If you know what drives your clients’ attitudes to money, you stand a better chance of getting your message across. Robert Skinner explains.
Knowing your client’s personality preferences can help you take your relationship with and understanding of your client to a totally new level. It also creates a richer experience for both you and your client.
From a reference point of view, we use four animals to describe clients’ money preferences: owl, monkey, labrador and dolphin.
While this may seem like a pigeon-holing exercise, it is actually a scaling concept, as opposed to a boxing one. It is correct to say you have all of these animals in you. It is just that one animal is likely to feel “more like you” than the others. In this sense, you will have a primary animal, a support animal and so on. You will also have an animal you just don’t have much in common with.
While the animals sound gimmicky, it is important to point out they have been built upon thousands of years of research into human behaviour. The animals indicate distinctive behavioural preferences of different people, while being highly memorable.
I am an owl, and I will remember this for the rest of my life. If you knew what an owl’s preferences were, you would know so much more about why I do the things I do, how to communicate with me, and what parts of a financial plan would appeal to me.
You would also know what is important to me in my relationship with my planner, which relates back to my previous article about clients seeing value in your service.
We will introduce the other animals to you in later editions; but for now, let’s look at the labrador. You could argue the traditional financial plan is a near perfect fit for labradors. Labradors find planning, budgeting, and building wealth a brick at a time appealing.
My wife is a labrador, and very different from me. Interestingly, ipac found that 70 per cent of couples experience conflict around money. In many cases this will be a result of people with different animal personalities just having different opinions regarding the best way to acquire, manage and preserve money.
Warren Buffett is a well-known example of someone who displays labrador preferences. Labradors have a preference to build wealth in an orderly, measured and structured way. You might find they walk into your office with a good idea of where their finances are up to, what their spending habits are; and they may have already done some forward planning with their finances.
Often labradors like to do one thing at a time – for example, paying off a mortgage before engaging in investment pursuits. So be careful if you are attempting to throw a bag full of ideas at a labrador all in one go.
As a planner, it would be a challenging exercise to persuade a labrador to take on a risky strategy or a complicated investment that is relatively new to market. You would not see Warren Buffett put his money on a new-to-market technology stock.
To provide an example, you may find clients with labrador preferences struggle with strategies involving Transition to Retirement pensions. Most people will see superannuation as retirement savings, and the idea of tapping into super before they retire can seem illogical from a labrador’s perspective.
In summary, labradors tend to:
• Be planned, practical and organised;
• Value loyalty, responsibility and reliability;
• Trust what has been proven, tried, and tested;
• Provide stability and dependability to organisations and people they care about.
One of the potential risks of the limited information I have provided is that you may decide which clients fit the profile, without using a robust framework to prove it. In the same way, risk profiles can bring some varied results from what our initial thoughts may have been.
As the saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover”.
Robert Skinner is a co-founder of innergi – www.innergi.com.au
