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The Client-centred Blog

Welcome to The Client Centred Blog; Free content that shares a fresh approach to thriving as a financial professional in a rapidly changing environment.

This blog has its foundation in a new understanding of the human mind that gives you the ultimate platform for creating better results, thriving under any circumstances and living the life you want.     

I invite you to explore the materials, reflect upon how it relates to you and your business and enjoy the benefits.

What makes a client want to engage a financial planner?
A successful financial planner I work with remarked to me that no one ever approaches him for a financial planning engagement. Instead, there is usually a trigger event that leads a client to thinking they want a financial product, financial issue solved, or investment advice. So, how do you shift...
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Want more financial planning referrals? This MUST happen first
Good financial planning referrals from happy existing clients are one of the best ways to grow your practice. Yet to create a regular and increasing flow of quality referrals there is something that MUST happen first. Let me share a story.
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How to sell more financial planning: stop giving advice
Do you want to sell more financial planning and boost your income? If so, then stopping giving financial advice might seem totally counter-intuitive, right? In this article I explore why holding back from giving advice can consistently help you sell more financial planning and serve your clients better.
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Clients are not willing to pay fees for financial planning – really?
“Clients are not willing to pay fees for financial planning!” This was the bold claim of an adviser in a post I recently read on LinkedIn. You might refer to this as a ‘gross generalisation’ because, quite clearly, there are many people who do already pay fees for financial planning.
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How to successfully sell financial planning
Genuine financial planning is very different from providing purely transactional financial advice. So, how you sell financial planning is a different kind of conversation too. Would you like it to be easier to sell financial planning engagements?
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Getting financial planning clients – the only obstacle
Getting financial planning clients is the number one challenge for many advisers. But why is it such a challenge? It is not for the reasons that most people think…
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Why challenging your clients is great for business
The key difference between an adviser who focuses upon doing purely transactional business and a ‘Trusted adviser’ is how the adviser is positioned in the mind of the client. A ‘Trusted Adviser’ is someone a client turns to for their advice, opinion, viewpoint, and even coaching on important aspects of...
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What they don’t teach you at financial planning school
There are some key skills a financial planner should exhibit if they want to be successful, skills that aren’t necessarily taught during financial planning qualification process… 
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The two styles of selling and why one of them is toxic
Although you could fill a small library with books on selling it seems to me that there are two distinct styles. You could call these pushing and pulling and here is how they contrast. Pushing is based upon trying to persuade, convince or entice someone into buying a product or...
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Why vulnerability is the key to exceptional client relationships
What is the one thing that stops advisers engaging their clients in deeper, emotionally engaging conversations? It is vulnerability or rather the fear of being vulnerable. If we take a conversation into unchartered territory, we are afraid of what we might find. We are afraid that we may not be...
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Telling clients your truth
Building a thriving practice, based on making a bigger difference to clients has many aspects to it. One of the most fundamental is that client relationships are based on truth. It can feel uncomfortable (at first) to share your truth with clients and allow them to do the same with...
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Labels are for jars, not people
Have you ever been told you are not listening? I have. It did not feel good and I thoroughly deserved it. I was new to coaching and was very enthusiastic about sharing my knowledge with my client. So enthusiastic that I thought what I had to say was more important...
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How easy are you to do business with?
You want to be easy to do business with, right? So, if you were in conversation with a potential client what is the best question you could be asked?
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Do you love what you do?
Going back a while I was invited to speak at an event for advisers at The Etihad stadium in Manchester. I spoke about creating better client engagement through being curious about what it is that clients want from life rather than just focusing on products and investments…
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The one thing that will help your financial planning business prosper
How do I get my financial advisory practice off the ground? How do I get more clients to notice my financial planning services? If you’ve done all the things you’re supposed to do from a marketing sense to entice new clients with no luck, it could be time to take...
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Working ONLY with wonderful clients – the two essential questions
The very first stage of a new client relationship is connecting with someone. They may get in touch with you. You may get in touch with them. Whichever it is the next stage is that you invite them into a conversation. Conversations are the most important aspect of building your...
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The power of simplicity in a world of complexity
The human intellectual mind loves to make things complex. And this is just as true in the financial world as anywhere else. We could have a much simpler tax system - but we choose not to. We could vastly simplify pensions - but we choose not to. We could make...
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The most-read blog posts of 2019
I was looking back over 2019's blog posts and I wanted to share the 5 most read with you again. You never know which ones are going to have the most reads and sometimes it can be a surprise. I enjoyed re-living the inspiration for each one and hope you...
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Two emotions – which one do you operate from?
Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to come across and even get to train a couple of times with the great Steve Chandler. Steve has written over thirty books and is a world-famous success coach to high-achieving business people, CEO’s, best-selling authors and Fortune 500 companies. For me, Steve...
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This will skyrocket your ability to influence
We live in a world that talks far too much and listens far too little. People love to tell other people their opinions, ideas or just what happens to be on their mind. It seems that most people want to be interesting rather than interested. As a professional person, being...
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Turning financial planning clients away – is it good for business?
Towards the end of last year, I was privileged to be invited along to a focus group for a financial planning client of mine. A group of the firm’s clients had been invited along to a half-day event where an external marketing agency explored with the group a number of...
