What do you reckon? Are those first five minutes of the advice conversation between adviser and client crucial? Or is that the time for good old-fashioned rapport building? In the past ‘advisers’ (or ‘product distributors’ or ‘salespeople’) focused those first five...
What are we meant to do? I mean in our role as financial services professionals, what is our immediate focus when in front of our clients? Help the ambitious business owner get another extension to their overdraft , or help them restrain their financial ambitions and...
Traditional annual client meetings frequently devolve into lengthy reviews of the performance or non-performance of an adviser’s recommendations during the preceding year. From a re-engagement perspective, this isn’t useful. The review process has merit. It is...
Would a builder ask your permission to use a hammer to build an extension on your house? Unlikely! And if he did, you’d probably doubt his competence as a builder, if not his sanity. A hammer is a critical tool of a builder’s profession. Likewise, a dictaphone (used...
When asked how our day was, we’ll usually give a quick answer: “Fine.” If pressed, though, unless something unusual occurred, we’ll find it hard to recollect many details of the hours we just lived through. This happens because in order to remember the details, we...
Gates in our client conversations. If you’re not looking for them you have to be lucky to stumble upon one… Some advisers have made the decision never to open them even if they do notice them. They prefer the conversational paths that they are used to. Their paths...
