Photo by Cory Woodward on Unsplash
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Planning for life is not much different than the financial planning you engage in for your clients. Both involve establishing goals, creating steps to achieve those goals and then implementing and tracking a plan.
I’ve spent decades extolling the benefits of financial planning. Yet, in my own life, I was spontaneous and reactive. When I interacted with others, I didn’t have a “plan.” I didn’t think about how my behavior could impact the outcome.
The research underlying The Solin Process changed my approach to how I live my life. I also benefitted from the experiences of the advisors who provided feedback after hearing me speak about this research.
Choices
We have choices when we meet others, but most people aren’t aware of them. Here are some options:
- We can create stress by trying to persuade someone of something.
- We can antagonize and polarize others by using data to support a position or view contrary to theirs.
- We can cause them to feel diminished and trivialized by dominating the conversation and interrupting them.
- We can induce boredom and distraction the longer we speak.
- We can cause them to feel great (about themselves and us) by empowering them to talk, asking appropriate follow-up questions, and demonstrating a sincere interest in what they’re saying.
When presented with these options, few would choose 1-4, but that’s precisely what happens when you impose your process on prospects, implement your agenda, seek to “educate” them, use text-dense PowerPoint slides or other presentation aids or assume you’re the “expert” and the person in front of you is keen to have you demonstrate your expertise.
A different kind of “preparation”
Recently, a client called to discuss a meeting she was about to have with a large prospect. She wanted to know how to “prepare” for the meeting. Here’s what I told her.
Forget about deciding what to say and how to “present.” Instead, prepare a list of 10 questions to ask the prospect. Listen carefully to the responses, and then ask suitable follow-up questions, without making any effort to steer the conversation in any direction. I told her to change her objective from conveying information to eliciting it.
Marketing Services For Evidence-Based Advisors...and a New Book!
We offer consulting services on how to convert more prospects into clients through Solin Consulting, a division of Solin Strategic, LLC.
We offer a full range of digital marketing services exclusively to evidence-based advisors through Evidence Based Advisor Marketing, LLC . You can see examples of our work here.
I'm working on a new self-help book for the general public. It's called:
Ask
How to Relate to Anyone
Ask will be published in mid-2020. For more information, click here.
Schedule a call with Dan here
I also advised her not to take notes.
After the meeting, she told me it was “certainly different,” but wasn’t sure she converted the prospect. In the same conversation, she told me she “really enjoyed” meeting the prospect and felt “so much more relaxed” implementing my recommendations.
A week later, she was retained. When the prospect called to give her the good news, he told her his meeting with her “couldn’t have been more different” from the interviews he had with six competitors.
I’m pretty sure she was the only one who showed a genuine interest in him. The others were focused on what they were saying and probably had little interest in his input.
She made a choice.
For more information about marketing and branding opportunities with Dan’s upcoming book, Ask: How to Relate to Anyone, click here.
Read more articles by Dan Solin