NAIFA California Statewide Brown Bag Webinar “The Psychology of the Client Interview”

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present “The Psychology of the Client Interview” via the October 21, 2014 NAIFA California Statewide Brown Bag Webinar that was facilitated by NAIFA California 2014/2015 State President, Ron Adams of College Funding Advisors.

Here is a transcript of the opening of the Webinar. Click here to Subscribe to my Newsletter as I will be providing the entire transcript in my upcoming Newsletters.

Ron:       Simon, welcome. I’m really looking forward to this. You and I have had a number of really good in-depth discussions on the phone. For full disclosure purposes I’ll let everybody know I first met Simon at a NAIFA National Convention in Las Vegas and I was very impressed. My good friend Chal Daniels was using him as a business coach, and so we invited Simon to come and speak at our annual meeting down in San Francisco this year. Before that I had had a chance to hear him do a presentation at the Central Valley NAIFA meeting and I just afterwards confirmed my wise decision to invite him to come and speak to our state meeting, and you are the real deal my friend.

Simon:  Thank you Ron. Much appreciated.

Ron:       I should let everybody know too that I have been through coaching sessions with Simon and found them to be incredibly valuable. I recommend them highly. We’re going to go through a 45-minute dialogue between Simon and me, and at that point Laura will give instructions about how people can come on and ask individual questions of Simon. So the topic we wanted to talk about today is sort of the whole psychology of the interview process, and in particular the first time that you sit down with a client and go through some sort of a fact finder, but you’re trying to find out about their situation to prepare yourself to at some point make significant recommendations, and how some advisors absolutely sabotage themselves and do a really awful job of trying to perform a very noble task. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that advisors are really good at asking questions. They probably have some questions that somebody prepared for them in advance, but then they don’t do the follow-up questions. So, for instance, Simon, I might ask somebody, because I do college funding and people will come to a workshop before they come in for their first meeting with me, and so I’ll typically ask them the question, tell me a couple of things from the workshop that stood out for you. Very often people will say, it’s the cost of paying for college. Now the old me, before some really good in-depth training and self-analysis, would have said, I agree. For heaven’s sake, Stanford is $60,000 a year, the UC schools are pushing in on $35,000 a year, college is really expensive, and so I can certainly appreciate your concern about that. This is a really bad technique. What I have learned and what I do say now is, well, that’s really interesting, I can appreciate your concern about that but cost means different things to different people and could you tell me more in-depth what is it about cost that concerns you. What will happen Simon is that will open it up to all sorts of different responses. I might get a response saying, well, we just haven’t saved any money for college. Or I might get a response saying, we sort of planned for community college and our daughter’s insistent on wanting to go away to Duke for 4 years and we’re not sure how we’re going to pay for that. And then you just drill deeper. Well, what sort of planning have you done and how do you feel about this whole situation. That’s what you want to basically get down to, at some point you want to drill deeper into, how do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? And to get people to tell you. I could sit there and say to somebody who hasn’t started saving, and they’ve got a junior in high school. Gee, that’s a shame that you didn’t start earlier. That was a real mistake. A far better technique for them to say to me, we’ve made a terrible mistake. We haven’t saved for college and now we just don’t know what we’re going to do.

Simon:  You’re right. You’re taking the client deeper, and so we need both the How and the What questions to ask, but we’ve got to look at a deeper question within ourselves and it’s, Why don’t we do that? I think it’s getting caught up with getting too fixated on the product. What is it that we know about the product, and it’s also trying to go too quick. Trying to get out of the sales process as quickly as we possibly can, and we’ve got to look at Why we do that. Why don’t we sit still with the client and create an experience? Because that’s what they want, is an experience. Ron was talking about, how do you feel about that? The client really needs to have a facilitator to help them understand Why, what it is that they want, is most important, and at the same time, help them to understand how they feel about those things because people don’t buy things. We all know that. They buy Why. They buy the feeling behind it. We have to understand how to go in that direction. We’ll also talk more about what I’m about to say, we’ve got to figure out Why is it that we do not do that.

 

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