We listen to a lot of adviser-client Discovery conversations.
That’s our job.
We can’t transform advice skills without working deep into the details of what’s said in client meetings, which only recordings of Discovery and Engagement conversations can provide.
Increasingly, AI is providing some insights into these crucial conversations.
For instance, AI is great for easily recording how dominant each speaker in a conversation is.
It can easily pick the conversations led by an ‘expert adviser’ who talks too much and dominates meetings, overcrowding valuable conversations and forcing the client to be heard too little.
The Certainty Advice approach prefers a more successful ‘client adviser’ approach where skilled advisers control conversations, ensuring clients participate more than their advisory teams in Discovery meetings.
AI also picks up the signals that tell us how well advisers listen.
Training the AI algorithm to identify if the advisers are reflective listening not only streamlines our production and pricing of effective terms of engagement agreements, but it also provides the fuel powering the most engaging, powerful client proposition possible – the exact words used by their clients when they shared what is of most value from a possible advice relationship.
When we marry the AI data from a Discovery meeting with our data showing whether the client signs up and for what fee, we understand the monetary value of good probing, controlling, listening and positioning skills.
What amazes me, though, is how few advice firms record and analyse their crucial conversations with clients.
A Dictaphone is the equivalent of a running coach’s stopwatch.
With AI applied to client/adviser conversations, skill analysis and their link to engagement results can play in fields similar to the Oaklands Athletics baseball team’s work for American baseball, as related to Moneyball.
AI complements my Certainty Advice approach because it provides insights into the crucial skills of advice rather than a conceptual knowledge of meeting scripts, which is still too common in old-fashioned sales or advice training.
Advice teams of the future need to maximise their awareness of their crucial conversational skills – why clients engage and re-engage.
What do you reckon?
Jim
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ABOUT JIM STACKPOOL
Since 1989, Jim has influenced, coached, and consulted financial advice and accounting firms across Australia. His training firm, Certainty Advice Group, skills comprehensive advisory teams to price and deliver valuable, methodical, non-person-dependent advice relationships with their clients. He has built a collaborative community of firms aligned to his firm’s comprehensive advice model – Certainty Advice – Australia’s only Certification Mark accredited by ACCC and IP Australia for impartial financial advice. He presents at conferences, has judged professional advice awards, written industry white papers, chaired practice management curriculum for tertiary institutions, and authored four books on financial advice – his latest being What Price Value.