Tell a Story for Organic Growth

Dear T.R.,

If you don’t mind, one take-away I’ll start with is to change the language from referring to introducing and from growing your business to helping others your clients might know or care about. It’s subtle but it’s powerful because language matters when it comes to things like this. It matters because you are offering a service that provides significant life change to individuals who work with you.

You aren’t offering to clean someone’s carpets! You don’t want to be referred to someone who can help your business. Rather, you want to be introduced to someone you might be able to help. Try and reframe this concept in your own mind so you come across a little bit differently.

You are approaching growth in a thoughtful way with your niche market approach. The more you understand a certain segment and can talk their talk, and maybe help with questions they didn’t even know they needed to ask, the more the niche recognizes you as someone who can help them – specifically.

I suggest you consider adding storytelling to your repertoire as you think about how best to gain those important introductions to others. Storytelling allows you to describe what you do, and whom you do it for, in a way that is transferrable and understandable. One of my partners works directly with a lot of wealthy families, and she has found even bringing up “the story of money” with each of them has allowed them to open up in productive and connective ways that simply talking about goals and plans has not been able to. Stories are powerful because they are illustrative and they bring people into a picture in ways that facts and data cannot.

I find most advisors overlook storytelling as a marketing tool. They often believe what they do isn’t that big of a deal and telling stories about solving financial conundrums for clients seems unnecessary and silly. In fact, it is the way to help someone who isn’t in our business understand what really goes on behind the scenes.

When I do workshops on storytelling, I often tell my own story about a retail bank client of mine who was trying to improve their in-branch client experience. They invested a lot of time and focus in creating a program to roll out ways to engage differently. My team was a key part of this, and for many months we prepared content. Then for many months after that, we traveled around the country to roll out the program.

The head of distribution for this bank would kick off each meeting by telling a story about his experience with the retail store REI. He talked about his family, outdoor camping and the customer experience. To this day I cannot remember what cities I was in, or even the content I myself had to deliver, but I could tell his two-minute story from beginning to end almost perfectly. That’s the power of storytelling. It doesn’t have to be long to be memorable!

How to construct a story?

1. Start with the trigger – the reason a client came to see you. What prompted them to seek a discussion with a financial advisor? Give background on what the client was experiencing at that point in time.
2. Outline what you did to really help them. How did you engage? What questions did you ask? How did you and the client find a common ground of what you could do for them? How did you solve the right problem?
3. Illustrate the steps involved in helping the client – what you did, how you implemented it, etc.
4. Financial advisory stories should always have a happy ending. This doesn’t mean the client’s life ends happily – you are often dealing with major life crises in your line of work. The “happy ending” is where the client is helped because of your approach. They are put on a better path to success, and are calm and less stressed along the way.

It sounds easy, but it does take practice to do this without veering off into unnecessary details and losing someone’s attention. A good story shouldn’t be more than about two minutes. With your niche approach you might want to do the following:

1. Make a list of the things your niche encounters that often come up for you to address;
2. Outline how much you know about each of these things;
3. Put some steps together in how you “solve” for each of them; and
4. Talk about what happens for the client once you have solved for this.

Please take my outline above and then align it specifically with your niche market. Then tell your clients you are hoping for introductions to others who are in their network who might need support like you have been able to provide them. Each time you interact, tell them a short and easy to remember story about something you’ve recently done for people in similar situations. The more you tell the stories, the stickier they become and the easier to remember as they leave you and talk to others.

The beauty of storytelling is that the client listening doesn’t have to know the asset size, the person’s name or even where they come from in order to relate to them. They just to have to listen and understand in order to turn around and tell it again themselves.

While I am not a customer who frequents REI, in my example above, I did listen and learn from the conversation. My impression of the company is a very positive one, based on the story I heard. Now, when anyone asks me about a great outdoor shop in the local area, I recommend REI. I haven’t had a personal experience there but the story I heard was compelling and credible from someone else that I trust. That’s the power of storytelling. It carries on long, long after the original story has been told!

Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).

She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.

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