For advisors, the key to getting clients to lean in may be leaning back.

Rather than peppering their clients with specific questions during the discovery process, advisors should take a more open ended approach, said Glenn Kurlander, head of Morgan Stanley’s family governance and wealth education unit, at the Investment and Wealth Institute’s 2018 Annual Conference Experience in Nashville, Tenn., on Tuesday.

In fact, by using a few behavioral techniques to boost client engagement, advisors can boost their effectiveness by at least 20 percent, said Kurlander.

“Unofficially, I’m the guy who makes people cry,” he said. “If I go into a meeting with a Morgan Stanley advisor and his or her clients, and no one cries, I consider that meeting a failure.”

Kurlander suggests that, early on in conversations, advisors promise to perform a simple task or achieve a small goal for their clients, then verbally request that clients hold them accountable. Accountability tests help establish trust between advisors and clients.

Next, advisors should ask more open-ended questions of their clients, rather than rushing to address the technical aspects of a client’s life events or their feelings on risk. Rather than asking about the terms of the sale of a business, for example, ask a client to talk candidly about the sale of their business.

“Then do something that’s very hard for a lot of us to do: Shut up and listen,” said Kurlander. “If we did it that magical way, four things would happen: We’d actually have a conversation, … (the client) would do most of the talking, ... we will learn more doing it the way I propose, … and (the client) would feel as if this was all about her.”

Advisors should also encourage their clients to go into more depth when talking about their lives and their feelings. According to Kurlander, the three most engaging words in the English language are “tell me more.”

However, the same end might be achieved with no words at all, said Kurlander, as human beings have a natural urge to fill in the silent gaps in conversation.

“I will intentionally create awkward pauses in our conversations,” he said. “I’ll ask a question, a prospect will answer, and then I’ll wait a beat and a half before asking another question. Much of the time, the prospect will keep talking. Sometimes they simply reiterate something they’ve said before, but a fair amount of the time they’ll say something different, something new, something they weren’t going to say otherwise.”

Another way to build engagement and trust is to tell a client a secret. Not necessarily an actual secret, says Kurlander, but a comment or a piece of information that creates intimacy with the client. Advisors should lower their voice, lean in, and give a client a piece of information or an observation that is not commonly known. To be effective, however, advisors must be authentic when doing so.

Storytelling can also help create more engaged, enthusiastic clients, said Kurlander.

“I can talk in a very academic, theoretical way, but I’ve learned that’s not the way to engage people,” he said. “Rather than speaking academically, I tell them a story.”

Advisors can also use mimicry both to engage clients and to test whether their clients are engaged, said Kurlander.

Neurobiology has discovered mimicry as a form of implicit, non-verbal communication that is difficult to fake. Mimicry refers to largely unconscious but reflexive exchange of gestures, postures and expressions in a conversation.

“The extent to which there’s mimicry in a conversation determines the extent to which the people who are speaking like and trust one another,” Kurlander said. “Work to become more self aware and more self conscious, and see if mimicry is taking place in … conversations.”

Mimicry should extend, to a certain point, to speech patterns as well, said Kurlander. While he doesn’t advocate anyone switching verbal affectations a la Hillary Clinton’s suddenly rediscovered southern accent during the 2008 presidential primaries, he does recommend slowing down and adopting more musical speaking patterns when in the American South, and speeding up and adopting flatter speech affectations when in the metropolitan Northeast.

Finally, one topic is more universal and engaging to human beings than any other, and is the key to engaging with them on a more open and intimate level, said Kurlander.

“Family is the one thing, not just for us, but for our clients as well, the most engaging thing in the world,” he said. “It’s ironic to reflect on that, because the best advisors in their firms, when I ask them if they know the important things about the families of their five to 10 most important clients, most will admit that they do not know. Families are the most engaging thing we can talk about, yet we don’t know everything we need to know about our clients’ families.”