Tom Anderson is the Founder and CEO of Anasova, a platform dedicated to connecting individuals with financial advisors through innovative technology and free financial plans. As a visionary in the financial advisory space advocating for customer success, he is also an accomplished author, having published four books, including The Value of Debt. Before Anasova, Tom was an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and the Founder, former CEO, and Chairman of Supernova Technology. A former 5X Barron's Top Financial Advisor, he is a regular speaker at events countrywide.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:03] Tom Anderson discusses how Anasova is redefining financial planning by connecting advisors with actionable data
[4:51] The nuances of advisor-client communication and successful follow-up practices
[10:31] How Anasova identifies customer engagement patterns by analyzing sample data
[16:01] Tom shares how advisors can nurture client relationships through continuous outreach
[21:08] Anasova's business model and how they monetize financial planning leads
[24:16] How AI optimizes the customer journey from ad targeting to content personalization
[30:59] Leadership and mentorship
In this episode…
Many businesses struggle to guide their customers from start to finish and maintain momentum when consumer interest wanes. Are you in this category as a financial services brand? If so, are you curious about successful companies' strategies for keeping their customers engaged throughout complex processes?
Tom Anderson, an expert in the financial services world, describes the intertwined challenges of customer engagement and conversion in the financial services industry. He discusses the meticulous process of trial and error that led to the refinement of user experience and customer journey on freefinancialplan.com. Additionally, he emphasizes the need for advisory services to step in where automation ends, nurturing client relationships through personalized follow-up and leveraging AI to create a more tailored experience. Tom’s approach focuses on data-driven methods and customer feedback to continuously improve engagement and satisfaction.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Tom Anderson, Founder and CEO of Anasova, about creating effective customer engagement strategies in the financial services sector. Tom discusses how Anasova is redefining financial planning by connecting advisors with actionable data, how it identifies customer engagement patterns by analyzing sample data, and how advisors can nurture client relationships through continuous outreach.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
The Value of Debt in Building Wealth: Creating Your Glide Path to a Healthy Financial L.I.F.E. by Tom Anderson
The Value of Debt in Retirement: Why Everything You Have Been Told Is Wrong by Tom Anderson
The Value of Debt: How to Manage Both Sides of a Balance Sheet to Maximize Wealth by Tom Anderson
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
"Navigating the Waters of Financial Marketing With Robert Sofia" on The Customer Wins
"[AI Series] Empowering RIAs for Personalized Customer Wins With Cormac Murphy" on The Customer Wins
"Innovating Fiduciary Risk Assessment for Growth With Mark Friedenthal" on The Customer Wins
Quotable Moments:
"Money is the number one cause of stress, and by offering a free plan, it's just psychology 101."
"Engagement is huge, but the drop-off at the action step is where the true challenge lies."
"People need a level of detail and that's where advisors come in to seal the deal."
"It's never been easier, ever in the history of ever, to tell your story to more people."
"AI is like the internet now, an integrated technology that enhances our capabilities."
Action Steps:
Generate and analyze customer feedback consistently: Collecting feedback allows for a data-driven approach to enhance the customer experience and cater to clients' needs effectively.
Introduce gradual changes and test their impact: By testing changes with a small customer sample, businesses can refine their offerings without risking large-scale customer dissatisfaction.
Develop a nurturing strategy for customer leads: A strong follow-up sequence increases the chances of conversion, addressing the common issue of lead engagement drop-off.
Personalize the customer journey with AI technology: AI can create a more tailored experience for customers, potentially leading to higher satisfaction and engagement rates.
Educate customers on the value of external expertise: By underscoring the advantages of professional assistance, businesses elevate the perceived value of their service and motivate customers to take action.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Robert Sofia of Snappy Kraken, Cormac Murphy of CacheTech Advisor Solutions, and Mark Friedenthal of Tolerisk. Today, I'm speaking with Tom Anderson, the founder and CEO of Anasova. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing.
When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms, instead, get Quik!, using our Form Xtract API, simply submit your completed forms and get back clean context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quikforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I want to give a huge thank you to Wim Van Lerberghe of Advintro and go check out their website at advintro.com to see how they help FinTech and wealthtech companies grow their sales.