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The invisible side of client engagement
Client engagement seems to be a bit of a buzz term at the moment and yet what it is and how you achieve it is still widely misunderstood. Ultimately, advancing technology will see to it that face to face advice must offer more than a purely transactional, product-based service if...
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Where do you find new clients?
What prompted this article was recently reading that 70% of advisers are actively seeking new clients. I know from working for myself for over twenty five years and working with dozens of my own clients that consistently bringing on new clients can seem a big challenge. Typical questions that people...
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The Most Effective Sales Programme Of All
Being able to sell with integrity is an essential business skill. Yet many people seem to struggle with it. So, what is the factor that makes the biggest difference of all? A while back I met up for coffee with a friend who runs a business networking group in London....
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Effective client acquisition – what do you say after ‘Hello’?
A useful realisation to have, as a professional service provider, is that people do not buy what we do. What we do is always a bridge to something of more substance. For example, in my business, the end result that people want is not coaching or learning how to think...
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Getting clients to come to you
If you are building your practice then having an increasing number of people seeking you out and wanting to work with you is the ideal situation. What could be better than having great conversations with interested people and hearing them say the magic words... 'So, where do we go from...
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Getting into your client’s world – key number 1
One of the most important things you can do for your business is going 'above and beyond' to create value for your clients. Professional services are so often delivered in very unimaginative ways that have little difference to how the majority of practitioners deliver them. So, the ability to deeply...
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No pain, no gain vs. no pain, no pain
Dusan Djukich wrote in his book 'Straight-line Leadership', "Most failure comes from quitting too soon." I guess we have all had projects, ideas and changes we intended to implement but, as he says, we have quit too soon. If we had stayed in the game, then we would have created...
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The 4 keys to getting into your clients world
Getting deep into the world of your client is the only way you can get to understand them and what they want, and put yourself in a position to deliver beyond their expectations. This is actually far easier than many people seem to make it. What is the starting point?...
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Trust – what builds it and what destroys it?
Trust is often thought of in terms of behaviours - do trustworthy behaviours and people will trust you. Also, in financial services many people believe that technical mastery is something that builds trust. The idea being that if you have qualifications and professional designations, then this leads to higher trust....
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The key to doing transformational client work – you go first
A couple of years ago I attended a conference in Oslo and one of my memories is of Dr. Aaron Turner make a particularly powerful point. Aaron shared a story about a time he was holidaying in Hawaii with his family. They were spending some time on the beach and...
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The Power Of Vulnerability
As a financial practitioner it is easy to only talk to your clients about products, investments and financial matters. Why? Because it is comfortable for you. It is where you feel safe. It is what you know about. But this isn’t where the real juice in the relationship is –...
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Are your clients emotionally engaged?
In my recent post 'No pressure selling and influence part 2' I touched upon the fact that humans are not driven by reason and logic - we are driven by emotion. Our behaviour is driven by our feeling state. The decisions we make come from how we feel. And what we...
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No pressure selling and influence part 2
“If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” Sydney Banks Being a powerful influencer is a vital aspect of your role with clients and yet it is something that advisers can be uncomfortable with. In part 1 of this...
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No pressure selling and influence part 1
“This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world.” Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others Being an effective influencer and confidently selling your services are essential skills if you want to build a thriving practice based upon...
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Sell the experience, not the concept
Several years ago I learned from master coach Steve Chandler his 'Eighteen fearless disciplines' for creating clients. He calls them disciplines because you actually have to practice them rather than just know the idea. The first of these disciplines is 'Sell the experience, not the concept' and it can transform...
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The real problem with fee charging (and it is never about the money)
Fees and fee charging are now a fact of life for financial professionals and yet it seems to be an area that creates far more challenges than is necessary. Common questions that come up for advisers are: What to charge for? What to actually charge? How to charge? When to...
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Selling your services – are you pushing or pulling?
'To effectively engage someone, you must be operating from a higher level of consciousness than the other person at that moment'. Garrett Kramer, Stillpower At a time when consumers have more choice, are more demanding and less tolerant of being placed under any kind of negative pressure it has never...
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Do you want more of the right clients?
An area that many advisers seem to find challenging is finding and engaging enough of the right clients. Naturally, there is a great deal of information and advice available in this area, however, if you feel you have diligently tried to find out what to do and yet continue to...
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The three levels of value creation
"If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army The primary function of a financial advice practice is to create value for its clients. So, I would imagine that everyone would agree that it is vitally important that...
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The inner game of trust
          Many people experience a great deal of insecurity around money and feel apprehensive when faced with talking about the future. Therefore, engaging the services of a financial adviser is not something that most people will take lightly. From an advisers perspective gaining sufficient trust to...
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Get off the safe ground
“You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” Paulo Coelho As a financial practitioner it is easy to only talk to your clients about products, investments and financial matters. Why? Because it is comfortable for you. It...
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Dashfield spent 14 years as a self-employed adviser. Since 2006 he has been a coach, mentor and author helping advisers create transformations in their business and personal lives.

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01580 753770

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john@clientcentredadvisers.com

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