The Five Step Client Interview Process for Insurance and Financial Planning

So you have dazzled your prospective client with the customer experience they have just encountered when first entering your business. Now they are sitting across from you and the fun begins. What do the best businesses do to ensure what happens next: is fun, is differentiated, is highly engaging (for the client and the adviser) leads to 100% conversion from prospect to client and leads to obtaining client referrals at a rate of above 70%?

Essentially there are 5 things that these businesses do. They do them in sequence and as a part of a deliberate well thought out process. Further they advise their prospective clients sometimes well before the meeting itself that there is a defined process that they are going to take them through. Further these businesses have developed collateral be it corporate brochures or web site applications or information that defines what this process is.

The brilliance in what they are doing is first and foremost is that it is simple, second by doing this they tap into a vast array of positive client psychology techniques, third, because it is a defined process it can be taught to emerging advisers and front of house staff, fourth it can be articulated clearly and succinctly and best of all despite the simplicity the fifth point to note is that it is rare that a business works through all 5 elements and consequently it is highly differentiated.

The 5 step client interview process:

1) Engage your clients in the data collection process

This does not mean running laboriously through the fact find or similar data collection forms. This means a highly engaged genuinely curious inquisition into the clients world. This is best done using a formulaic method. Ideally visual, participative and a means to get the client talking about themselves. It's "going deep" with a client.

Best techniques and practitioners utilise mind map diagrams that go further than just assets and liabilities but cover much broader areas of a clients world.

How do you get clients to share that much information? Show them your mind map or family tree but the best practitioners start by outlining what it is that they have incorporated for themselves and then ask the prospect to reciprocate.

2) Ask great questions and set a benchmark for where the client is now and what the possibilities may be.

These are questions about lifestyle and other aspects that are non financial. It's about where else they have obtained advice and what was their experience. It's about hard questions about how they would live their life if time was limited or if money was no object.

Great questions take practice and take time to construct. PCE has created 4 questionnaires available via PCE for those interested. (yes website still under construction)

Further PCE have a benchmark tool to assess where a client sits now and where they will be after your advice.

3) Describe your methodology, for insurance sales, for choosing the right levels of cover. There are plenty of applications that work through clients scenarios, even i pad applications provided by life risk houses, and worksheets that PCE have developed. What's important is to highlight that there is a method and that all your clients go through this process and have positive results as a consequence : this is where the power of story telling about your clients comes into its own. And story telling is a critical element of step 3.

4) Use visuals to explain your suggested course of action. Be it words on a slide. A diagram about how it all fits together, what you need to do here is imprint in a clients mind the solidity of your solution. Flow charts work very well and if you can for example explain how packing insurance options works and will work for the client sitting in front of you by a visual method what stays with the client is not so much the product names and intracacies but rather that you have constructed (or will construct) something cohesive, relevant and understandable for them.

5) Describe the next steps : what is the application process / when will your recommendations be ready / what is the underwriting process and in doing so define the outcome that they will have which should be in the clients words and aligned to the objective that they want to achieve or that you have identified is a necessary component of their well being. Further provide them with an engagement pack that reassures them that they have made the right decision in choosing you. This will certainly have relevance when natural buyers remorse sets in. By having managed the psychology of the sale process during the appointment you have mitigated the natural thought process of the client and reassured them that what they experienced in your waiting room was genuine and that in a very short space of time the feeling that you understand them and are genuinely concerned about their well being. The WHY you are in business is powerful here. Make sure you tell them at this point why it is you do what you do.

Laying the Ground For The Perfect Sales Pitch

The perfect sales pitch delivery doesn't happen on the day of the pitch. The fertile ground that is sown during the initial discovery meetings with your clients AND how exactly you sow that seed will determine your success.

In fiancial planning and insurance sales this involves you as the professional adviser enaging the client on:

- areas of discomfort for a client and doing this early in the engagement process removes/reduced barriers to change
- sharing commonalities, shared experiences, shared values and aspirations
- winning their heart and mind by showing that you understand their point of view AND that you have had experience dealing with the situations they face

THIS IS NOT THE TIME to share with them a diatribe on your education, experience and your financial services guide. (We expect of course there is some compliance requirement that has been met appropriately).

