A unique one-day workshop for client-centred financial advisers

If you would love to: 

• Discover what your clients really want
• Easily build rapport, trust and high credibility
• Demonstrate the real and genuine value in what you do
• Learn the 5 essential elements of powerful client conversations
• Get better results with less effort
• Raise the bar on your work to an extraordinarily high level
• Enjoy your work more than ever before 

Join us at this unique one-day event

Why attend this workshop?

For years the financial services business has been focused on technical qualifications with most practitioners spending literally hundreds of hours in study.  While knowing what you are doing is essential, it is behind the scenes work.

Clients do not want you to talk technical ‘speak’ to them. They want to: 

• Talk about what matters most to them
• Feel comfortable enough to be open with you
• Live in accordance with their values
• Feel secure, safe and confident about the future
• Have a meaningful financial strategy that aligns with their most important goals in life

These outcomes do not just happen. It requires you to understand how to create the environment that supports this. 

To do truly meaningful work you have to get to the very core of how your clients want to live their lives. 

Most advisers do not know how to do this. Even when their intention is good, they often inadvertently do the wrong things simply through habit. 

You have put scores, possibly hundreds, of hours into your qualifications and yet these alone will not determine your long-term success and happiness.

There are many highly qualified advisers who lack the inter-personal ‘skills’ to really make an impact. 

The day: 

During this enjoyable and enlightening day you will learn 5 the core elements of how to conduct powerful client conversations.  You will immediately improve your ability to connect with your clients at a deeper level and consequently, the quality of your work will go up. Often staggeringly. 

Demonstrating value to clients 

A challenge faced by advisers is demonstrating the value of what they do, especially in an environment where clients are explicitly aware of what they are paying for and the service they are receiving.  The area with the most upside potential for creating massive value are your client conversations. 

The art of deep engagement 

What deeply engages clients and has them willing to pay strong fees is when they see a crystal clear link between what they most want from life and your services.

When they can see that engaging you will improve their quality of life, both now and in the future, they will see it as a worthwhile investment. The vast majority of this work is done within the client conversations.  There are three levels of conversation that you can engage your clients in: 

Level 1 conversations – product and investment centred conversations 

Level 1 conversations are those that focus almost entirely on financial products, financial strategies, funds and investments. Of course, this may be part of the process of financial planning but conducting conversations only at this level does not emotionally engage people, which has big implications with regards to the perception of value. 

Level 2 conversations – problem and solution centred conversations 

Level 2 conversations are where the adviser is eliciting the clients problems and focusing upon solving them. For example, it could be retirement on a certain income, school fees or solving an IHT problem.  Just as with level 1, this is helpful, often extremely so, but there is still huge upside potential for more deeply engaging the client because, once again, people are often not emotionally engaged by this level of conversation. 

Level 3 conversations – experiential conversations 

This is where you are deeply engaging the client on an emotional level about what matters most to them. You are putting a great deal into making sure you understand your client before talking about what happens next. 

Most people are busy in their day to day lives and whom, other than you, is going to sit down with them and have a proper conversation about what they want from life? Their doctor? Their dentist? Their hairdresser?

Level 3 conversations form the basis for your work. When your clients can see that through their collaboration with you their lives are more aligned with what they really want from life then this is of deep service and high value to them. 

Why clients can struggle to see the deeper value is because most advisers are having level 1 or level 2 conversations. The problem this creates is that clients will often struggle to see a deeper value when the approach is too rational and analytical. Here is why: 

People always make important decisions based upon emotion and only then back it up with logic and reason. We don’t do what we should logically do; we do what emotionally compels us. Logic may make us think but, it is emotion that makes us act.

When you are willing to slow things down and really get to the core of what matters most to your clients then the process of financial planning is really brought to life. Level 3 conversations are very different from levels 1 and 2 and they’re always guided by these core elements: 

1. Your intention
2. Your questions
3. Your willingness to really listen
4. Your ability to elicit the client’s deepest goals and outcomes
5. A very high tone to the meeting 

It is a waste of your time to try and convince clients of the value of financial planning. Clients have to discover value for themselves and the most effective way to do this to have powerful conversations.

When you have powerful, level 3 conversations with your clients they will see you as a valued and trusted partner in leading a higher quality life and they would not consider going anywhere else. Why would they?

If you have any questions please email me at john@dashfield.com