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The Power of Client Journey Mapping to Drive RIA Growth

Imagine you’re just starting your advisory firm and drafting your business plan. What’s the first thing you’d do? You’d determine the client you want to serve and outline the services you plan to deliver. This exercise is foundational for launching a successful RIA.

Now fast forward a few years. You’re no longer starting from scratch. But your days are consumed with client reviews, phone calls, internal meetings, tech issues, staff training, and investment committee discussions. There’s little time left to focus on growth. Marketing is sporadic, often reactive, and rarely produces the results you hoped for. Growth has slowed (or stalled), and you’ve hit a growth barrier. You want to keep growing, but it feels like there’s simply no time.

So, what’s the next move?

The answer is simple: return to what worked at the beginning, but with more depth. Redefine your client and remap the services you offer, this time through a comprehensive, intentional client journey. Because whether you’re starting out or running a mature firm, growth always begins with the client.

Why Client Journey Mapping Matters for RIAs

Client journey mapping, the process of documenting every interaction a client has with your firm across each stage of the relationship, is one of the most powerful tools in modern practice management. While widely adopted in industries like retail and technology, this approach is gaining traction among high-performing RIAs because it solves two persistent challenges: operational efficiency and gaps in advisor training and retention.

In most advisory firms, client journeys vary greatly depending on the advisor, the complexity of the client’s financial life, and the systems supporting service delivery. What begins as a clearly defined client value proposition (CVP) often evolves into a patchwork of advisor-specific workflows and informal processes as the firm grows. Over time, this inconsistency erodes profits and slows financial advisors' ability to focus on business development and growth opportunities.

The data underscores this risk. According to Charles Schwab’s RIA Benchmarking Study, 82% of top-performing firms have a documented CVP, one of the foundational elements of a defined client journey. Yet many firms have not formalized their journey beyond the onboarding phase. Instead of focusing on intentional client journey design, they often fall back on tactical solutions: marketing campaigns, lead generation tools, and hurried hiring decisions.

Client journey mapping addresses these gaps directly. It surfaces where clients encounter friction, where teams deviate from the intended service model, and where firms are inadvertently overdelivering in low-value areas while underdelivering in critical ones. By building a client journey with intention, firms align their internal processes with external expectations, creating not only smoother onboarding and more consistent service, but also a scalable infrastructure for growth.

The strategic value is undeniable. Clients who feel emotionally connected to their advisor are 3.2 times more likely to provide referrals and twice as likely to consolidate their assets with that firm, according to Cerulli Associates. These emotional connections are not accidental; they are cultivated through deliberate, repeatable, and thoughtful interactions across the client lifecycle. Journey mapping empowers firms to design those experiences, not just react to them.

In our consulting experience, client journey mapping is one of the most underutilized yet highest-impact growth strategies in the RIA space. When done well, it becomes the backbone of scalable service delivery, targeted marketing, strategic hiring, advisor training, and operational efficiency. It doesn’t just improve how your firm works, it transforms how your firm grows.

“Client journey mapping is one of the most underutilized yet highest-impact growth strategies in the RIA space. It doesn’t just improve how your firm works, it transforms how your firm grows.”

— Herbers & Company

What Is Client Journey Mapping?

Client journey mapping is the process of documenting and optimizing every step of a client’s experience with your firm, from the first interaction to multigenerational transitions. It goes beyond marketing funnels or onboarding workflows. A true client journey map defines how your firm builds trust, delivers advice, communicates value, and deepens engagement at every touchpoint.

At its best, journey mapping connects what your clients value with how your firm operates. It gives your team a roadmap for delivering consistent, high-quality service. It reveals friction points and inefficiencies that waste time and money. Most importantly, it aligns your firm’s internal capabilities with your external brand promise creating new lead sources, improved new client close ratios, and expands client referrals.

Building a Client Journey: The Four Stages That Drive Growth

Client journey mapping has four essential stages, each with unique growth implications:

1. Discovery and Engagement
This is where prospects form their first impression, via your website, referral, social media, or a phone call. If your messaging is vague or the process for becoming a client is unclear, potential relationships are lost before they begin. If you define this stage clearly, by explaining what it’s like to work with your firm, what the process entails, and what outcomes clients can expect, you can expect to have higher new client close rates and more engaged clients from day one.

2. Onboarding and Planning
This phase builds the foundation of trust. Many firms underestimate how overwhelming onboarding can feel for clients, especially high-net-worth families juggling documents, complicated estates, and tax returns. Without a defined process, clients feel uncertain about timelines, deliverables, or next steps. Firms that streamline onboarding, often through automated workflows and milestone-driven communication, reduce time-to-plan delivery and improve client satisfaction. In our consulting experience, clients expect a completed plan within 21 days or sooner of initial contact with your firm, yet many firms have onboarding processes that last 45-60 days or more, weakening the early stages of trust building and overwhelming their advisors capacity to serve new clients and existing clients at the same time.