THIS IS THE TIME TO:
- question them on why they have not taken action before
- their experiences with the provision of advice
- sharing your story with them about what you have done to insure and plan for your family
- what experiences your other clients have had and NOT how you dealt with and provided solutions BUT rather how they felt when the solution you crafted was put in place

You NEED THEREFORE

- to adopt the techniques described in how to use the family tree technique
- to tell your own story
- to tell compelling client stories - insurance claims are key here
- to engage them on values
- to verbally acknowledge the barriers they may have and respect them


A well crafted client questionnaire such as those now available from Positive Client Engagement will be a success guide and tool for you and an assessment for a client that can lead with your help to outcomes that are transformational.

Writing a Great Sales Pitch - Statements of Advice written by your client

So last time we promised that the next step was to discuss what to say in your sales presentation and importantly how to say it.

Well it's a little more involved than that BUT it's paradoxically simple.

Great sales presentations in financial planning and insurance do not depend on being a great presenter. Rather you need to have a great presentation as a base.

This point should instantly ease the minds of those insurance and financial planning professionals who HATE "presenting".

Even a poor presenter can make a few lines from Shakespeare sound good. Who couldn't?

It's the content of your pitch that is critical.

This means it's the right story for the client to hear and see. Using the right words that will resonate with the client. It's about using their words - the very words they've used when answering your lifestyle questionnaire. By doing that you capture the emotion of the core motivating drivers that are in play for the client.

So what's the lesson here when writing your pitch:

1) Use the clients words to show that you appreciate and respect thier values and dreams

2) Connect your financial planning and insurance solution to those values and dreams

3) Do it with a mix of visual, audio and text content

4) Describe it in broad terms

5) Make sure that what you are saying has a structure around it

6) Make sure that you repeat the core essence of the outcomes of your recommendations over and over and over and over again throughout your presentation

Do this in a cover letter, in a visual slide show and in words. Three ways of communicating the same message. Punctuate your Statement of Advice with bold double font quotes from the client lifestyle questionnaire as the "sub-headings" for each relevant recommendation.

The Statement of Advice will then be transformed from a document that is disconnected financial planning jargon to a document that is signposted with the clients words, thoughts, hopes, dreams and ambitions.

It will become a document that they have immense ownership of and when you own something .....you protect it.

In otherwords - they become your client and your advocate.

Next Time:

- keeping it simple
- and the power slide/page in your pitch

Sales Presentations That Win!

We hope you've started 2012 ready to embrace the opportunity that awaits those financial planning and insurance businesses that have developed the capabilities to positively engage clients with depth relevance and meaning.

That means you'd be familiar with the concepts around client engagement that are regular features of our writings:

- using smart questionnaires that embed communication models within them
- you have a great story
- you use a family tree in your dicussions with clients

And most of all you have developed capabilities in your business to engage the client throughout the buying process and made the financial planning and insurance strategies, relevant by using techniques that ensure the client projects and assesses the future and can see what your strategy looks, feels, even sounds like to them, thus providing compelling reasons for action.

Now you just need to make your final pitch.

In the financial planning and insurance business - you need to present your Statement of Advice.

The next phase of our writings in the coming months will be focussed on making sales presentations.

A good reference for anyone making any sort of presentation is a wonderfully engaging book by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity - "Life's a Pitch: How to Sell Yourself and Your Brilliant Ideas" (2008).

As Bayley and Mavity point out, "when you are pitching to someone, you're asking them to judge the future.....their judgement won't be based on logical fctors, but on emotional factors, trust, confidence, hope, ambition, desire".

In the financial planning and insurance world this point is incredibly relevant.

If you have not engaged clients for example with an understanding of the four drive theory - then you have not engaged your client with emotion, trust, you have not inspired confidence, demonstrated the ability to deliver hope and the ambitions and desires they have.

Your sales pitch is doomed.

Re-read our previous articles for help if you have no idea what we're talking about at this point!!!

Next time we'll look at what it takes and how to write a great presentation and over the coming weeks, we'll discover:

- what to say and how to say it
- keeping things simple
- the power "slide"
- where to put your executive summary
- the power of practice
- language that resonates, is remembered and illicits a response