Launching the Conversation: Questions 1 and 2

You’ve set up the meeting and now it is time to speak with your client, preferably in person and at a meeting that is separate from a client review. Before you dive into the questions, you can launch the meeting with some helpful techniques. At ClientWise, we ask all of our clients to begin the meeting by again stating its purpose. For example:

• “Joe, I wanted to meet with you and ask you to help me think about the way I am running my practice. I value your opinion, and I would like to ask you for some honest feedback.”

It’s helpful to ground the client in the purpose of the meeting as this will be a new kind of conversation, probably unlike those you’ve had before. There will be no discussion of investments, financial planning, or the capital markets as you are meeting with the client to invite him or her to provide you with feedback about you and your practice. This opening comment will also build trust and rapport with your client as you express that you appreciate his or her feedback.

Remember, too, as you launch the conversation that you are coming from a position of strength. Your attitude is one of excitement and openness because your practice is doing well and you would like to do even better at serving clients in the ways they need. It’s all part of a philosophy of continual improvement or lifelong learning.

The next step we ask all of our clients to take is to tell the person three things that you like or admire about him or her. For example:

• “I have always appreciated how knowledgeable you are about what I do, and how thorough you are about doing your homework before we meet.”
• “I really appreciate how you always confirm our appointments and make sure it is convenient for me. That kind of sensitivity is unusual.”
• “I value the trust you put in me, especially the way you follow my advice when I make recommendations.”

By telling the other person three things you like or admire about him or her, you are setting a positive tone for the meeting and further building trust. (Of course, these observations need to be authentic to be effective.) Recent research by a Japanese team has shown that not only do compliments serve as social rewards that have a positive effect on recipients not unlike that of money, but they also motivate people to perform better after receiving them.² You want your clients’ help, and this is a great method to start paving the way to get it!

There are no right or wrong words to acknowledge your clients; simply offer them some evidence that you understand them and value specific things about them. In fact, having a perfect script is probably a mistake. Your acknowledgment should be tailored to the client you are talking to and personal to them. Authenticity and sincerity are the most important elements to this step.

With the meeting launched, you can begin asking the five ClientWise Conversation™ questions, beginning with Question 1 and then moving on to Question 2. To be effective, the questions need to be asked in the order they are given. The reason for this lies in value. Often, it’s easier for the clients to identify first what is working for them, what they value, and how they enjoy working with you today.

Most interviewers assume that the current setup is working well and thus want to skip that part of the interview in favor of getting to the question of what can be done better. If you take that approach, you’ll likely hear from clients that the relationship is fine, they are happy, and they wouldn’t change much. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” you’ll be likely to hear.

This is not the feedback you are looking for! Instead, give clients the space to start thinking and talking about their experiences with you over the years, and this will warm them up to giving you the constructive feedback you are asking for.

Do not, under any circumstances, think that you can mail these questions out in some sort of written or typed survey. It’s best if you do not even send them to the client in advance. I had one Morgan Stanley advisor in Chicago call me to specifically tell me the ClientWise Conversation™ didn’t work. When I responded with some questions of my own to figure out why, I discovered that he had mass mailed the five questions to all 400 of his clients and got (surprise surprise!) very little response. You need the questions answered, and you need them answered truthfully, with your clients’ authentic responses. These answers are best acquired in person.

Also important to note, the conversation will be richer than just the five questions with authentic answers by your clients. As your clients answer the five questions I have provided here, you will learn information that may raise additional questions for you. Plan to ask any follow-up questions that spring to mind and to be in the flow of the conversation. Remember, however, that in the first meeting, you must cover all five of the questions. Start with Question 1:

• What is the one thing you value most about how my firm and I serve you?

This question allows you to begin the inquiry by gathering positive information, which is likely to put both you and the client at ease. Most people don’t particularly enjoy giving negative or constructive feedback, whereas they are far more willing and/or comfortable saying something positive. So this is an icebreaker question. Of course, it’s more than an icebreaker. At its heart, it is a means of determining how exactly the client perceives your value as a professional. You are gathering data to let you know how your clients are currently framing your business. What value do they think you provide them?