3. Ongoing Advice and Relationship Management
This is the long game. It’s how you show up for your clients year after year. Journey mapping reveals inconsistencies in service among advisors, communication issues, and the value of your advice. Standardizing your firm’s annual service calendar, embedding check-in cadences, and using client feedback loops ensures that relationships don’t erode over time. This phase is where loyalty is either sustained or lost. In Herbers & Company’s recent consumer study, 62% of financial consumers now expect their financial advisor to respond to them within at least 30 minutes. Mapping the journey creates improved response times, no matter if you are a small or large advisory firm, to better serve your client needs and demands.

4. Transitions and Advocacy
Major life events—business exits, retirement, inheritance—are defining moments. They’re also your firm’s greatest opportunity to expand wallet share and retain next-generation heirs. Without a mapped transition journey, these moments are chaotic and risk-filled. But when managed intentionally, they result in deeper relationships, retained assets, and strong advocacy through word-of-mouth referrals. In our consulting work, mapping the client journey for transitions substantially increases referral rates to an outstanding 43 referred prospects per year for every 100 clients. In other words, roughly one in two clients becomes an active advocate, sharing their positive experience and directly contributing to firm growth through referrals.

The Benefits of Client Journey Mapping

Client journey mapping is not just about improving client satisfaction. More importantly, it transforms how your business operates. When designed and executed properly, it drives growth across six core areas:

  • Improved Team Alignment
    A clearly defined journey gives every team member clarity on their role. This empowers firms to design better hiring profiles, create advisor training programs, and deliver a consistent experience as the firm grows, significantly reducing advisor turnover and management strain.

  • Smarter Capital Allocation
    With visibility into where clients engage, and where they want more service, firms can invest in technology and service expansion where it counts most.

  • Higher Margins and Owner Income
    Operational efficiency, client satisfaction, and advisor productivity all increase when the client journey is mapped. The result is stronger profit margins and increased income for founders and partners.

  • Better Retention and More Referrals
    Satisfied clients who feel cared for and understood stay longer and refer more. When the journey is consistent and memorable, clients become vocal brand advocates.

  • More Effective Marketing
    Journey maps identify what prospects value most, allowing firms to craft marketing campaigns and messaging that resonate and attract more new clients.

  • Higher Close Rates
    When every team member understands the client journey, they engage prospective clients with greater confidence.

  • Higher Valuations
    A consistent and sustainable growth rate improves overall firm valuations. Firms that can illustrate sustainable growth rates to prospective buyers gain a premium at exit.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) That Drive Results

Advisory firms often search externally for growth—new clients, new markets, more services. But some of the most powerful growth drivers are internal. Client journey mapping doesn’t require a bigger team, a new CRM, or a major overhaul of your website. It requires the discipline to step back and evaluate how your firm delivers its promise, and the ongoing commitment to improve it. When built with intention, it becomes the engine for sustainable, profitable, organic growth.

To make client journey mapping actionable, firms must connect client service improvements to business metrics. While year-over-year growth is commonly tracked, RIAs benefit more from measuring granular indicators such as:

  • Onboarding Cycle Time: How many days does it take to close a new client—from initial inquiry to signed agreement and transferred assets?

  • Referrals Per Client: How many referrals does your client base send each year? For example, if you have 100 clients and receive 43 referrals, your average is 0.43 referrals per client. Is this number rising or falling year over year?

  • Client Retention Rate: While advisory firms typically enjoy high client retention, these rates often decline as the firm grows in complexity. A clearly defined client journey helps maintain client retention through consistent, high-quality improvement at every stage of growth.

Growth From Within: How Herbers & Company Can Help

While advisory firms often benefit from high client retention, growth can introduce complexity. As teams expand and operations scale, even small inconsistencies in the client experience can erode trust and satisfaction over time. That’s why developing a clearly defined client journey early, and refining it often, is essential to maintaining strong relationships and sustainable growth.

At Herbers & Company, we help firms design and implement client journeys that align with their business model, team structure, and growth goals. Through our consulting services, we guide advisory firms step-by-step to map every stage of the client lifecycle, streamline service delivery, and ensure every client touchpoint reinforces your firm’s value. Whether you're expanding advisor training, hiring, or simply looking to elevate your organic growth rate, we’re here to help you turn the client journey into your most powerful growth engine.

We invite you to get started.