3 Ways to Earn Your Clients’ Trust (Part 1 of 3)
How do you become a Trusted Advisor? You start by earning people’s trust, which you can easily do by following these three steps: Communicate with conviction, ask better questions, and tell the hard truth.
1. Communicate with Conviction
Have you earned the right to expect people to follow your advice and respond to your authority? No one will give you that authority unless you first believe you deserve it. If you show up in the marketplace assuming that you’re not going to be trusted and people aren’t going to respond to your authority or advice, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The result is a collaborative environment where the client directs you instead of following your advice.
I often see clients or prospects who strongly believe that they know what they’re doing. Others think, “It’s my money, so I should be in charge.” There’s certainly some truth in that, but unless they’ve dedicated themselves to becoming financial experts, they should find somebody smarter than themselves and defer to that person’s expertise. Unfortunately, many financial advisors don’t convey the impression that they really are more competent or knowledgeable than their potential clients and prospects. Therefore, people don’t defer to them.
To become a Trusted Advisor and have people defer their financial decisions to you, your clients need to think, “I trust you and I believe you have my best interests at heart. I also trust that you’re competent enough and, between the two of us, you know better.” There’s nothing wrong with a client questioning your authority, but at some point all clients want to find an advisor they can trust. Deep down inside, they want you to tell them what to do. If they can trust you, they’ll do it. If they can’t trust you, they’ll find someone else. That’s why so many people have more than one advisor—they don’t completely trust any of them. Communicate with conviction, and you’ll earn your clients’ trust as well as all of their business.
