How to present data and findings to advisory clients
Whether you hold in-person or digital meetings with your clients, you have options in how you present dashboards or reports.
Everyone has their preference, but on Malartu you can:
Invite users to their accounts (like you would with a Quickbooks account)
Make digital boards shareable with snapshot links (like you would in an email)
That last jab at printed reports is a joke, but here’s the serious case for inviting your clients to their digital accounts and presenting data on-platform, instead of through printed reports:
Answer questions on the fly
Editing blocks in Malartu was designed to be easy enough to answer questions that may arise during an advisory meeting on the fly.
For example, you’re reviewing how margins have trended over the last 12 months and there’s a particular area where the margins seem to dip. By meeting with your client in their account, you can easily adjust these block options to drill into that month, view by week or by day to see that something happened in a certain week.
What happened in their business that week? Is it going to happen again? How do we plan for that?
These are the value-add insights you provide to your clients that make you a trusted advisor.
Annotate boards for later
Text boxes within Malartu offer you the freedom and flexibility to write any narrative you choose into a dashboard to support the data.
This is the crux of advisory work: translating your clients data into language they understand. Within text boxes, you have a few options for formatting, including adding videos - here’s how you do that:
Creating drop downs to measure subjective goals
In addition to text boxes, drop downs can help you tell a story. First, here’s how you create drop downs:
At Malartu, we use drop downs to track strategic initiatives that may be a bit more subjective. For example, are we on track to complete development of a major module? To answer this, we create drop downs with the options:
On Track
Caution
Off Track
Done
In each of our weekly meetings we adjust these drop downs to reflect where we are as a team.
Using other digital tools to annotate boards
Some of our favorite collaboration tools are Slack and Zoom. Both of these work well in tandem with Malartu, but for a few different reasons:
Slack: Our alerts integration with Slack (How to setup Slack alerts in Malartu) means that many partners use client accounts to automate alerts on any metric, and then send those alerts straight to a client’s Slack channel.
Slack also allows you to annotate directly on your screen during a screenshare, which is immensely helpful when you’re deliberating over a board and want to highlight something specific.
Zoom: is our favorite video conferencing tool. Period. If you’re a Malartu partner, chances are you’ve already hopped into a Zoom meeting with us once before. Zoom is particularly helpful when you’re meeting with clients because you can easily take over their account to show them how to adjust something on a board.
Even with Malartu’s best-in-class usability, there are things you will need to train your clients on. Zoom is a powerful training tool in addition to conferencing.
The ultimate “leave-behind” between meetings
You’re not just marginally improving your advisory services with Malartu, you have the potential to change the game.
Possibly the biggest overlooked value to adopting Malartu is that you’re providing your client with value while you sleep. How? They can reference their dashboards any time, from anywhere.
Add value between meetings by granting clients access to their account.
More than financial data
Have you noticed Malartu’s extensive integration list? Inviting your clients into their account also gives them access to integrations outside the financial realm. Many of these integrations contain data that directly affects financial outcomes.
The more you introduce your clients to Malartu’s functionality, the more embedded you become as an advisor. A linchpin.
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