All right, I'm excited to talk to Tom. Tom is the founder and CEO of Anasova, an author of four books, including The Value of Debt, and is the founder and former CEO and chairman of Supernova Technology. Prior to this, he was executive director at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Tom, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Tom Anderson 1:42
Thanks, Rich. It's great to be here. Really appreciate the invitation.
Richard Walker 1:45
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today. So for those who haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience, and the challenges to growing their own company. Tom, let's understand your business little better. How does your company help people?
Tom Anderson 2:03
Well, it's a great question. Rich, and I love the focus of your podcast. So the interesting thing about Anasova is we started with a vision of helping people directly. So we own the website, freefinancialplan.com, and what we offer is a free financial plan. So money, of course, is the number one cause of stress, and by offering a free plan, it's just psychology 101, right? When you have a plan, your level of stress automatically goes down. And actually, a lot of financial advisors talk about planning, but very few of them actually deliver a plan to their individuals. So in about five minutes, you can get a financial plan fast, free. It was anonymous. We'll come back to that. It'll be an interesting thing to talk about. Now we require an email address, and we started just helping people with that journey.
Our view initially was that this was going to be a direct-to-consumer model where we would help connect people directly to financial products and solutions based on the data that was in their plan. What we discovered was huge levels of engagement, huge levels of click, and then a complete drop-off at the action step. So now we're helping primarily financial advisors connect to people who are making the plan to help with that next level of action, because people need a level of detail. So we're helping advisors build their business where they can actually come in and get the exact information from the financial plan, targeting their exact demographic, building their list of qualified prospects. So that's what we do.
Richard Walker 3:31
That is cool. So look, I'm gonna admit I actually went through it the other day. I wanted to see what it was like, and I thought the process was actually very smooth, very clean, very easy to go through. And I have received inquiries from three financial advisors, and I'm probably not going to work with any of them, sorry, guys, but I wanted to see what this was like.
Tom Anderson 3:51
You should respond to them and say, hey, give me the opportunity to like, why should I work with you? Challenge them. A lot of people, they don't engage. There's a similar process, but I can't wait to hear more. Didn't mean interrupt.
Richard Walker 4:02
Yeah, no, and that's totally fair. And I might, I might take your advice and do that. But the thing was, I really valued seeing this plan come out of the system. My Financial Advisor hasn't given me a plan since we started working with them many years ago, and I think I'm at too small of a scale for them to come back and say, hey, let's do a plan all the time and see it.
The other nice thing was the number it said I needed to get to was still the number I knew, so I haven't really deviated from where I'm trying to head to. But all that aside, I want to ask you, I think, what it's really an interesting problem here, you talked about the customer experience of building this process, and then it dropped off, like the customers were engaged to the end of the plan, and then it dropped off. How did you know how to solve that problem? What are all the things did you try to solve that problem with?
Tom Anderson 4:51
Well, it took a while to solve it, and it's funny, because you touched on a bit of things there as well, in your kind of experience. Saying, hey, I'm not getting a financial plan from my advisor. Here we have three people reaching out to you that would like to follow up. I will answer that, but I'm curious if you're saying that you're feeling that you're not getting a regular plan from your advisor because you're maybe too small of a fish. And here three advisors reached out to you. What is your thought process on why you would or would not engage with them, because that's the journey your example.
Richard Walker 5:24
The truth is, there's some that I want to work with, and we, my wife, I haven't hit a stage where we're ready to switch gears and maybe work with somebody else. So what we have a status quo is good enough for what we're doing. I mean, we max out our 401K, we save 20, 25% of our income, that kind of thing. Yep, we're making the right steps that we could be making, and we don't have a lot of questions at the moment. So there's no real catalyst for us to say, hey, let's go change and switch providers and the work that goes into that at the moment. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should anyway, but we just haven't, school starting, we got little kids. We have all these things going on in life.
Tom Anderson 6:00
We get busy and we get distracted. You're actually hitting a lot within that on the customer success part, that I hopefully we can actually dissect exactly what you said, like what we have is probably good enough. I'm doing a lot of the right things. I don't have a lot of specific questions, right? Those are all kind of interesting things that are challenges. So how do advisors, which is one hand of what we're trying to solve break through the challenges that you just identified. Because everybody who is financially successful, you mean your money is somewhere things are okay. Rarely is the roof on fire. I need to instantly action. And so advisors need to figure out how they can nurture through that process. But it is directly related to your first question, which is what we discovered on this kind of consumer journey, is people would run a plan.
