Meaningful communication is crucial to building strong, durable relationships, and asking effective questions is an essential part of facilitating impactful conversations. Being able to initiate and lead those conversations has become an important aspect of any financial advicer’s skill set, but for many, it’s one that isn’t always as straightforward or easy to learn… particularly for advicers who might be happiest when nerding out with spreadsheets and flowcharts! The good news, however, is that every advicer can learn how to be a better communicator, especially when there’s a certain podcast host willing to share his roadmap for having Meaningful Conversations About Money.
In our 142nd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and aforementioned client communication expert Carl Richards discuss Carl’s “Magical Questions Of Conversation Goodness“, how an advicer can ‘move through time‘ to help clients make meaningful connections around their relationships with money, and how advicers can effectively implement those questions in their own practices.
It’s generally accepted in the financial planning world that people don’t typically wake up in the middle of the night because they’ve realized they need a comprehensive financial plan. More often, initial outreach from a prospect occurs because there’s some urgent issue they need help with. Accordingly, advicers can foster a space for deeper money conversations by helping the prospect (or new client) paint a picture of their desired future state, homing in on whatever the underlying issues may be (which won’t always be the same reasons they reached out in the first place). Questions like “What brought you in today?“ and “How do you think we could help with that?“ are great places to start, while Dan Solin’s “3 years“, Bill Bachrach’s “What’s important about money to you?”, and George Kinder’s EVOKE questions can offer powerful avenues to help clients start to open up.
As conversations (and relationships) deepen, advicers can probe further by ‘working through time‘, asking questions like “What was money like in your home growing up?“ and “Were you one of the rich kids or poor kids in middle school (and how could you tell)?“ From there, advicers can help clients explore their relationships with money by asking, “If you could go back and talk to yourself with the benefit of hindsight, what would you say?“, potentially providing them with insight around experiences that have been informing their lives for years. From a forward-looking perspective, advicers can ask about how the client deals with money in their home, and (if they have children) what they think their kids would say if asked the same series of questions 20 years down the road.
It’s important to note that the goal isn’t to tackle all these questions in one meeting. Rather, advicers can have multiple conversations over time to deepen the relationship. Initially, advicers can focus on discovery questions to understand the client’s future desired state, which (once defined) becomes the basis for a Statement Of Financial Purpose, which in turn becomes the foundation for well-informed goals. And with clear goals, the advicer can then ask about the client’s current state, identifying what they owe and what they own.
Ultimately, the goal is to normalize the process of having meaningful conversations about money. And by implementing Carl’s Magical Questions Of Conversation Goodness, not only can advicers help their clients buy into their financial plans, implement recommendations, and reach their ‘desired future states‘, but they can also learn a skill set that helps them differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace while engendering long-term, durable relationships with their clients!
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