As with all of these questions, it’s important to word them as they are shown here. The wording has been chosen expressly and tested across thousands of situations. In the case of Question 1, notice that the question doesn’t ask, “What is the most important way that you feel my firm and I serve you?” It asks, “What is the one thing . . . ?” Neurolinguistics research shows that people tend to freeze up or struggle to answer a question about “the most important” something, whereas they answer “one thing” questions with greater ease and creativity.

The request to pull the superlative, tip-top, number one “most important thing” answer out of the air raises the blood pressure of the person trying to come up with a brilliant, insightful, unassailable response; in fact, psychology professor Barry Schwartz has called the quest to make the perfect choice “a recipe for misery.”³ Spare your clients the torture and stick with “one thing”! After all, they are likely to give you more than one thing anyway!

After you have asked your client what is the one thing that he or she values most about your firm and you’ve taken time to listen and document the answer, it’s time to ask Question 2:

• What is the one thing you would most like me to change or improve about my firm and how I serve you?

With this question, you are moving on to gather information about how you can be a more effective partner to your clients. If the answer resonates and/or you discover a pattern across multiple clients, you can build this change into the reframe. Wow, is this question powerful! Who has better insight into how you can best serve the client than the client him- or herself? Your client is a treasure trove of useful information on how you can effectively reframe your business. As long as you are able to build trust during the conversation and maintain an open attitude rather than being defensive, you have the potential to learn some very useful information with this question.

In fact, one of my clients, an advisor from the Midwest, affiliated with one of the big brokerage houses, informed me that this question saved him from losing his biggest client. I picked up the phone one day to hear him share, “I just want you to know that you saved my career.” I will admit that I was stunned. Truth be told, I had never met the man—let’s call him Paul—but he had gone through one of our coaching programs and had learned the ClientWise Conversation™ from his ClientWise coach.

Paul explained the following: “My number one client, who is a chief executive of a major company, was about to leave me—until I asked him, ‘What is the one thing I could change or improve?’ His answer was, ‘Stop calling my home number and leaving messages for me to call you back. Send me an e-mail, it would be preferred, and, oh, by the way, go set up an appointment and meet my wife. She really has no clue about the finances, and you need to educate her.’”

Why did Paul’s client make these requests? Here’s what was really happening. This client was the chief executive of an international company and found himself traveling all over the world. Paul would call the client for his periodic check-in because this client was an ultra-high-net-worth individual, and he had a very large investment portfolio. A trainer or consultant somewhere along the way had told Paul that this was the right thing to do, the “best practice.”

But here’s the thing: The client never asked for Paul to call him monthly and certainly not at his home number. Instead of this being a good thing for the client, it was causing him all sorts of headaches, because each time Paul would leave a voice mail on the home machine, the client’s wife would think that something had gone wrong with the couple’s investment portfolio, so she would call the husband in the middle of the night, say, Tokyo time, waking him up to ask, “Hey, by the way, the advisor just called and left this message. Is everything okay?”

The truth of the matter was that nothing was wrong at all, but Paul’s “best practice” home number check-in caused all sorts of stress, disruption, and headaches for the client. The client was ready to dump his “annoying” advisor who just wouldn’t let up with the monthly calls to his home phone—until his advisor took the time to gather feedback from him. Question 2 saved this advisor from losing his biggest client.

It saved him his career, too, because this client had referred over 50 clients to him who were all high-net-worth individuals and employees of the international firm that the client led. If the client had left the advisor, the rest of these clients would have departed, too.

Instead, this story has a fantastic ending. Instead of losing his client, Paul actually reframed his business and gained new clients by developing a whole education series to better educate the spouses of his clients. The ClientWise Conversation™ helped him realize that he was not connecting with half of his clients—the spouses—and he made a meaningful change in his value proposition as a result. In fact, it has become the centerpiece to his value proposition, as he primarily works with C-suite executives, many of whom are married and appreciate this piece of support.

