Interested in fast-tracking your team’s understanding of client value by at least 50% in just a month?
I’m serious.
I appreciate your business training and development is already a priority, but is it focused on the ‘heart’ of your advice skills?
If you are not consistently using a simple voice recorder (like this one) you might not realise the value it can provide your advisory business.
If, like me, you believe there is a universe of difference between delivery of financial advice and financial products, the role of your voice recorder quickly becomes as vital a tool as the surgeon’s scalpel.
Why?
Advice is intangible. So, too it’s value.
Advice is delivered in wildly varying circumstances for clients with diverse, unique and at times, frustrating issues.
Advice is the reason our clients engage us, pay us, return to us and refer us.
Here’s three reasons why your voice recorder will increase your understanding of client’s value by 50% in just a month:
1. Recorders make the intangible tangible
You’re a business person, growing and running an advice business.
You want your advice to deliver specific and consistent value to your clients and you want the advice delivered in a methodical manner.
Clients engage you because they trust you will help them achieve more, or take care of something (or maybe take care of everything financial), or manage their concerns.
If, like me, you believe clients are not buying your products, they are buying you, then your recorder captures the ‘gold’ that they value, the reasons they are engaging, entrusting and why they are paying you.
The review of your very first transcript (or listening to yourself for the first time giving advice) is proof enough for most at the value you’ll pick up (or don’t pick up). You’ll be amazed at the learning that will occur not only for you, but for your team when those value conversations are captured exactly with all the “um’s, argh’s, side-track conversations, and emotions clearly visible.
Make the ‘gold’ they seek tangible and getting it out of ‘your memory’ or ‘in your file notes’, because, frankly, that’s not good enough if you really want to build the best advisory business you can.
Being human, your notes or memory won’t capture everything or more importantly won’t capture the tone, the authenticity, the emotions or the details EXACTLY as your client shared them. Exactly.
Make the intangible spoken words into tangible transcripts (or audio recordings) to lift your learnings, (“…we should have probed more into this area here“) to continually improve your value conservations and thus your firm’s grasp of the issues, frustrations, emotions, aspirations you clients bring to you – i.e. the reasons they are paying you.
2. You want to deliver great advice
How do you improve your advice approach?
I’m not talking about the products, markets, and regulations, but how do you significantly improve HOW you actually do the advice conversations?
Sports teams study videos of their plays, Harvard University Business School studies case studies of management topics – what do you do?
Using transcripts (we currently recommend this group to transcribe your recordings) study what is said, how it is said, and especially your client’s responses, line by line in your next internal training session. Study one client conversation that ‘went well’ and even more importantly study one conversation that ‘didn’t go well’.
If you want to deliver great advice, commit to a study of the moments when you did deliver great advice and, as importantly, the moments when you didn’t deliver great advice. I’d suggest that the study of great advice needs a re-alignment to include greater focus on the study of the actual advice conversations between adviser and client, not just a study of the technical strategies we are providing.
3. Advice is a team proposition
The next generation of advisers is in the business of building businesses that deliver advice.
As the roles within advice businesses are quickly adapting it’s becoming clear that every single team member’s role needs to understand the value each client is seeking.
Having the exact words from your clients about the value they are seeking, about the fears they wish to overcome, about the outcomes they wish to achieve, and about the frustrations they’ve always experienced in their financial lives is vital.
Too much of this detail has been locked too deeply in the heads of the advisers who sits in the meetings.
With recordings your team doesn’t need to be in the meetings, because the recordings will be kept (***) with all your client records and used to extract the core issues for easy access by your whole team.
In Summary…
Making and keeping (***) recordings of your client meetings will become a ‘ticket to the future game of advice’.
The savings of time, the reduction in adviser dependency, the completeness of record-keeping, the benefits to your team’s training, the accuracy of your value proposition will lift your returns, but more importantly will benefit your clients.
What do you reckon?
*** It goes without saying that all recordings and record-keeping will be made and stored as per your client privacy requirements.
About Jim Stackpool
For nearly 30 years Jim has influenced, coached, and consulted to advisory firms across Australia. As founder of Certainty Advice Group, he leads a like-minded team of professional advisory firms seeking to create greater certainty for their clients. As an author, blogger, columnist, and keynote speaker, Jim is regularly called upon for his professional insights into the advice industry. His latest book Seeking Certainty is available now.