Distraction-Proof® Advisor Ideas

How clearly and simply can you communicate and illustrate exactly how you help people?
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As advisors, we have a wealth of information in our heads, which is absolutely worthless unless we know how to communicate it effectively to clients and prospects we’re talking with.

We can have a CFP^® designation, we can have a ChFC^® designation, and the certificates hanging up on the wall. That’s great and that’s important, relative to our industry, but unless we can communicate succinctly to the person we’re talking with how we best help and how we can help them achieve their objectives, it’s not really worth anything.

Often times in resorting to “industry speak,” we can leave them baffled and confused. We need to learn how to speak succinctly, and that means distilling down complex thoughts and theories and ideas into simple words that people can hang onto, that they can understand, so they can leave your office meeting feeling like they’ve just made progress.

Tony Vidler is a friend of mine. He is eighty percent Kiwi and twenty percent Australian, so he’s nearly perfect, and he showed a great, simple illustration of the wealth accumulation phase, the spending phase, and the drawing down phase of retirement. It was a very simple illustration outlining what those three different phases look like in a client’s life.

You want to get proficient at being able to draw an illustration like this as a simple way to explain clearly what you’re talking to the client about.

So,

1. Find a couple of illustrations that show clearly key points that you’re going to be describing to that person about how you help them and what they need to be aware of.


2. Practice them: get proficient at illustrating and drawing and labeling these pictures in front of your clients so that they’re part of the process that you’re building out, literally, right in front of them.


3. After you’ve done that, you can take that piece of paper, scan it – as a record, obviously – and send it to them, highlighting, “Here are the to-dos that you’re responsible for, and here are the to-dos that I’m going to take care of.” Then, in your next meeting, you can pull that out and pick up right from that point, letting them see we’re just starting from where we were at before; this is nothing too complex or complicated. It’s staying simple. Let’s see what our next steps are involved in working together.

I look forward to bringing you another Distraction-Proof Advisor Idea next week.