us.

[00:18:44] Liam Hanlon: Thanks Doug.

[00:18:45] Doug Heikkinen: And as he said, to learn more about Jump, please visit Jump.ai. We are on all social media platforms @Advisorpedia. Please give us a follow. For our producer Tory Miller and everyone at Advisorpedia, thank you so much for listening.