Make your message sing

The evidence is crystal clear. With the exception of the most analytical of clients, the answer is not more facts, figures or statistics. Instead, there are three approaches to making your message resonate:

– the power of engagement

In any meeting, your first priority is to get your clients engaged in the conversation. The more engaged your clients are, the more likely they’ll absorb, relate to and remember your key message. Even more important, the more engaged they are, the more positive their view of you will be when the meeting is over.

Increasingly, the best way to get through to people is to get them talking. That’s why formal “death by PowerPoint” presentations are being phased out. That strategy is backed up by a study by Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. asking corporate decision-makers about their important buying decisions: 88% say they’d rather dispense with a formal PowerPoint presentation and have more dialogue.

The top financial advisors make it their No. 1 goal to ask questions to get their clients talking. One advisor found that after many hours of work to prepare financial plans, clients were tuning out when flipping through the binders with the results. Here’s how she reworked the way she presents financial plans:

First, she moved from a large boardroom into a smaller meeting room with a round table, so she was sitting beside her clients rather than across the table.

Next, rather than giving the binder with the plan to a client at the beginning of the meeting, she left this step to the very end, reviewing the high-level conclusions before giving her client the binder to walk away with. In the process, this advisor reduced the length of the plan to make it more manageable reading.

This advisor also had one of her staff operate a projector to take clients through the highlights of the plan. As a result, the advisor was able to give her clients her undivided attention.

Finally, the focus of the conversation became discussing “what if” scenarios with clients, with the staff person making changes to plan assumptions on the fly and showing the results on the screen. This discussion became the main emphasis of the meeting to present the plan outcomes.

Remember, it’s almost impossible for clients and prospects to talk too much in meetings. Write down a list of questions beforehand and make it your top priority to get them engaged – and you’re on your way to a memorable meeting.

– the power of visuals

The second principle of effective communication is to use visuals to reinforce your message.

Psychologist and visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark wrote: “Unless our words, concepts [and] ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory, in which we can retain only about seven bits of information (plus or minus two). (This is why we have seven-digit phone numbers.)

“Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory.”

If you doubt this theory, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab asked 2,500 Americans how they evaluated the credibility of websites. Almost half said the site’s look was the No. 1 way they judged its credibility. Not the content, but the design.

A study by the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who used visual aids were almost 50% more effective in persuading their audiences to take a desired course of action than those who don’t use visuals.

Carl Richards, a financial planner in Utah, has demonstrated the power of visuals in his regular “Bucks Blog” on the New York Times website (http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/author/carl-richards/). For each topic, Richards starts with a simple image, then explains the concept in words. Here’s an entry from his blog dated June 11, 2013:

“Since many of us use the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index as a proxy for the market, let’s take a look at the period from 1950 to 2012 to see how often we’re likely to feel positive, based on how often we check our investments:

– “If you checked daily, it would be positive 52.8 % of the time.

– “If you checked monthly, it would be positive 63.1% of the time.

– “If you checked quarterly, it would be positive 68.7% of the time.

– “If you checked annually, it would be positive 77.8 % of the time.

“And here’s the same information presented visually.”

The visual is a rough, hand-drawn bar graph showing the relative sizes of those percentages as boxes.

Which way do you think your clients would be more likely to retain this information?

– the power of storytelling

The third approach to getting your message across is to wrap it into a story. In a short video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X0weDMh9C4), Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford Graduate School of Business explains why stories are up to 22 times more powerful than facts alone. She then asks viewers to think about their signature story.

Aaker describes how the power of storytelling motivated more than 25,000 people to participate in clinics to look for a bone-marrow match for a recent Stanford graduate who needed a transplant. The key is that the story humanized the situation and made it personal.

Similarly, research on raising funds to fight poverty in Africa found that focusing on an individual seven-year-old girl in Mali raised twice as much as when the emphasis was on statistics about child poverty.

Some advisors already use stories effectively. Aaker maintains that our brains are wired to retain stories and she describes how a signature narrative moves you closer to your goal and can get people to look at you differently.

The best stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. And they result in persuasion and action. Effective stories will:

1. shape how others see you;

2. get the people you’re talking to to slow down and listen;

3. persuade listeners and imprint your message.

Aaker tells of an experiment in which research subjects were divided into two groups. One group was shown statistics and the other was told a story. After 10 minutes, 5% of the first group remembered the statistics, while more than 60% of members of the other group remembered the story they had been told.

Your story has to be well structured and compelling to be effective. Aaker describes four characteristics of an effective story:

1. a goal. Where do you want your audience to go? What do you want your audience to feel, think and do?

2. a hook to grab attention. Why should people listen? It can be a shocking statistic or a funny joke.

3. engagement. What makes the story authentic and relatable? Why should people care?

4. a call to action. What should the audience do as a result?

There are a number of ways you can incorporate these approaches into your communications. Aaker maintains that the best stories have a protagonist who journeys through an arc during your story. This concept is similar to that of effective case studies, which are structured as: before/problem; the action that was taken; and the outcome.

One note of caution: for case studies to resonate, they must be relevant to your audience. Unless you have a narrowly focused client niche, that means one case study won’t work for everyone you talk to. You will need an arsenal of case studies to draw from.

Whether describing your approach to prospects or in conversation with your clients, the traditional focus on facts and figures with the advisor as the centre of the conversation won’t work anymore. In delivering a message that resonates, the world has changed. And if you want to be effective, you have to change with it.

Dan Richards is CEO of Clientinsights (www.clientinsights.ca) in Toronto. For more of Dan’s columns and informative videos, visit www.investmentexecutive.com.

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