Advisors: 3 Ideas to Get the Whole Kit and Caboodle

Growing up my grandmother used a term to emphasize the entire situation or everything as: The Whole Kit and Caboodle

Successful consultants and advisors understand that their primary goal is to get The Whole Kit and Caboodle, meaning we get our entire client’s business and ideally work with them for life. When our strategy is designed to attract and retain clients for life, business becomes easy and we get to a point where we simply have to maintain our current clients.Recently, I attended a personal growth workshop with my daughter. If I found the workshop helpful, I planned to enroll my children and family in 5 of their programs. The total cost would have been over $5,000, and I was prepared to spend it! The program was a combination of strategies and techniques on steroids! By the end of the workshop I, as well as many of the other affluent attendees, were left in a “wait-and-see” mode.The reality is that the mistakes the workshop coordinators made are similar to ones advisors and consultants make every day with their clients. The workshop coordinators would have had The Whole Kit and Caboodle if they had remembered these critical insights:

Identify the Goal

The attendees were asked a few questions before the workshop, but there was no time or discussion about the answers. They also didn’t dive deep or ask any more questions during the event. They didn’t take the time to find out the goal of the attendees and many participants voiced their frustration. Many of the participants including myself were there to make a great life better! The coordinator’s focus came not from how to make a great life better but how to fix a broken life. This idea worked well for the attendees whose lives needed transforming but failed to connect with the people who were looking to take their already great lives to the next level. In turn, I felt I was not gaining what I wanted and needed from the program.When we don’t ask our clients about they goals, we assume which is very dangerous. What’s worse, some even make the mistake of telling clients what their goal is. This can be a fatal error, making achieving “the whole kit and caboodle” difficult if not impossible. Related: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Understanding Our Clients

The next step is to listen and understand empathetically. When we really want to learn what a person thinks and wants, it requires empathy. Empathy allows us to understand what our clients feel and to see the world as they see it. Empathizing doesn’t mean that we agree with the client, or even sympathize with them, but we understand what they are feeling. By practicing empathy we are able to connect on a deeper level and solidify our relationship with the client. Listening empathetically also helps the client feel more positive and become open to sharing their inner most feelings with us.

Getting It

One of the most important aspects of “getting it”, requires that we put our clients wants and needs above ours. This requires emotional intelligence, which can take years to develop. When we take the time to really find out what our clients want, versus going in with an agenda of what we are going to sell them, amazing things can happen! We truly solve their biggest challenges and end up selling so much more than we ever would have by simply focusing on an agenda to sell more!

Originally published on PMA360.com