Are Follow Up Tasks Weighing you Down?

When we talk to Financial Services professionals one area of pain that we hear about is managing tasks that need to be followed up with after a client or prospect meeting.

There are follow-up tasks that the agent needs to do, tasks that the client or prospect has committed to doing, and tasks, that if it were easier to pass off, the service team could easily complete.

While many agents take great notes, it still takes time to decipher and to enter tasks into a system that allows for tracking tasks (CRM, Trello, Asana, a to-do list, etc.) and to delegate them. And many professionals will hold on to tasks that should go to their service team, because it’s easier than trying to delegate that work.

There’s a simple tool that can help your agency manage tasks and delegate work to the service team: a meeting note pad. And no, we don’t mean a blank piece of paper or even a blank word document. It’s often not the note taking that causes the pain, but instead the ability to quickly understand what tasks need to be done, by who, and scheduling a reminder to ensure that they are done.

What we’re talking about is an easy-to-create template. This template should have:

• Client Information and meeting date and time at the top of the template
• A big space for note taking in the left column
• And on the right, there should be three headers:
  • Tasks for me to complete
  • Tasks the client will complete
  • Tasks my team will complete

As you hold the meeting any actionable item should be written in the boxes. As you write the task remember to do the following:

• If it’s a task for you: write the task and then in parentheses the date it needs to be done.
• If it’s a task for clients: write the task, then in parentheses the date to follow up with the client if it hasn’t been done and who in the office will follow up with the client.
• If it’s task for the team: write the task, then in parentheses the date it needs to be done, and then who needs to do it.
• If information is needed to complete the task highlight that information or underline it in the notes so it’s easy to locate.

After the meeting, this should be handed off to a member of your team to enter into any systems you use for task management and a copy of it can be placed in the client’s folder. This provides great documentation as well as a great way to ensure that it’s easier to delegate and follow up with work.

This notepad is on the surface extremely simple, but it’s also effective. It ensures that tasks don’t get dropped. It makes it easier to delegate work. And it saves you time digging through notes to find the information that you need right away to create tasks after your meeting. Some of our clients will even send it to their clients after the meeting as a follow up and to ensure that if they didn’t write down a task or missed something important the client can let them know.