They would say, great, like, I loved my initial experience because we asked for satisfaction on two things. So how easy was the input process? And I'm thrilled that you said it was easy. It took a lot of refinement there to figure out the level of detail. Ask people without losing engagement and so forth. And then on the output, we're continuously refining the output. So do you want? How much detail do you want? So the output you got would have been customized to what you said going through it. So I catch you on a Saturday. When did you make your plan? Do you know roughly, like, what day or time?
Richard Walker 7:21
I can't remember. Quite honestly, I it was probably an afternoon last week.
Tom Anderson 7:26
Yeah, what happens is, you're having a cup of coffee, you build a plan. A lot of our activity is on a Saturday morning, or Sunday morning. People are come across the site, you're in a Reddit forum, and you see an ad, you'll get a free financial plan. So then you leave your Reddit forum, you build the plan, you read the plan. You might click to take a level, but from there, even if I identify like, hey, you don't have a will. You have kids, you should have an update in will. Click here to get a will. It's too much. You can't do that. And you're not going to do that on the Saturday morning in your PJs with the coffee you will be like, oh, yeah, I do need a will. You'll put it on your mental to-do list, and you'll go on with your life, like your Saturday will come, and then you won't get your will, and you won't do everything, and you'll be like, yeah, everything's pretty okay.
Like, there were specific action steps that were likely identified in your plan, that you're like, yeah, that maybe would be good for me to have a line of credit, but then you're like, yeah, but things are okay without the line of credit, so I don't have it. Maybe I should review my life insurance, but that's boring. And so there's this task list that is identified, and but then, because we're all human, we're not going to do all of those tasks. So that's why there's the drop-off. And then those advisors, hopefully, when they nurture you, they don't just send you hand things. They say, look, let's take one thing on that to-do list and talk about it. Let's talk about this aspect of your plan. Maybe they give you some level of personalized follow-up, and then that would be a level way to engage you.
Richard Walker 8:52
It's almost like I want a new car, and I'm told, Well, go fix your car, go clean your car, go prepare it for sale. I don't want to do all that work. I just want the new car. Right, right?
Tom Anderson 9:02
Exactly, exactly. There is a point in time when you want a new car, but look, your current car is fine, and it's rare that you're gonna like the market of new cars for your buyer. You're not gonna drive it until it breaks down. Is no longer good. I mean, there's gonna just be a point at which, when do you take that action step, and why and how do you make it easy? And that concept is much more true in financial services, because it's just, it's not sexy, it's not fun. Nobody sits around says, You know what, I want to figure out the best rate on my mortgage, right? Or how. People don't do that.
Richard Walker 9:39
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a few people who might like that, but that's not their whole thing in life. So let me go back and dissect my question a little bit better, because the reason I ask this question is this, I develop solutions all the time, software, user experiences, et cetera, and when I hear that you have built this really high engaging process, it tells me you put a lot into every step leading up to the point of when it stops, when the engagement stops. And you have perfected all these steps. You've learned how to engage these customers. That's hard in and of itself. But when you have this falling-off Cliff part, how do you know it's not just the software missing another step? How do you know you need to change the model to a person being involved now, versus the customer self-serving. How did you figure that out? And how did you analyze it? You said it took time, but I want to get through the thinking of that process, because that's really hard to do frankly.
Tom Anderson 10:31
Yeah, it's a great question. So we certainly don't have everything figured out. And what we do is we're very data-driven on tests, so we test lots and lots of different things, and then as we test them, we just look at the data of what resonates. So we'll take this as kind of like an outer layer of an onion, and we can go however deep you want to, but anything that happens at less than 100 samples I don't even really care about, and I try to not be distracted by. So if something happens and I don't have a subset that's larger than 100 I don't want to get faked out by that data, which is, I think, is one important thing to talk about. What is interesting is that when your data sample gets to around 400 it's very statistically significant. We can dork out on the math things. And what I find is that the difference between 400 and 4,000 it's very little. And in fact, when the difference between 100 and 400, now you can actually start to see some patterns.
