This series of articles put into action can make a dramatic difference in improving your business and the lives of your clients and their dependents. It is a culmination of 8 years of personal experience of speaking with clients, 1000s of conversations, and techniques and ideas brought together mainly in the fields of study of positive psychology, behavioral economics, and sales and negotiation strategies.

Part 1: Why it is Important to Have Better LTD Conversations: You are Failing Your Business by Having Ineffective Conversations:

If you cannot add value to our clients, your clients will leave you. The most valuable conversations you can have are ones where you learn something or that changes your perspective on a topic or idea. It is rare to remember conversations or people who never taught us anything new. Yet, we run our mouths about people who have changed us. If you cannot change the way your clients think, you will not have as high of client retention or referrals from them bragging about and teaching their friends and family what they learned from you. Put simply, life-changing conversations are business-changing conversations.

You are Failing Your Clients and Their Families by Having Bad Conversations:

The fact that you worked as hard as you did to become a fee-only CFP probably means a few things: 1) You care about helping others, 2) you want a good income, and 3) you are great with numbers and are logic-oriented. I know this because this is how and why I decided to become a CFP (although fee-based because I started with insurance and did not want to restart from zero). If you have ever had a client die or get very sick or hurt, you already know how important life and disability insurance can be. During those phone calls, you instinctively know whether you failed or succeeded for the well-being of your client and their family. You know whether you did all you could to give them the adequate protection they needed.

Why Simply Presenting the Numbers Fails Your Clients:

A rational person would typically judge a doctor based on how much he is able to help his patients not die. Without personal experience or proper understanding of how people actually work, a perfectly rational patient would make the right health choice simply by knowing the numbers for and against making certain medical decisions. From this perspective, a pediatrician should just present the overwhelmingly robust evidence and numbers for the efficacy of vaccines, right? Well, you probably know that a significant contingency of the population refuses to vaccinate their children when simply presented with the data.

One evening I was at a party with a group of doctors in LA – an increasingly anti-vax city -. A pediatrician I met made it crystal clear why he is not  “impartial with the numbers” because it fails his patients. He told me he is able to get every one of his patients vaccinated when his colleagues fail and fail to do the same. His secret? He performs. He cares. And he scares.

This is his act:

“Mr/Mrs Smith, this vaccine prevents your child’s lungs from filling with pus until he chokes and dies on it. I don’t want that to happen to your child. Do you want that to happen to your child? … No? … Me neither. I guess we should get that one.

This vaccine prevents your child from dying from a brian infection… etc.”

He gets a perfect vaccination rate without ever presenting the odds and statistics regarding vaccine efficacy. He knows the best thing he can do is be pragmatic and get those children vaccinated. He knows the numbers and data are on his side and that he is doing the right thing for his patients by not presenting the data.

Which Kind of CFP Practitioner Would You Rather Be?

This contradiction between simply being objective and presenting the data and properly convincing the patient to vaccinate their children creates the proverbial fork in the road. Who is the better doctor? The objective one that spits out data and leaves children unvaccinated, or the doctor that puts on a performance, cares deeply, and perhaps scares the parents a bit but gets everyone protected with the vaccine?

The answer is pretty clear that the better doctor – the one with objectively better patient outcomes – is the performer who cares and scares.

And in your own practice, who do you want to be? Are you going to be the objective financial planner who lets their patients make their own bad decisions? Or are you going to put on your uniform, put on a show, and have a pragmatic conversation that gets your clients and their dependents protected?

By not taking advantage of the knowledge and experience in these articles and letting clients “make their own decision” based on the disability statistics and premiums alone, you are making the conscious decision to choose to have life-changing conversations designed to fail your clients, their family, and your business.

This series of articles put into action can make a dramatic difference in improving your business and the lives of your clients and their dependents. It is a culmination of 8 years of personal experience of speaking with clients, 1000s of conversations, and techniques and ideas brought together mainly in the fields of study of positive psychology, behavioral economics, and sales and negotiation strategies.

To read the next part of this article, click here.