Trending
For all the talk about the advisory business becoming increasingly steeped in technology – and it is – human interaction remains a big part of the advisor/client relationship and that’s a good thing.
Scores of studies and surveys indicate that clients want the human touch, confirming robots won’t be replacing advisors anytime soon. Smart advisors also realize that when time allots for it, an extensive phone call or involved in-person meeting can pay substantial dividends beyond email and other forms of digital communication.
The rub is, in an ideal setting, advisors have extensive client rosters, making digital communication important and time-efficient. Point is, whether it’s digital, in-person or on the phone, communication is an essential part of an advisor’s job. It’s a soft skill that comes naturally to some and can be mastered by all – an encouraging point for highly analytical advisors.
Indeed, conversation, written or live, is arguably its own art form, particularly in a business setting. Advisors and clients alike have limited time. Communication, whether in-person or via marketing avenues, is how advisors make impressions on prospects. In other words, it’s of the utmost importance to a practice’s long-term success. The good news is that advisors don’t have to stretch to up their communication games and if that goal can’t be accomplished in house, it can be realized by outsourcing related tasks to cost-effective professionals. Point is communication is a vital task and needs to be mastered. Here are some ideas for enhancing client/prospects.
Think In Buckets
In a recent interview with Morningstar, Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, highlights three conversation “buckets” advisors are apt to have with clients and prospects: emotional, practical and social.
A social conversation is implicit. It involves catching up with the client, discussing family, career, vacations and the like. In a practical conversation, the advisor and client can discussing anything from estate planning to long-term care to portfolio strategies. These are staples of being advisor and given the ease at which these things can be discussed, the emotional bucket takes on added importance.
“And in an emotional conversation, I don’t want you to solve my emotions. I want you to empathize,” notes Duhigg. “And as everyone who is a financial advisor or thinks about money knows, oftentimes those clients come in and they think they want a practical conversation, but actually, it’s an emotional conversation because they’re feeling anxious and they’re feeling uncertain and they’re feeling a chagrined that they don’t know everything they should know about money.”
Knowing the various conversation buckets is only half the battle for advisors. The other half is ensuring that right conversation is taking place at the right time. Said another way, the advisor shouldn’t be starting a practical conversation when an emotional chat is required.
“And what the researchers told me was they said, look, what we figured out is all three conversations are important and all three of them are legitimate. But if you aren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it’s really hard to hear each other and it’s really hard to connect,” Duhigg told Morningstar.
Don’t Fret About Improving Communication
Likely owing to the fact that some people are outgoing and garrulous while others are introverted and many are somewhere in between, there’s a pervasive thought that some personality traits lend themselves to the possessor being more effective communicators than others.
In what could be good news for advisors that consider themselves reserved, that’s actually not the case, indicating improved communication skills are attainable for anyone.
“There seems to be no personality characteristics that make you better or worse at communication. What does make a huge difference is whether you recognize the skills involved in communication and practice them,” notes Duhigg.
It also pays for advisors to remember the importance of story-telling. It’s a cornerstone of political communication and advisors can easily deploy it to improve client communications.
Related: Growth, Segmentation, Talent Top Advisor Priorities, Says Schwab