Have you ever noticed that when you ramble, your subconscious encourages you to keep talking, which tortures your clients even more? Eventually, you will figure out what to say. Yet, as financial professionals, you know the power behind asking open-ended questions to instantly build rapport with very few words.
Your verbal and nonverbal communication can jeopardize your influence or enhance it without your even knowing it. This is why it’s important to ask yourself the question, Am I really as influential as I think I am?
Growing your influence
Influence is your body language and messaging. They are consistent so clients never have to guess who is going to show up. Influence means that you have this ability to move people to act long after the interaction has occurred. We know that to grow our businesses, it’s about relationships of trust, which don’t happen in one interaction but are a series of interactions that are consistent over time.
The best way to grow and drive your influence is to see and experience yourself through the eyes and ears of your clients.
Correcting a common communication misstep
One of the biggest areas of communication problems we are unaware of is our lack of brevity. Lack of brevity is the biggest mistake we make that jeopardizes our influence.
Start thinking and speaking in bullet-point sentences and make sure to pause. This allows your clients to follow you in your message every step of the way. Comedians call it “pause for a cause.” The minute that comedians hit the punchline, what do they do? They pause because that’s the laughter. That’s the excitement. When comedians don’t honor that, they call it “stepping on their own laughter.”
As financial advisors, avoid stepping on your own ideas, and especially avoid stepping on your client’s thoughts. Silence sometimes is the right answer. You need to trust your competence to give yourself the chance to figure out what the right question is to build rapport so you can constantly adapt your message on the fly to meet your needs.
Remember, every interaction you have determines the businesses you run, the people in your circle, the money in your pocket tomorrow and the influence you have.
This was excerpted from the 2022 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation “Be the leader you were meant to be.” (MDRT member exclusive content)
Stacey Hanke has trained thousands of people to rid themselves of bad body language by choosing words wisely. She has been a featured guest in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist and many other media outlets.
For more about how to communicate more clearly:
- Read “Simple talk” (Available in nine languages)
- Watch “Simple ways to talk to clients about complex topics”
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