So what I like to try to do is test things and get a data set of about 400 that's my ideal. So if 400 users go through and have an experience, what was the drop-off? What was the engagement? What was the click-through? And then we can kind of look at different things from there almost any way that we iterate it, we can change levels of clicks. We can change levels of engagement, we can change levels of detail. We can change levels of measure, what happens on satisfaction or data quality. But the drop off to action is something that I believe in financial services is just extremely, extremely hard to automate. And our conclusion, especially for the time being, is that's the role of a person. People won't on a major financial thing. You still need and want a person to be there. There's some exceptions to it, but if it's big, the digital process breaks down there. I need a person.
Richard Walker 12:37
So Tom I don't know if you knew, but I was a financial advisor in the year 2000 good. And I didn't get to actually start my seminars, but I was building up to do seminars as a way to bring people to my business. And I had this premise that I was going to target people who were very busy, highly intelligent, successful, so like 30s, 40s, right? And they're doing really well in their career. And they thought, I mean, intuitively, think that I'm doing really well. I'm very smart. So they think they know what they're doing with their money. Second they're too busy to do what they need to do with their money, because they've got life and kids and houses and all those types of things going on.
So my seminar was going to show them how to do things very simply, but also reinforce the fact that they actually need somebody else to do it for them. And that's kind of, I think, what your plan is showing it's like, hey, there are all these steps, but you need somebody to come in and help you, right?
Tom Anderson 13:34
It's just to execute that last leg. That is where you need a person to execute the last leg, and while you can decide to do it yourself, there's a area for help and support to do that, yeah, because not executing it is a terrible part of the process. So I like what you're saying for who your target market was. Everything about that makes perfect sense, and that's what we find. Everyone's busy. So you can have a plan, but executing the plan is what really matters.
Richard Walker 14:05
Yeah, okay, so I have to ask another question that is, I don't know, maybe only intriguing to me, but if you're doing all these tests, and you get 400 samples out of your test, is that 400 lost opportunities? Do you feel bad that maybe you've lost 400 opportunities?
Tom Anderson 14:25
That's a good question. No, I've never looked at it that way. Would be the best answer. Maybe I should more, but if the prize is a high-quality result on the other side, I'm willing to sacrifice for that price, but ideally, what I can do is just gradually iterate by introducing a few new things. So hey, if I drop what? So we tried something at the end recently of our journey where we weren't sure if we put offers that were customized to you, if that would make the consumer happy or sad. Now I'm now getting advertisements, and I didn't want to also have ads.
I just want the advisor to be connecting the offers. So we just tested it to 400 and the click rates were way higher than we expected, and satisfaction went up, not down. So you probably had customized offers on your last Sure. Yeah, I saw that. I thought that was very clever. Yeah. So that was something that, like, we tried and worked, and then, like you keep it so that ended up not being the path to a lost opportunity and other things. If we change the way that we ask questions, hopefully you still complete your journey, but then if you complete your journey, it isn't a lost opportunity. It was just a refinement, if that makes sense.
Richard Walker 15:38
Yeah, all right, so are you taking it a step further? Are you following up with the advisors and seeing what their results are and helping them refine their approach so they win more clients potentially?
Tom Anderson 15:48
Oh, man, I was going to try to not pull my hair out on this one.
Richard Walker 15:53
Did I just ask the hard question?
Tom Anderson 15:55
Nice conversation. Keep it in the nice space.
Richard Walker 15:59
Sure erase that.
Tom Anderson 16:01
No, it's a great question. I'll tell you why it's a difficult one. So you should have heard from three. Did you hear from three? I did. That's wonderful. That's great. Oftentimes, I will find that advisors will receive a lead that will be the exact lead, so they set their parameters, saying of what characteristics they wanted in the match, and then they won't follow up. They like the lead will come to the advisor, and they literally just won't even send the first email. Or someone can find their phone number, say, I'm looking for an advisor, and they won't call, which is an amazing challenge to me. Yeah. And the other amazing challenge is advisors will send one email, and then they don't follow up after that. So of the three that you heard from initially, that's cool, that's easy. How many have you heard from three times?