This story makes you wonder what you will discover when you ask your clients about the one thing that they would most like you to change or improve about your firm and how it serves them, doesn’t it?

Question 3

When my firm first designed the questions in the ClientWise Conversation™ back in 2006, we made a mistake. There were only four questions at the time, not five, and that’s because we didn’t know that Question 3—the next one that you will use when conducting the ClientWise Conversation™—would not provide us with the kind of feedback we anticipated. Whoops! The question read as follows:

• If you were to describe the services that my firm and I offer you, to clients like yourself, what would you say?

In Question 3, we were trying to get at the heart of what kind of services clients believed their advisors provided to them. That’s fair enough, I think, with a question like this one. Yet, the answer that thousands of clients provided when asked this question was altogether different than the one we expected. Instead of saying things like, “You offer reasonably priced life insurance” or “You help clients build strong retirement portfolios,” they said things like, “I trust you,” “You take care of my family,” “You’ve always been there for me,” and “I can count on you.”

The clients’ answers had everything to do with building a trustful relationship. It had very little to do with answering the actual question, which invited people to describe the advisor’s services—unless, of course, building a trusting relationship was the one most important thing that the advisor was providing to the client as a service.

Jonathan Beukelman, Managing Director of Wealth Management at the Beukelman Group,⁴ discovered a similar reality early in his career and ultimately used it to help him frame himself for clients in a way that would be truly helpful to them. As a natural listener, Beukelman asked questions of his prospects and clients early on. In response, they told him the interesting truth that they didn’t get particularly excited to hear about all the great investments his firm had told him to talk about to them.

What they really wanted was his support with the big questions, like how to pass their money down to their kids in the best way, how to educate their children about money, and how to make sure that they didn’t ruin the next generation by not transitioning their wealth properly. This information helped Beukelman understand early on the value of the support relationship he could supply his clients. Most people need more than a mutual fund manager, Beukelman discovered—they need a financial advisor. What clients needed was not one piece, but the whole picture.

Over the years, when Beukelman has asked his clients what they need from him, they will often express concerns regarding their adult children. Beukelman doesn’t shy away from talking directly to his clients’ children, often when the kids are in their early twenties. Instead, he says lightheartedly, “Let me at them.”

Over the course of his conversations with them, Beukelman has discovered that some of these kids “just need . . . patient conversation.”⁵ Instead of focusing on money management per se, Beukelman focuses on listening to these individuals and helping to keep a “fire in their gut” so they have the motivation to manage their money well, to “just go on and attack it.”⁶ Beukelman, whose firm specializes in managing family wealth, understands that the value of the advisor to the client is in the trusting relationship he and his team can provide, not in their ability to sell services to them.

We discovered the same reality as Beukelman when road-testing Question 3 of the ClientWise Conversation™: From the clients’ view, the greatest value they receive from their advisor is to have a trusting relationship. In fact, this was the number one answer that was given when we asked clients, “If you were to describe the services that my firm and I offer you, to clients like yourself, what would you say?” We had learned something very important by asking Question 3. Clearly, though, we needed to add a different question to elicit the client’s view on what kind of services the advisor offered. That’s where Question 4 came in.

Yet, we did not remove Question 3 as we felt it was incredibly important to retain for two reasons. First, we believed that advisors needed to hear out loud from their clients how important the trusting relationship was to clients. Second, we knew that enabling the clients to enunciate for themselves that the trusting relationship was important to them would have a powerful impact on the clients. Both advisors and clients would gain a firsthand understanding, in the moment, of how much value the trusting relationship brings to clients, a value that could not be easily replicated by switching to another firm.

Question 4

Question 4 centers around achievement. It’s a powerful question because it gets the clients to say in their own words what it is you have achieved together. It gets them to describe the value of your services out loud.

• If you were to describe what we’ve achieved together for as long as we’ve worked together, what would you say?

