Journal of Financial Planning: May 2015
Financial advisers consistently ask me to teach them how to “sell” better. I quickly find that the way they have been selling isn’t working because what they have been doing isn’t actually selling, but more like telling.
It is easy for advisers with years of experience to make this mistake as they typically have solid knowledge and expertise about a product and/or service, and they want to tell people the best thing to do. The challenge is that the prospect or client doesn’t want to be sold to. However they do want to buy, and they absolutely would buy if they saw a sound enough reason to do so.
So, as an adviser, how do you get a client or prospect to buy with confidence? The solution isn’t only about what you say but about the questions you ask so that clients or prospects come to the conclusion that they want or need what you are recommending.
The way to do this is to reverse the dialogue—determine the conclusion that you’d like the individual to come to and map out the questions you would ask, in reverse order, until you get to the starting point of the conversation.
Why It Works
Reversing the dialogue works for a few reasons:
It gives you a visual of the question path. Knowing the direction of the conversation and what questions to ask is what I refer to as the “question path.” Think of a maze in which your prospect or client is at the starting point (they don’t know what they don’t know), and your plan and recommendations are the ending point (you know what they need and why it will help them). Some advisers jump from small talk to their recommendations without seeing a path to take the individual down. That is because the adviser understands the recommendations. But remember, the prospect or client won’t buy unless they understand why they need the comprehensive plan or individual recommendations within that plan. So you need to map out the best questions to ask and visualize the path you want to take them down.
It gives you an opportunity to get prospects involved. Questions are the key to this process. If you ask enough questions in the right order, the prospect will eventually understand that they have a need or problem for which you have the solution. Not all types of questions work best for this process. Open-ended questions such as who, what, why, where, when, and how will open up the dialogue because they get the prospect to talk. Closed-ended questions, or questions that illicit a “yes,” or “no,” may close down the dialogue. Closed-ended questions generally begin with: is, are, do, did, does, would, could, and should. If you use too many closed-ended questions you may turn your dialogue into a monologue, and you don’t want that. By using open-ended questions you get prospects more engaged in the conversation.
It helps you systematize the process. After you start this process, you will soon see that you can have a similar conversation with various prospects, asking similar questions, taking them down the same questions path. By systematizing the conversations into a process, you can duplicate any success you might have.
How It Works
I recently had a coaching session with Jim, a financial adviser client of mine with 12 years of experience. He was interested in learning how to get some of his clients to move transaction accounts into fee-based accounts. Let’s take a look at how the conversation went:
Understand the conclusion. The first step is to determine the conclusion(s) we want the prospect or client to come to.
I said to Jim, “Give me four reasons why a client would or should convert their transaction account to a fee-based account.”
“First, it’s a team approach—meaning that the private money manager and his team are consistently picking what stocks to buy and sell instead of me trying to figure it out,” Jim said confidently. “Second, it’s a systematic way of investing so it’s logical instead of emotional. Third, I monitor the money managers to see if they are doing what they say they will instead of me trying to monitor the universe of stocks trying to pick the right ones. Fourth, it’s a flat fee, typically 1 percent, so I have a vested interest in the client’s success.”
I was impressed at how quickly he made his case. Now all we had to do was map out the questions he would need to use so that his client would understand what Jim’s role and responsibility to him was.
Map out the reversing the dialogue matrix. Next, create a reversing the dialogue matrix using an Excel spreadsheet with three columns and five rows. Label the columns “Question 1,” “Question 2,” and “Solutions.” Once you’ve done that, put your reasons why they should buy into the Solutions column.
Map out question 2. Here’s where it gets a little tricky.
“Let’s take your first reason for why some of your clients would want to have a fee-based account,” I said to Jim. “You mentioned private money managers have a team approach. Why is that better for them?”
This question was meant to get Jim to understand how to set up the previous question, in this case, the one in the column labeled “Question 2.”
“Because sometimes I’m in meetings during the day and I don’t have time to watch all the stock positions that I have,” he explained.
So what would be a great question to get them to come to that conclusion?
He posed the question: “Do you think it’s better to have one person, like myself, monitor your portfolio even though I’m sometimes in meetings during the day, or to have a team monitor your stock position whose job is to monitor the market all day long?”
Map out question 1. It’s important to set the stage with a story or a simple question to understand how much the client knows about the subject. In this case, does the client understand what a money manager is or does? In other words, we identify a starting point for the path that corresponds with where the client is.
To design a question to determine what the client knows about money managers, use a closed-ended question such as, “Has anyone ever explained what a money manager is?” Or, if you think the client understands money managers, use an open-ended question such as, “How do you think money managers monitor their client’s investments—by themselves or with a team approach?” After the client answers, open it up even more by asking, “Why is that?”
Practice the dialogue. Once Jim understood the process, we worked on filling in the remaining boxes on the matrix and began practicing the dialogue by having Jim role play, starting at the first question and ending with the prospect reaching the conclusion we’d hoped they’d reach.
Jim eventually applied this process before his meetings with clients and prospects and soon realized that he was not only more prepared, but his anxiety prior to and during those meetings significantly dropped, and he connected much better with individuals.
Daniel C. Finley is president of Advisor Solutions (www.advisor-solutions.com), author of 101 Advisor Solutions: A Financial Advisor’s Guide to Strategies that Educate, Motivate, and Inspire, and a regular contributor to the FPA and Journal of Financial Planning Practice Management Blog.