Financial advisers are speaking the wrong language and using too many words when speaking to clients, says Moira Somers, a clinical neuropsychologist, professor and executive coach based in Winnipeg, Canada.
Somers, who has a website called Money, Mind and Meaning and has recently published a book on advice delivery called Advice that Sticks, says the reason we talk too much is that we’re overly keen to show clients how smart we are.
“It’s pretty human. When you’re trying to get a client, you want to somehow demonstrate your knowledge and expertise,” Somers says. “To do that, we feel like we have to open our mouths a lot, but that isn’t really a way to make people feel comfortable, generally. A lot of time, it just comes across as feeling like you are bearing witness to nothing but a display of ego.”
Advisers tend to have a habit of rushing in to fill the silences when speaking with clients, she says, which makes them uncomfortable and precludes them from opening up.
“The research is compelling that we do rush to fill in the silence too quickly,” she says.
‘A distasteful path’
Somers says selling is still an embedded component of financial advice. Many advisers have a background in sales, she argues, so they tend to use ingrained sales methods in their client meetings.
“The old model of doing sales was to sell, sell, sell and always be coming up with selling features and countering objections with powerful tactics aimed at silencing people,” she says. “There’s a bit of a distasteful path there.”
This approach runs contrary to what makes the client happy, she explains. More than anything, clients want to be heard and to find comfort in knowing that you’re aware of what’s important to them.
“It’s especially true in initial meetings,” Somers continues. “In an initial meeting, the client wants to have a sense that they are in good hands and part of that is having a sense that the person is going to listen to them and draw them out about what their hopes and concerns are.
“You can’t offer that to a client if you’re talking.”
Putting silence on a pedestal is nothing new, Somers says, but is something that takes a while to learn.
“This comes out of a lot of medical school training,” she explains. “You get the best quality of information as a physician if you ask the right kinds of questions, but are then prepared to fully listen to the answer and not interrupt.”
The gender problem
Somers says there is anecdotal evidence that these communication issues are more common when male advisers are speaking to female clients.
“There’s a bit of a gender problem in there, too, in that often female clients, when they’re dealing with male advisers, feel that this dynamic is kind of compounded – that they are being talked at rather than connected with,” Somers says. “That’s what I hear from the women I work with in a lot of the ‘women in money’ groups that I run.”
The human side of the process
Somers says that within the financial services industry we often speak to outsiders in the language we learned in our training, which leaves them feeling excluded. This is especially so when we’re dealing with new clients, who are most in need of engagement.
Using jargon to give voluminous explanations about things like investment returns turns them off, she says.
“Advisers do need better training in the personal side of advising,” she says. “They often get lots of great training – in Australia in particular – in the technical side of things. But they can still get through their entire training without having to learn anything, really, about the human side of the process, about the client and what drives their decision-making.”
Financial planners would benefit from understanding what makes their clients feel “comfortable and productive” in meetings, she says.
“Advisers need help learning how not to turn off clients by speaking with a level of vocabulary that the advisers themselves would never have known had they not had that level of training,” she says. “But it’s so easy to let jargon slip into the conversation and assume that the client gets it.”
