Recommending the right insurance or financial plans at different stages of your client’s life is crucial for long-term financial planning. Similar to how a newly wedded couple preparing for the arrival of their first child will have different priorities from a single budding entrepreneur, their financial goals will be different as well.

However, the way a financial advisor pitches solutions to clients and prospects can also make or break a case. As shared by Joey Yee, a one-year MDRT member with two Court of the Table qualifications from Singapore, “Each client proposal is unique”. She shares how she leverages personality tests to help her clients and prospects plan their finances according to their life’s milestones.

Understanding clients’ goals and personalities with DiSC

Before going into the actual financial planning for her clients, Yee believes that it is important to build a relationship with her client by getting to know them better and tailoring her solutions to their personalities. This is why she requests specific clients do a detailed DiSC personality test when she first meets them. This will allow her to find out if they rank the highest for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, or Conscientious character traits.

If the test results show that her prospect ranks high for the Dominance trait, she understands that they are likely to be goal and performance-oriented, which means that she will have to focus her pitch on how each investment or savings plan might perform, and how they might help her client achieve their end goal.

However, if her client ranks high on Conscientiousness, they are typically more cautious and have a more measured reaction when she speaks to them. When speaking to these clients, she would make sure to prepare more graphics and include visual representations for the appointment. Thereafter, she proceeds to create a detailed financial plan in a spreadsheet and spends time explaining the various strategies she will be proposing to help the client make a sound decision.

Creating a visual reference

As clients and prospects grow to be more financially savvy in a technologically advanced era, Yee believes that it is important to help them understand the importance of starting financial planning early in their life. She shares, “My role as a financial advisor is to help my clients understand what they truly need and let them visualize how starting planning early can help them fulfill current needs and meet future financial goals.”

After getting a good grasp of her clients’ financial goals and personality types, she creates a customized liability chart to give them a visual reference of their needs analysis for deeper understanding. After all, research has shown that up to 90% of the information being transmitted to the brain is visual.

Making use of personality tests to serve clients and prospects at different life stages

With the chart, along with detailed fact-finding and budgeting, she will then communicate the importance of long-term planning, instead of only focusing on planning for their current life stage.

Customizing financial solutions according to clients’ needs

Once the client has a deep understanding of their financial goals, current and future needs and their existing financial portfolio, Yee can then dive into recommending the optimal financial plans for them.

However, coming up with tailored financial solutions for clients is not without its own difficulties. Yee shared that “clients usually focus on short-term goals and tend to neglect the importance of long-term planning.” For example, “couples tend to focus their budget on upcoming wedding, financing their new flat and potential pregnancy expenses without realizing that they should have been planning for these milestones beforehand.”

In another instance, Yee remembers meeting a client who had over 30 insurance policies from five different companies but did not have full knowledge about his coverage and total spending on insurance. This client also ranked high on the Dominance personality trait, which meant that he is a highly opinionated individual.

However, after a year of building the relationship with him, coupled with her understanding of his personality, her persistence eventually paid off and she managed to add value to his overall financial portfolio.

“With the help of statistics and financial tools, I can easily reassure [my clients] on the decision made,” Yee concludes.

Contact: MDRTeditorial@teamlewis.com

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Making use of personality tests to serve clients and prospects at different life stages