When the clients believe they have achieved something and they are able to articulate that something—when they own and know for themselves what they have achieved in partnership with you, the advisor—there is magic. The client makes a real connection in his or her mind between what you do as an advisor and why it is valuable to him or her.

Now if you as the advisor tell the client, “This is of value to you,” the client won’t believe it; it won’t sink in or feel real or authentic. But if clients say out loud what is of value to them, it becomes real. Therein lies the genius of Question 4.

Question 5

The last question that needs to be asked during the ClientWise Conversation™ is Question 5:

• Among your other professional advisors in your life, who do you trust the most and why?

There are two reasons that an advisor wants to ask Question 5. First, you want to know who the other trusted advisors are in the client’s life. From a competitive perspective and a client-influence perspective, you have to identify and understand who else has your client’s ear and business so you know where you stand relative to them.

Second, when we study the best in the business—those who are most successful—what we notice is that they have a network of professionals with whom they partner so that they can provide comprehensive wealth management. The answer to Question 5 will provide you with essential data for building your network of professionals with whom you partner.

Note that I am not talking about the old, trite centers of influence or professional alliances for the benefit of getting referrals. Referrals are not even what you want. What you really want are introductions, and you only get formal introductions if you have professional partnerships with people.

By asking Question 5 of your clients, you will be able to gather key information that will help you in the reframe to develop those professional partnerships and to provide complete wealth management. The reality is that if you are going to deliver wealth management, you will likely specialize in only one piece of wealth management and need to build out a team for the rest.

For example, if you are a financial planner, you may still need on your team a primary banker, a primary insurance agent, a primary business valuation specialist, a health care consultant, a person to handle the concentrated stock position, and more. As your client goes through one or more life transitions, you are likely to have a need to connect him or her to one of these other professionals on your team. If you are proactive about building this team, all roads can lead back to you as the financial planner or wealth advisor.

The best way to build this network is to ask your existing clients, “Hey, by the way, among your other trusted advisors, who do you trust the most and why? Because from time to time, my clients need to connect with these other types of professionals, and the way we have built our network is by asking our clients who they trust the most and why, to determine whether or not we want to add them to our professional network for the benefit of our clients, because we are building a community—a community of clients and a community of professionals that together can help our clients achieve their goals and dreams and hopes and desires.”

As you are building your network, you are also creating goodwill with the clients and deepening their potential to trust in you—to understand that you will truly be able to take care of them because you have a robust team, not just of partners, but of partners that your clients trust.

The Meeting Wrap-Up

As the meeting comes to a close, you will want to let the client know that his or her input was really valuable and helpful. Do not forget to thank your client for his or her time, ideas, and candor. Plan, too, to ask permission of the client to be able to have a follow-up conversation in the future with a question like one of the following. (That being said, there are some clients you will not go back to because they weren’t really helpful. If you feel this is the case for a particular client, you can skip this step.)

• “Would it be okay if we circle back to you in a couple of months and share with you our key findings?”
• “Would it be okay if we came back to you and demonstrated some of the items we are improving, perhaps [from a technology perspective or from a processing perspective or from a messaging perspective]?”
• “Would it be all right if I come back and share with you regarding the value that we really want to bring to our clients?”
• “Would you mind my sharing those key insights and what changes and improvements we have decided to make?”
• “I have some work to do. Thanks for your input. I want to come back to you after I’ve done some thinking and learning because we want to reshape, we’re improving, and we want to include you in the improving part of the process so you’re aware of what we’ve done; is that OK?”

By closing in this way, you will demonstrate that you are taking the client and his or her opinion seriously and that this is not simply a matter of you looking to get referrals from the client. It conveys that you are engaging in an authentically driven process around identifying how you are being framed today.

In addition to going back to your client in the future with the results of your reframe, plan to make it a habit as a team, every 18 to 20 months, to have this kind of conversation with your client. This will allow you to get a fresh read on how you are being framed at that stage in time and to identify whether steps you’ve taken to reframe your business are working.