Richard Walker 16:54
So I don't know the answer, because the truth is, when I did it, I let those go to email. I saw the emails come in. I read two of them. I didn't read the third one yet, and that's an email account I only look at about one once a week, so I just haven't had time to go back and look at it and give them the time that they're due to see if there's something I want to pursue or respond and I am kind. I will actually respond to them and say, thank you. Whatever. Yeah, but no, I don't know. I actually don't know the answer.
Tom Anderson 17:22
I would encourage. I'll bet this will be a fun test for us. So now, when you go into that email account, so we can break all of these different things apart, most people won't respond, just like you did. That is the base action, and most advisors will send one to three notes, and then they stop. And that's the end of the well, that shouldn't be the end of the journey. So the way funnels work. So we literally are trying to teach people from Square zero on how marketing funnels work. So the largest firms, if you think about like Fisher Investments, right, if you have $500,000 or more, download this report, what that is, is, if you have $500,000 or more, download this report, and I'm going to send you information for however long you want, teaching you about markets, informing you about who I am and when the time is right for you engage with me.
What these advisors could do, they have great data from you in a plan. They could do personalized follow-up. They could create a video. They could say, Hey, Rich, these are things that I think that you should be thinking about. I get it. You're probably happy with this. Here's why I want to give you a second opinion. They could keep on if you don't want a second opinion, read my general cam content, but when you're ready to take action in your life, I want to be one of those people. If 90% of people in financial services are buy later, AI won't change that. Technology won't change that. Nothing will change that. We're going to come into AI in a bit. But the thing that advisors don't understand is that you need to nurture the same training program that you had from the year 2000 is actually the right program. Nurture through seminars.
You're busy. I'm going to tell you things to do over time. You can't just expect immediate actions. And so yes, we try to do a lot of education to advisors on how to grow but it's like trying to teach weight loss or fitness or anything else. It's like, it's not actually that difficult. You just have to be disciplined and stick with it, and you can't teach the discipline. Does that make sense?
Richard Walker 19:16
Yeah, it's hard. I don't want to put financial advisors in a corner on this, but they tend to be practitioners, not necessarily business operators, because they love the craft, right? It's just like doctors. They love to diagnose and fix the problems, not run their business. So that's the challenge. Running the business means you pay attention to the marketing funnels and the sales funnels and the process, and you consistently repeat those processes to keep them moving. And it's hard, it's hard to learn that in any business, even if you're just a business operator, it's hard to learn that.
Tom Anderson 19:49
It is hard to learn that. But that is where technology is actually taking over, because if you have you, if you love the craft, just like you said, as many of them do, and they have talents that they like and tricks that they know. Almost any advisor who's been in the industry for more than five years is really good at something like I can really reduce business owners taxes or whatever they're you have some skill that you're really good at, then take that craft, and it's never been easier, ever and history of ever, to tell that story to more people. But right now, a lot of advisors, most advisors, don't have 100 prospects on their list.
Right now, not 100 if 90% of the people are buy later, you're only going to have 10 Buy Now opportunities. If you're not nurturing those, you're not going to have a proposal a month that you're making as an advisor. Why would you be so passionate about your craft and then not tell people your story? Be passionate about it. Tell people the story through technology when they're ready, make proposals to them. It's a simple recipe.
Richard Walker 20:54
I love it. I love it. So let me ask maybe a question I shouldn't ask. You, tell me if I shouldn't ask this. But how do you guys make money. Does the advisor pay for the lead? I mean, are they squandering it by not doing the follow-up because they paid for that lead?
Tom Anderson 21:08
Yes. So they are paying for the lead. And so we're really transparent to everybody. So this is a question you perfectly can ask. Is Super reasonable. And I think everybody needs to say this space that I'm in in particular, our industry is incredibly opaque, and I think that's problematic for everyone. So the model is this, it is more efficient for me to advertise free financial plan.com, through clicks and so forth, than it is for you to average to advertise Tom's financial advisory for in Chicago, right?
Like, if I want to advertise my firm in any market, it's just really, really, really expensive clicks, social media, trying to get qualified traffic, everything, well, it's highly competitive, right? Highly competitive. You don't have the scale, so we have a tremendous amount of scale so we can advertise nationally a simple concept, get a free financial plan. Of the plans that are completed, some of them are geared to advisors, and that's our biggest market by far, but about a third of people don't have any money, and about another third of people have between zero and $100,000 so we monetize those with other partners, which gives us this incredible efficiency on the financial advisor side, what happens is they're bidding on the plans.
