When you ask the right questions, you gain an understanding of your clients and what is important to them. This is key to not only knowing your clients, but also building trust. By actively listening, you encourage them to share their thoughts, goals and challenges. Good conversations require financial planners to do more listening than talking.
Integrated Wealth Planning encourages planners to capture the essence of their clients’ lives and worlds. Building a trusted relationship means turning monologues into dialogues where both parties have a genuine interest in what the other person is saying. It is about listening to clients’ stories without interrupting them to respond with your own. Paying attention to what's being said and not what you want to say is key to building relationships.
It all starts with effective listening skills and questioning with curiosity.Why ask questions?
- Questions hold the power to cause us to think.
- Questions redefine relationships between people. When I ask for your ideas, we become equals.
- When you do the asking instead of the telling, you elevate the intellect, reason, and thoughts of the other person.
Celeste Headlee, top TED speaker, and best-selling author, explains that the reason we don’t listen to each other is that we would rather talk. When you are talking, you are in control. But the other reason is that we get distracted. The average person talks at about 225 words per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. It takes effort and energy to pay attention to someone, but if you can’t do that, you’re not in a conversation.
Get in touch with us to guide you on how to have healthy conversations that will get your clients to share their stories.