One of the keys to creating a thriving practice is to make it effortless for clients to say ‘Yes’ to doing business with you.
People do not enjoy saying ‘No’. They really want to say ‘Yes’ because they want their decisions and their life to be easy.
What this means in practice is removing any areas of potential friction in your business process.
So, what follows are seven areas to pay attention to that make it easier for clients to say ‘Yes’ to working with you.
1. Always be creating value
When you have conversations with potential clients, how inherently valuable do they find these conversations?
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about how to build a client base was to go and have conversations with people and make them so valuable that some of those people will pay you not to stop.
To me, the quality of conversations we create is like a mountain without a top. It is something you can continually refine and keep improving at.
2. Your client feels fully listened to and understood
Most professional people listen for problems to solve. Very few listen with the intent to understand.
“When I ask you to listen and you start giving advice, you have not done what I have asked. When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings. When I ask you to listen and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as it may seem. Listen! All I ask is that you listen; not talk or do – just hear me.” Ralph Roughton, M.D.
Learning to listen with nothing on your mind will transform your relationships. Click here to read more.
3. Stay in the world of your client
Imagine you have pain in your stomach, so you call up a doctor for an appointment. You get to the surgery and, without asking you why you are there, the doctor says “Please, sit down and let me tell you about myself and what we can do for you.”
What would you think? It’s unlikely that your response is going to be, “Wow, I am so glad to know this, my stomach is feeling better already!”
Value can only be created in your client’s world, not yours.
4. Keep your needs out of the picture
Neediness comes in many forms – needing to be liked, needing to be right, needing to be the expert, needing the business, needing to win, or trying to control the outcome.
In business, any form of neediness on the part of the professional person will contaminate a relationship. Top negotiation coach, Jim Camp, said:
“In order to avoid showing need, you must never feel it. You do not need this deal.”
5. Make agreements, avoid expectations
Expectations are toxic to relationships. The best that can ever happen is that an expectation is met. Yet often they are not, and this creates tension.
You can avoid this situation by making sure that you have agreed with your client what happens next at each stage of the process. This avoids expectations (both on your and your clients’ part) and unnecessary disappointment or frustration.
6. Do what you say you will do
A firm I started working with had an integrity problem. People were making promises and consistently not keeping them. The result was needlessly losing business and credibility.
People and businesses who are true to their word are rare yet every time a promise is not kept, even small ones, it undermines trust.
I have often asked clients I am working with, “What difference would it make if everyone in your business kept their word?”
In every single case the answer has been some version of, “It would be massive!”
I highly recommend the paper, ‘Integrity: without it nothing works‘.
7. Less is more
One of the biggest unforced errors you can make is causing people to think too much. The more thinking that people do, the worse they feel. You want to avoid, at all costs, having bad feelings associated with you, your business, and your service.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that providing more information to a client is helpful. Often it is the opposite. Many people will soon start feeling overwhelmed when faced with a lot of complex information.
Stick by the rule that less is more and seek a client’s confirmation that more information would be helpful before providing it.
Becoming effortless to do business with
In financial services giving the right advice and recommending the right products is expected and offers no differentiation.
What sets firms and advisers apart is the total experience the client has. This does not happen by accident. It happens by design.
What are you doing to make your client experience as frictionless as possible?
PS. You might also enjoy, How to make your financial planning meetings better than ever’. Click here to view.
