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.”