These days the only way to truly differentiate yourself is by focusing on the client experience. When you can engage with your clients in a way that makes relationships easier and moves clients closer to you, you can truly create a competitive advantage. You can create relationships whereby your clients seek your advice.
I am a huge advocate in regard to planning, and I believe everyone should have a plan. However, it’s just a matter of when that will happen. Today, “planning” is the newest buzzword as regulatory pressures cause advisors to seek a better way to engage and serve in the client’s best interest. These pressures are forcing traditional sales/transactional advisors to be planners. So whether you’ve been formulating plans for years and want to understand how to stay on the cutting edge, have never delivered planning before, or are somewhere in between, this session is for you. Behavioral planning will be the model for the advisors of the future because it not only takes into consideration the consumer behavior but the behaviors of you, the advisor, as well as your team.
To help bring some context to behavioral planning, I am going to share something that we call the Legacy Advice Model. There are three components that represent the priority of engagement that forward-thinking advisors will implement with clients:
- Lead with empathy
- Seek to understand
- Planning
All three are required in order to deliver the highest quality of advice.
Empathy is about leading with a high level of deep responsibility and respect for the clients and the vision they have for their future. This calls for the need to slow down and truly listen with the intent to learn. While some of us are born empathetic, I’ve come to understand that, for many advisors, empathy needs to be a learned behavior. It is not that empathy does not exist within us all, but you must revise how you value it, what you pull from it, how you leverage it and the impact of it on building the most powerful client relationships possible.
We need to recognize the habits that have been instilled in many of us to problem solve and bring solutions to the clients long before we understand and, more importantly, the clients understand what it is they really want. The good news is that these habits can be reprogrammed, and you can build new neural pathways by following the advice model consistently. The only bad news is that it takes time, effort, accountability and a strong purpose to change, but it’s entirely possible.
Empathy is something you should be giving to your clients in an effort to learn what matters to them and why, as well as the experiences they have had. This isn’t the time to be selling or even communicating to them how to solve certain issues. Learning to lead with empathy and truly leading with it will differentiate you from your competitors, although you must commit to enhancing your skills and create a process you can replicate from client to client so you no longer even have to think about it.
Understanding is about gaining awareness and appreciation for the circumstances impacting a client through a truly qualitative discovery process that goes far beyond traditional fact finding. The fact-finding and data-gathering process is critical in advising and serving clients. However, the process of gathering that information is where you need to think differently. Your client-facing moments should be about them, what they want and the decisions they need to make to get there. It should be about engaging all stakeholders in the conversations so you become the advisor at the center of your clients’ lives, and they wouldn’t make a financial move without you.
Building on empathy and understanding is the key component to creating the most powerful relationships possible with your clients. Many have talked about understanding as the soft stuff. However, your ability to help clients truly clarify what they want and why and for you to understand their circumstances and have the awareness for what they want are the behaviors that will move clients closer and closer to you.
Planning is about bringing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, assessments, modeling and forecasting together, and this is where things get interesting. During the empathy and understanding phases of the model is where much of the qualitative knowledge comes from, and this becomes extremely powerful when combined with the quantitative analysis. What you need to overcome, however, is that most of the planning today is highly quantitatively focused, and even when good conversations happen around goals, objectives and understanding of what the client wants, that information can quickly get left in the past, live in a file or, worse, become a distant memory when it is time to talk about solutions.
As I mentioned earlier, the culmination of all three components allows the advisor to deliver actionable advice that leads to appropriate product selection. While the industry is focused on understanding those different human behaviors, I believe the advisor of the future is in the driver’s seat to create an experience with a client by addressing all three components that are designed to lower consumer tension and allow them the time or space to be clearer than ever before about what they want and what matters to them most before you even begin solving.
By focusing on the clients and what matters to them, you will have all the opportunities you want to solve their needs. Now, as you read this, you might be thinking, or even feeling, Wow, this sounds like a lot of work or a lot more steps and could add considerable time to my current approach. First, let me say I get that that feeling is real, and I hear it all the time. But I also have found it not to be true, meaning I’ve studied this for years and consistently find the end-to-end time reduces because the trust, rapport and clarity to create in the beginning by moving slowly speeds up the decision-making ability of your clients when it comes to implementation. What is even better is the fact that your clients will be raving fans and won’t be able to help themselves from bragging about you.
My experience of nearly three decades as both an advisor and a coach to thousands of advisors has highlighted the fact that poor human behavior and decision-making on behalf of clients has less to do with their irrational or emotional self than it does with the quality of the relationship they have with their advisor. When clients don’t trust the advisor, the advice or the plan, the irrational emotional self becomes present, as it probably should.
There is a great quote by Carl Buehner that I use frequently in my work: “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” This is a relationship business, but selling is not relational in most cases, so creating a relational experience around how you sell and serve is the factor that will make you differentiate competitively all day long.
