As discussed in previous issues of this series of articles, using meeting time effectively helps keep the meeting focused and participants engaged. Explaining the standard Discovery meeting process to your clients during the meeting frame-up aids in this by letting your clients know how the meeting will be conducted.
Explain the Discovery meeting process to your clients by informing them that you’ll be asking them a lot of questions so you can build an Advice Map outlining their financial life, and that the conversation will be recorded to ensure that you don’t miss anything.
The questions you ask during the Discovery meeting provide the best possible means of discovering and understanding the current circumstances of your clients, what’s important to them, and what their needs and objectives are. This is the information you require to determine what you need to do to maximise the probability of your clients achieving their financial objectives. This is the information you’ll use to build their Advice Map.
At first, you may feel uncomfortable recording conversations with your clients, but it’s important to remember that doing so is critical to the delivery of great advice. Because advisers know the recording will be an exact representation of what happened during the meeting, they are better able to focus on the client rather than note-taking during the actual conversation. The conversation can always be reviewed later, to ensure nothing was missed, to analyse the effectiveness of the meeting (for future improvement), and as a memory refresher prior to subsequent meetings with the client. Recording your conversations with clients demonstrates your firm’s thoroughness and commitment to delivering quality advice.