Financial advisors who want clients and prospects to commit fully to the planning process need to secure buy-in from the very first meeting.
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Consistent communication, showing up for meetings and following through on long-term goals all stem from the foundation an advisor builds at the start of the relationship, according to a webinar last week led by Kelsa Dickey, the founder of financial coaching firm Fiscal Fitness Phoenix. The presentation, hosted by the nonprofit Foundation for Financial Planning, focused on achieving buy-in from pro bono clients. But the lessons apply broadly to first-time planning meetings with any customer or prospect.
Ideally, advisor-client relationships will not only span decades and generations, but also add significant value to an advisory practice. Dickey outlined her four core strategies to achieve a client’s early buy-in:
“Believe your client is capable of change.””Start smaller; buy-in is built through momentum.””Consider their readiness, match your service model.””Encourage experimentation, most people learn by doing.”
Overall, an advisor needs to set the tone by establishing trust rather than overwhelming the client or prospect with lengthy lists of tasks or documents or speaking down to them, she said. Many times, advisors “are speaking to someone who just needs more clarity more than anything.”
Communication prior to the first meeting “should express one thing and one thing only: ‘When we meet, I am going to help you,'” Dickey said. “This is going to be helpful for you, because that is the clarity that they need. They are likely full of skepticism, full of doubt. They question whether you can help them. They question whether they’re not already doing the best with what they have. They’re wondering if you’re going to laugh at them or judge them, so many things, and so that is why all they need to hear in order to cut down on no-shows for that very first session is, ‘This will help.'”
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No one wants to be patronized or insulted
The fear of being embarrassed by a wealthy, judgy advisor who speaks in incomprehensible jargon often repels potential clients, especially those who have financial trauma.
Advisors know this. Nevertheless, at a conference last year Dickey witnessed advisor attendees use “words like ‘dumb, stupid and ignorant'” to describe clients and make comments such as “‘I just don’t know what they were thinking,’ in this condescending, patronizing sort of way.”
She suggested advisors turn the tables and consider how they would feel in a situation where they needed advice but sensed the professional looked down on them.
“You cannot create buy-in if you don’t believe the person you’re helping is capable of it,” Dickey said. “People can sense this. They can smell it from a mile away if you don’t believe that they’re doing their best and don’t genuinely want to help them.”
Most professionals know not to talk down to people or communicate in a condescending way, she said. The problem is that advisors may not be aware of how prospects and clients are perceiving them. “There is a very subtle way that financial professionals come across as condescending, and it’s completely inadvertent,” Dickey said.
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Start with small, quick wins
One method to avoid coming off that way revolves around “placing a very big spotlight on small wins” at the first meeting to ensure clients see that progress is being made, Dickey said.
“Highlight a few things that they’re doing well or that are their strengths.” Examples she cited include acknowledging and celebrating that the client has a stable job, excellent work benefits or great communication with their partner.
“In the first session, you also, obviously, want to solve something,” Dickey said. “But what I have noticed when I watch coaching sessions or financial planning sessions with individuals, the first session, if we’re not careful, can tend to be a lot of action steps and a lot of problem solving and not a lot of acknowledgement of their strengths or things that they’re doing well, the things that they actually want to capture and use in order to solve the things that aren’t working right.”
After that successful interaction, the advisor can then introduce new steps in the process for subsequent meetings.
Give some space within the guardrails
Placing too many rules on clients and being highly proscriptive about every one of their financial decisions are other major missteps for advisors. Those pitfalls can push clients off what Dickey calls the “trust buy-in loop” toward establishing a long-term relationship with the advisor. It may even harm clients by blocking them from finding their own conclusions.
“We can easily take them off of a trust buy-in loop simply by trying to control what they do too much,” Dickey said. “You really want to let your clients try new things with guardrails. If you’re giving your clients very detailed plans, like I was saying, a laundry list of action steps, you might actually be robbing them of what they need in order to learn and get better with money, which is experimenting, improvising and gaining self-awareness.”
For most clients, she said, navigating that process will help them learn better habits faster.
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Acknowledge constraints and capacities
But if they don’t invest fully into the planning process, clients may never get that far. That’s particularly true for people of limited means who may be exhausted by the thought of a giant checklist of tasks.
During the webinar, an audience question about the challenge of time management for single parents sparked Dickey’s memory of her own mother, who had to file for bankruptcy. Had someone advised her to save money via time-intensive strategies like clipping coupons, meal planning or cooking from scratch, it would have set her up for failure, Dickey said. “As a single parent, she just didn’t have the capacity.”
For advisors, the lesson is clear: Be mindful of a prospective client’s life situation.
“When we think about readiness level, we also should consider capacity at the same time, and a simple acknowledgement, something like, ‘I want to look for solutions and strategies that can save both time and money for you,’ or, ‘The solutions we consider can’t be too time involved or too time-intensive, because you don’t have a lot of that to spare either, right?,'” Dickey said. “Even just simply acknowledging that you are aware of it and that you are considering solutions that match their readiness level and their capacity can really go a long way to cultivate buy-in, as opposed to reducing buy-in.”