So you're only paying a price with us part of client satisfaction. If you're not paying a price that you like, then you're not winning with us. That's it. So when you set your price, it goes to the top three bidders in an instant Dutch auction, and that's it. So advisor, it's a win-win-win ecosystem. People are getting instant financial advice with follow-up. Advisors are getting plans of the exact target market they want at a price that they set in a market that they choose, because you can sort by all sorts of different filters and criteria. And so then in the middle, if our three bids are higher than our cost of generating the plan we win. That's the model.
Richard Walker 23:05
Nice. That's clean. I love it. You have figured out something that's very, potentially very lucrative if you can produce leads for people, that is one of the most exceptional business models out there. So kudos to you for doing that. That's awesome.
Tom Anderson 23:19
Well, thanks. There's always challenges along the journey, but there's finally some seeds of success that are kind of coming into this. It makes sense that the advisor is essentially paying for the opportunity to nurture a target prospect. That's a win-win for the client and for the advisor, and it kind of solves that problem that we were talking about before. Because of the level of consumer drop-off, we weren't able to successfully monetize that way, which was interesting, right?
Richard Walker 23:46
Yeah. So maybe the message to the advisors who aren't following up is, go look at those funny parodies of what Facebook marketplace is like in real life. Somebody walks up the table says, is that for sale? And then just walks away, I'll give you $10 for it, and then they walk away. So Tom, let's switch gears a little. You mentioned AI. I love to talk about AI. How is AI playing a role in your business? What is the impact on this type of relationship with the advisor and creating these opportunities?
Tom Anderson 24:16
Yeah, so I think AI is a hot topic, obviously, as it should be, because it's an incredible technology. My personal view on AI is that there is no such thing and will not be such a thing as an AI-based company. Everyone will leverage AI, just as we are leveraging the internet right now. But that doesn't make this a.com podcast, right, right? We're leveraging the cloud. So these are magical technologies. AI is a magical technology that's integrated in lots of different ways. So you, because you know me, you probably came direct. Is that right to did you go to plan.com to do your plan?
Richard Walker 25:00
Yeah. Yeah, I just typed it in with their edit. Have a lead generate.
Tom Anderson 25:03
So from walking through the different pieces of our puzzle. So in optimizing what audiences we're targeting, there's an incredible amount of AI optimization that happens. So companies like Google and Reddit and will all help you optimize your ad content, your ad placement, the testing we were talking about, what words resonate, what words make people more likely to click and engage versus not? Where does drop-off happen? So there's a lot of the funnel management that can all be done through AI, the tool that you went through that the assessment, the output, how did you feel about the level you can speak honestly? Did you feel that your plan was personalized?
Richard Walker 25:46
Yeah, it was actually very beautiful. I was impressed. I didn't expect it to look so nice and so professional.
Tom Anderson 25:53
Well, thank you. So that's a lot of work too. So each of the things that you're looking at, there's different levels of AI output and optimization that are coming in to personalize each part of the plan. And so, you know what simple algorithms versus what is AI versus where is AI creating the content or not? There's a lot of moving parts. And then on the advisor side, some of the follow up that you probably received was actually AI-created. So we guide advisors how to use AI to help create content, and content that you maybe received, that maybe looked personalized could have actually been, hey, leveraging data in the plan create personalized follow-up, and send Rich seven emails based on this data to say, this is how I can have value. So there's, I mean, you can see an AI ecosystem kind of working through to optimize.
Richard Walker 26:42
Nice, yeah, well, that, that's an intelligent use of it, right there. That's amazing. Hey, I'll give you one live feedback point on your process. I didn't see much of an opportunity to talk about windfalls, inheritance, the sale of a business, things that could actually impact the future of the financial plan. I didn't see much opportunity to kind of put those concepts into the planning process.
