CIF 2021 saw Danielle Howard, Wealth by Design, USA sharing newer perspectives to creating more engaged, robust and productive financial conversations with clients. Danielle beautifully showed how analogies could be used for eliminating and reframing technical jargons in a conversation.
Here are the key learnings from Danielle's session titled ‘Time to turn over a new leaf? - Changing the advisor-client conversations’
- Change from ‘should do’ to ‘choose to’ - A traditional financial conversation puts people in a position of pressure. The conservations are usually ‘should dos’ - ‘You should save for the future’, ‘You should spend less’, ‘You should set goals’. Instead, shift to the ‘choose to’ approach. This puts the client in a position of power, potential and possibilities. Make your clients say ‘I choose to set aside money from my future’, ‘I choose to picture a positive productive future and set meaningful goals’.
- Walk the walk before you talk the talk - Share your own financial journey like learnings and mistakes with your clients to make them comfortable. Such a story can give your clients the confidence to initiate a meaningful conversation with you.
- Remove the fear around money - People tend to get fearful around money. You can take away this powerful emotion of fear and connect it with something else. For instance, when your client loses his job, tell him to think about autumn season. While people visualize fall of leaves with autumn, they feel better imagining arrival of spring season. Connecting the financial feelings in such a way helps the client to move through rough phases in a better way.
- Do not limit to product selling - There must be a repositioning of the mindset where it should not be about selling a financial product. It is more about process and offering of financial health and peace of mind. This will help in shifting the way you talk to your clients
Danielle's session was truly inspiring as it brought a new dimension to client engagement. You can listen to Danielle's wise words on changing the advisor-client conversations by clicking here.
