Hesitant Prospects? Here's How to Earn Their Trust
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Here are overlooked actions that tarnish credibility and decrease a client’s confidence in your ability to handle their nest egg.
Everything helps, or everything hurts – there is no neutral ground when it comes to credibility and integrity. As an advisor and leader, you can’t blow off the little things, as they all add up either in your favor or against you.
Whether consciously or not, your clients are keeping a tally.
How is your score?
If your clients are pushing back, if your prospects hesitate to sign on as clients, you have a credibility problem in your relationship. They don’t completely trust you. Maybe you’re a few minutes late for meetings or fail to follow through exactly when you said you would. Or maybe your office decor is less than stellar.
Whatever the reason, little, seemingly nonimportant things help or hinder your client’s confidence in your ability to manage their life savings. Let’s look at ways to build a reputation that your clients – and prospects – can trust.
Losing credibility: An example
Recently, my family and I returned from a group tour of the Holy Land in Israel. We had a wonderful time touring with about 40 others on a bus throughout the country. Our tour guides kept us busy – we started every day at 6 am, and we often didn’t get back for the night until 8 pm.
At one point, we were in a rural part of Israel and taking the guide’s recommendation for lunch. We had two options, a falafel or a Druze wrap made from a potato crepe, a unique blend of herbs only found in Israel with a mayo-like spread. The sandwich wasn’t made anywhere else in the world and was supposed to be a local specialty.
While our guide explained our lunch options, I raised my hand and asked the guide which option he would get. He replied that he gets the Druze wrap every time. Following the local’s lead, my family requested wraps as our meal option.
Lunch came and went, and while the little wrap would have been a great appetizer, it certainly wasn’t enough food to count as a meal. Naturally, my son Gabriel was still rather hungry after finishing his. So, we sought out the guide for help ordering more food.
We found the guide and his friends set up at a table away from ours. While we were given only two options for lunch (none of which contained any substance), our guide and his pals were feasting on meaty sandwiches, French fries, and salads and had a whole heap of food on their tables, with no Druze wraps or falafels in sight.
I told the guide I needed to order more food for my kids. After he shouted something to the Arabic cooks, they tossed us a falafel. That was it.
A few days later, I asked my son where the guide lost his credibility.
Gabriel’s response?
The guide lost all credibility when he didn’t do what he said he would do (eat a Druze wrap) and had a better meal than us.
We often confuse prospect hesitation with an “objection” to your fees, schedule, or designations. But more often it is a credibility issue – the prospect doesn’t trust you enough.
This isn’t necessarily because you’re a terrible person, but you’re a stranger. Your prospect is trusting you with their life savings! It's normal for them to have questions and concerns.
Building credibility in the advisor-client relationship
If your prospect isn’t saying “yes” right away, you haven’t demonstrated enough credibility in the relationship, or you’ve done something that tarnished your credibility.
Here are ways you can bolster confidence in your leadership.
Matching investments
Let’s say I pulled up your personal investment accounts and a client’s today. Will they be virtually identical?
Do you own the same stuff you're asking your clients to invest in? Maybe your clients have never requested outright if you’re investing in the same things, but whether you call it karma or a higher power, people will always find out when you’re not aligned with them.
I’m very open with my clients and invite them to look at my accounts at any time. I have zero qualms about reminding my clients that I’m so committed to our process that I follow it myself.
Meetings start and end on time
You lose credibility with your clients when your meetings start late or run over. Let’s say your Zoom meeting was supposed to begin at 3:00, but you don’t enter until 3:03 because your computer needed an update, and you clicked on the link at the last second.
You just demonstrated that you’re not a person who does what they say they will do.
You may not think being three minutes late is a big deal, but in your client’s eyes it's a black-and-white thing – you’re either on time or late.
With a new prospect or existing client, make sure you’re on that call 10 minutes early so you have time to manage any unexpected tech issues.
Sometimes life-changing events happen, and you’re late for the next meeting. You could just bump the client next in line back without letting them know, but this would discredit your leadership.
Preferably, you’d call that client and let them know what’s up. When I have to squeeze a client in during surge because of a life-changing event, my team calls the next client on the schedule, and they say something like this:
We just had a client pass away, and Micah is now helping the widow. He might be five to 10 minutes late for your appointment.
We tell the client why I’m late because we suddenly have the grace from clients who realize, “Hey, if I pass away or if my spouse passes away, I would like Micah to work with me like this.”
Credibility breaches hurt you
Sometimes, the custodian messes things up, which legitimately happens, and we’ve all had to deal with that. But the client doesn’t clearly distinguish between where your team ends and the custodian starts.
All they understand is that there was a problem with their money.
You can boost your credibility here by reminding the client of potential issues and reassuring them that your team will proactively handle them.
Extreme accountability
If a mistake happens with a client, how do you handle it?
You could wait a week to see if you can fix the issue before the client finds out. You could also play the blame game and chuck your team members under the bus.
However, neither of these actions increases your client’s confidence in your ability to handle their nest egg.
Here in Alaska, I only walk on water when it's frozen. I’m going to make mistakes from time to time. When mistakes happen, I own that mistake, regardless of whether or not a team member was at fault, and I address how the problem will be fixed moving forward.
Action Items
Next time you meet with a prospect or a client, keep a credibility score.
In the corners of your paper, keep a tally of when you add credibility and when you lose it. You can make a note when you see positive body language in one corner and mark negative body language in another corner.
Here are some tells you can watch for:
- Did they pull their phone out?
- Do they look at the papers you pass them?
- Are they doing something else when you’re talking?
- Was the client leaning in and engaged in the conversation?
Set the rules before your meeting, and good luck!
Micah Shilanski, CFP®, is a financial planner who achieves the impossible. Micah is recognized as a leader in the concept of lifestyle design for financial planners and has spoken at conferences across the country. Micah is an advisor with Shilanski and Associates, a founder of Plan Your Federal Retirement, and a co-founder of The Perfect RIA.
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