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Given today’s cluttered, short-attention span world, getting your message to stand out and stick with clients and prospects has never been more challenging. Fortunately, new research provides guidance for anyone looking to tell your story more effectively.
Let’s suppose you’re talking to a prospect about your approach to portfolio construction, risk management or wealth management. How do you get past the “sea of sameness” that I discussed in last fall’s article, Getting Past “Blah, Blah, Blah” When Talking to Prospects? Or say you’re meeting with a client to present a financial plan or to discuss recent market turbulence. How do you get clients to remember your key points months after the meeting?
Except with the most analytical of clients, the answer is not more facts, figures or statistics. Instead, there are three core approaches to making your message resonate:
- The power of engagement
- The power of visuals
- The power of storytelling
How to win multi-million dollar clients
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The power of engagement
Your first priority is to get clients engaged in the conversation – the more engaged, the more likely they’ll absorb, relate to and remember your key message.
The only way to get through to people is to engage them in dialogue; that’s why formal “death by PowerPoint” presentations are being phased out. That approach is backed up by a Forrester Research study of corporate decision-makers on important buying decisions, 88% of whom say they’d replace formal PowerPoint presentations with more dialogue.
The best advisors make it their number one goal to ask questions to get clients talking. One advisor completely reworked the way she presents financial plans to achieve this goal. After many hours of work to prepare financial plans, she found clients tuned out when flipping through the binders with the results.
Here’s what she did:
- She moved from a large boardroom to a smaller meeting room with a round table, so she was beside clients rather than across the table.
- Rather than giving the binder with the plan to clients at the beginning, she kept this to the very end, briefly reviewing the contents before allowing clients to walk away with it. In the process, she reduced the length of the plan to make it more manageable reading.
- She had one of her staff operate the projector to take clients through the highlights of their plan. As a result, she was able to give them her undivided attention.
- The focus of her conversation was discussing “what-if” scenarios with clients, with her staff person making changes to plan assumptions on the fly and showing the results on the screen.
Clients and prospects can’t talk too much in meetings. Write down a list of questions beforehand and make it your top priority to get them engaged – and you’re on your way to a memorable meeting.
The power of visuals
Use visuals to reinforce your message. Psychologist and visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark has written "…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7 bits of information (plus or minus 2). This is why, by the way, that we have 7-digit phone numbers. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory."
If you doubt this, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab asked 2,500 Americans how they evaluated the credibility of Web sites. Almost half said that the web site's look was the number one way they judged its credibility – not the content, but the design. And a study at the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who use visual aids were almost 50% more effective in persuading their audience to take a desired course of action than those who didn't use visuals.
An example of visuals in action
Utah financial planner Carl Richards has demonstrated the power of visuals in his regular Bucks Blog in the New York Times. For each topic, he starts with a simple visual image and then explains the concept in words. Here’s an entry from his blog explaining the price that investors pay for frequent references to their statements.
From New York Times blog – June 11, 2013
Since many of us use the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as a proxy for the market, let’s take a look at the period from 1950 to 2012 to see how often we’re likely to feel positive, based on how often we check our investments:
- If you checked daily, it would be positive 52.8% of the time.
- If you checked monthly, it would be positive 63.1% of the time.
- If you checked quarterly, it would be positive 68.7% of the time.
- If you checked annually, it would be positive 77.8% of the time.
And here’s the same information presented visually.
Source: Bucks Blog, New York Times
Which way do you think your clients would be more likely to retain this information?
For the full article, here’s a link to Richards’ Bucks Blog.
The power of storytelling
The third approach to getting your message across is to wrap it into a story. In this short video, Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford Graduate School of Business explained why “stories are up to 22 times more powerful than facts alone.” She then asked viewers to think about their signature story.
Aaker begins by describing how the power of story-telling motivated over 25,000 people to participate in clinics to look for a bone marrow match for a recent Stanford graduate. The key is that the story humanized the situation and made it personal. Along similar lines, research on how to raise funds to fight poverty in Africa showed that focusing on an individual seven-year old girl in Mali raised twice as much as when the emphasis was on statistics on child poverty.
Some advisors already use stories effectively – for example, the advisor I profiled in last fall’s article on getting past “blah blah blah” used a case study to tell a story.. Jennifer Aaker maintains that our brains are wired to retain stories and describes how a signature narrative moves you closer to your goal and gets people to look at you differently.
The best stories have a beginning, middle and end and result in persuasion and action. Effective stories:
- Shape how others see you;
- Get people you’re talking to slow down and listen; and
- Persuade and imprint your message. In an experiment, research subjects were divided into group, with one being showing statistics and the other told a story. After 10 minutes, 5% remembered statistics, while over 60% remembered the story.
Aaker describes four characteristics of an effective story:
- A goal: Where you want audience to go, what want audience to feel, think and do?
- A hook to grab attention: Why should people listen – this can be a shocking stat or a funny joke.
- Engagement: What makes the story authentic and relatable? Why should people care?
- Enable action: What should the audience do as a result?
There are a number of ways that advisors can incorporate these approaches into your communication. For example, Aaker maintains that the best stories have a protagonist who journeys through an arc during the story. This is very similar to effective case studies, which are structured as “before/problem”: the action that was taken and the outcome afterwards.
For case studies to resonate, they have to be relevant to your audience. Unless you have a narrowly focused client niche, one case study won’t work for everyone. You need to draw from an arsenal.
Whether describing your approach to prospects or in conversation with clients, the traditional focus on facts and figures with advisor as the center of the conversation will no longer work. The world’s changed – and if you want your message to resonate, you have to change with it.
conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written and video commentaries, go to www.clientinsights.ca. Use A555A for the rep and dealer code to register for website access.
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