Wedding bells — or alarm bells?
What to do when you suspect an elderly client is being manipulated in a late-life relationship
By Allan Janssen |May 27, 2024
4 min read
News and resources for Canada's top financial advisors
- You use left brain language or a lot of jargon or buzzwords.
- You hand clients a piece of marketing material or prospectus, or get them to look at a computer screen.
- There is ambient noise or other distractions that take your client’s focus away from your conversation.
- You allow your own attention to drift to a quote machine or a phone call or other task.
You can’t avoid all checkouts, but you can mitigate their negative effects. First, since you know that clients are going to drift, take a look at the things in your office that might draw their attention. Utilize items that will somehow reinforce your message. For example, if you are in client discovery, use a visual that will outline your process and give clients something they can “drift” to. If you see clients start to drift, re-engage them in the conversation by asking a question that forces a response.
4. Not appealing to all types of learners.
Often advisors fail to consider how best to impart information to the person sitting in front of them. Not everyone takes in information in the same way; different clients react to or remember things in different ways, based on what type of learner they are.
Your understanding of how to best approach your clients based on their learning type will improve your likelihood of resonating with them. There are four basic learning styles:
- Auditory learners respond to the things they hear.
- Visual learners respond to the things they see.
- Sensory learners respond to the things they feel.
- Tactile learners respond to the things they touch.
Everyone is different, and most people have a dominant motivator and a secondary motivator. You can usually tell what type of learners you are dealing with by how they react to the different ways you approach them. For example, if they seem to perk up when shown a picture or come alive when you talk about their family, it is likely that they are visual learners or sensory learners.
The least dominant style in all age groups is the auditory learner. Generally, the aging process moves learners to respond to emotional stimuli; we tend to become more visual, sensory or tactile. When it comes to reaching the right brain or the emotions of listeners, the least effective way is to speak in left brain terms without engaging their emotions.
To make sure you have covered all the bases, use elements of all four types when you are communicating to an audience or speaking one-on-one with a client.
5. Not paying attention to whether the client is still engaged in the conversation.
Checkout isn’t the only impediment to learning. Often clients don’t connect the dots in a way that would make your message resonate as much as possible. This has to do with your effectiveness in bringing out their implicit needs and making them explicit. Simply put, you want clients to draw out any of those internal needs that they may not have thought about so they can see the benefits of your message.
Teach-back is the act of getting clients to summarize what they heard and then relate what it means to them. This is an important technique that can be used to engage the right brain and assess whether clients are using fluid or crystallized intelligence. The former is when clients consider your information and start a thought process that analyzes “what’s in it for them.” Fluid intelligence is when you or the clients “connect the dots” and it is where the most important learning takes place. Crystallized intelligence is when clients don’t think your information is important or they have already made a decision; it can also contribute to checkout.
The more successful you are in keeping your clients’ light switch in the ON position, the more likely you are to get your message across. Remember that even the best information is lost if it is not received by the audience; a radio station continues to broadcast but it depends on listeners tuning in to hear it.
Barry LaValley is president, The LifeFirst Approach and specializes in working with advisors to help them communicate more effectively with clients, prospects and centers of influence. He is a leading educator in wealth management marketing in North America. His programs are available on an individual coaching basis or through the Canadian Securities Institute’s CH.P Strategic Wealth designation.
(09/02/09)
