Introduction

Storyselling for Financial Advisors teaches the readers to tell the financial story. The authors want to show how the top advisors sell. As I am starting my financial planning business, I would like to know more about soliciting clients.

Author

Scott West is Head of Consulting for Invesco Van Kampen Consulting. I could not find much information about him on the internet.

Mitch Anthony is a financial services advisor, author, speaker and consultant, and the developer of MyFLPTools, a subscription-based service that provides a suite of discovery tools for financial services professionals.

Contents

There are a preface and 13 chapters in Storyselling for Financial Advisors.

The chapters are

Part One: How to Put Half of Your Client’s Brain to Sleep

1) Why Statistics Don’t Sell and Stories Do

2) Learning to Speak the Language of the Right Brain

3) What’s Your Gut Feeling? How Decisions Really Get Made

Part Two: Becoming a Better Storyseller

4) Reading and Leading Others: The 30-Second Body Language Read

5) How Socrates Can Help You Reach Your Sales Quota: Getting Others to Tell Their Story

6) How Self-Deprecation and Wit Will Get You Further Than Self-Promotion

7) Making the Intuitive Leap with Your Client

8) Using Analogies and Metaphors to Move Your Clients and Products

Part Three: Storyselling in Desirable Markets

9) Telling the Story of the Affluent

10) Telling the Story of the 65+

11) Telling the Woman’s Story

Part Four: Let Me Tell You a Story

12) The Metaphorical Magic of Warren Buffett

13) Let Me Tell You a Story: Storyselling Illustrations, Analogies, and Metaphors

Review

Storyselling for Financial Advisors provides actionable advice to financial advisors and planners to recruit clients.

Storyselling

Storyselling is about making an emotional connection with client’s hopes and dreams by using illustrations and stories they can understand. It is all about making complex ideas understandable.

What do clients want?

All humans want to be recognised for their uniqueness. Furthermore, many clients have this attitude of “If you don’t ask, I’m not going to tell”. Thus, advisors need to have a sincere concern and respect for people. Besides that, simplify matters, not complicate them for the clients, to sell. If the clients are as knowledgeable as the financial planner, there is no need for them to engage a planner in the first place.

Emotions and decisions

The choices we make are based on about 80% emotion and 20% logic or rationale. Emotions play a much greater role than logic in the average person’s investment decisions.

We want to stimulate good gut feeling with every client. This is determined by how well you understand the topic and how good you are at educating your client, and how well you understand your client’s personality and how good you are at connecting with the client’s style.

Advance or close sale by stimulating the intuitive leap, thereby causing the clients to feel the appropriate emotion, be it excitement or fear, insecurity or peace of mind, which will immediately stimulate their ability to decide.

Questions to elicit information

Following questions can be used to stimulate clients to talk and reveal telling emotions, values and hopes that they held dear:

1. Where are you from?
2. Tell me about your work (or the work you did).
3. What is the best financial decision you have made in your life?
4. Is there anyone besides yourself whose future hinges on your financial decisions?
5. Are there any stocks or companies that you would not care to invest in as a matter of principle or for moral reasons?

The rule for asking a good question is the question invites the subject to reflect and it compels him/her to answer.

Client profiling

In the book, there are 9 profiles of client. The profiles and their key motivation for investing are Family Stewards (taking care of family), Investment Phobics (last thing I want to talk about), Independents (means freedom), The Anonymous (nobody’s business but mine), Moguls (means power), VIPs (gets me toys/status/respect), Accumulators (to get rich and richer and richer), Gamblers (exciting and provides a hobby), and Innovators (technical and mental challenge).

The book provides a Profile Diagnostic System (PDS) to determine the exact profile of a client. I think this system would be useful for us to identify our ideal clients.

Conclusion

A financial planner needs to remember that money issues inherently have a degree of stress attached. The best return on investments an advisor can offer clients is the peace of mind. Simplicity leads to understanding and understanding leads to peace of mind. Thus, it is important to explain financial concepts in simple terms and answer the client’s questions in plain language.

There are lots of quotes at the end of the book which we could use. Nonetheless, I think it is better to develop our own quotes which are based on our own experience. It might be easier to remember and more natural.

One-sentence summary for Storyselling for Financial Advisors

Sell price and returns, and you’ll lose. Sell relationship and service, and you’ll win.

Quotes

1. All the knowledge and understanding in the world is useless if you can’t effectively transfer and relate that understanding to your clients.
2. You teach the new by referring to the old and understood.
3. There are some things that money will change – and some things that money will not change.

Rating

Interested in Storyselling for Financial Advisors?

You may get the book from through the link below*.

Get the print book from Kinokuniya Malaysia here

*Disclosure: The above link is an affiliate link. Thus, I may earn a small commission when you purchase the book through the link.

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