Tom Anderson 27:07
Yes, it's a great question. And so there was a question on inheritance, but it nudged you. So have you read the book Nudge? No. Oh, it's so great. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, I think, is his last thing Nudge. It's all about nudging you into different things. The planning would have given you an opportunity to address those in a couple of ways, but it likely nudged you away from you can put an inheritance in, but we try to nudge people to zero, and you put your business as either an investment or as another asset. But we try to nudge you to de-emphasize that a bit, and the process on why is because the so it is really, really good feedback. We find people take these over aggressive estimates oftentimes, and it compromises the integrity of the plan.
Richard Walker 28:09
Right, right? And they're what-ifs until it happens.
Tom Anderson 28:12
They're what-ifs until it happens. And so it has not yet happened. You need to. So if you say, Well, I'm going to inherit $2 million or $5 million when I'm 70, then what's the plan going to say? Like, okay, then your life is fine. Don't go then we have nothing to talk about, right? Not exactly right, but it's hard to optimize or put an output when people put those events in, like, what does the plan say? It gets the AI actually gets a little bit paralyzed on well, then you should be optimizing your business until that sale happens and make sure that it happens.
Richard Walker 28:47
The reason I brought this up, Tom, is I was thinking, what if, at the end of the plan, or at the end of the process, it said, did we miss something? This is a great thing to talk to an advisor about to help cater your plan to other things that we couldn't cover in this process, because then it'll maybe engage my interest with an advisor more, who can personalize it further.
Tom Anderson 29:07
I closed a window, and I'm now going to have to open it, and we're right. Did we miss something that is exactly what we're putting it in? And we're going to test it 400 times, and I'm going to tell you.
Richard Walker 29:17
I'm sure you will, wow, this is awesome. I love hearing about your process and how you guys have looked at this, because I don't know that everybody gets 400 tests. I would be hard for me to get 400 tests of new customers coming to my product.
Tom Anderson 29:32
No, don't look at it that way. You always can find the test if you look for it. So you could test you have 400 form completions all the time. Sure. Yeah, 400 form completion. So you can test something within a form, and you can say, what if I change this? What happens? And I don't know enough about your specific space, but I'm not trying to test it across, like, for example, 400 advisor clients. I'm trying to look at it as much as I can at the unit level is where you have a lot of flexibility to test.
Richard Walker 30:01
Yeah, oh, this is incredible. I could keep asking lots of questions, but we will have to wrap this up. So before I wrap it up, I have another question, and I want to ask you one question before that, which is, how can people find and connect with you? What's the best way to find you?
Tom Anderson 30:16
So I'd love to connect on LinkedIn, and you can find me there. I'm Tom Anderson in Chicago. But if you want to run a plan, go to freefinancialplan.com run one. It will ask you for feedback. I read all the feedback, and this is a customer success podcast, so please provide the feedback. And I'd love to know what you think about the plan, what you thought about your output. That's something I would love to optimize. If you are looking for clients and you'd like to grow your business or your financial advisory practice, go to anasova.com you'll find out lots of information on how that system works.
Richard Walker 30:49
Awesome. That's perfect. All right. Tom so here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Tom Anderson 30:59
So I would say two people stand out in that space. I was very fortunate in the first so I moved from financial services being a financial advisor to create a company called Supernova, and that company has just been absolutely taken to a new level by Tao Huang, he's the former CTO and COO of Morningstar, and his level of focus on the customer, his focus on operational excellence, has been incredibly instructive to me, and how much you need to rely on the data. So what he's done with Supernova, and how he's kind of transformed that has then helped me shape what I need to be doing in Anasova.
So a lot to Tao, and just two seconds on, the name Supernova came, I was hoping to merge it with one of my greatest leaders at Merrill Lynch, was a guy named Rob Knapp, who we lost last year battle with cancer. And Rob taught me a lot about client service, defining who you are, what you are doing in the market, and Supernovas named after him, and a legacy that he created. And so he has been very influential to me as well.
Richard Walker 32:19
Oh man, that is awesome. It's great to have such incredible mentors and people who have given you these views and help you see a different perspective to grow with. It's awesome. I'm so glad I asked that question, Tom.
Tom Anderson 32:31
I'm glad that you asked it as well.
Richard Walker 32:34
All right, I want to give a big thank you Tom Anderson, founder and CEO of Anasova, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Tom's website at anasova.com, and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com, where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, will click the Like button. Share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today.
Tom Anderson 33:02
Thanks Rich really enjoyed it great time.
Outro 33:05
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