“Can a financial advisor steal your money?” When considering financial goals, many prospective clients are hesitant to use a financial planner. So, how can you build trust as a financial advisor?
Stop letting client interests dictate how you build trust and rapport as a successful financial advisor. Focus on what actions can help make an advisor trustworthy and what makes a successful relationship with a financial advisor from the client perspective.
So how does a financial advisor create a trustworthy reputation? It is the cornerstone of building a high value practice and attracting the right clients.
In this video, Paul discusses:
– How to position yourself and your business to naturally create trust
– Our secret to building trust with our ideal clientele
– When to create targeted content and where to promote it
– How to stay consistent across multiple platforms
And, I suppose, the most important way you can actually help people drive that trust is walk the walk. So, if you talk about dealing with a segment of the market, and understanding the problems and challenges, you need to demonstrate that as well. So, show it, provide proof, provide different testimonials of clients that you’ve dealt with, and the results that you’ve actually got for them.
If you’re looking to further explore how you can attract ideal clients by creating a trustworthy reputation, check out our free training.
TRANSCRIPTION
Why trust matters for financial advisors, and how to generate it quickly.
In this short video, we're going to go through trust, why it's important, the significance of a lack of trust in the financial advisory industry, and what you can do about it, if you're a financial advisor, financial planner and wealth manager.
Let me tell you a story, I have a two year old son, and myself and my wife went to visit some friends of ours with our little boy over the weekend. When we arrived there, the family that we were with, they had a toy garbage truck, or a toy bin truck. It was about so long. It was quite big. Big enough for my son to be able to ride on it. He was fascinated with this particular bin truck for 15, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. He was just playing with it all the time. He was very excited. A little bit later, he wanted to cycle around on bikes that the other kids were doing. And he did that, but every 30 to 60 seconds, he had to come back to where the bin truck, or the garbage truck was just to check somebody else wasn't actually using it, or that it had been taken away and he wouldn't be able to play with this.
Now, listen, this is the way the mind of a two year old works. His favourite word is mine. But really it comes down to, in his mind, he didn't trust the fact that the in lorry would still be there for him to be able to play with. Now, why am I telling you this story? Because his kind of lack of trust is exactly the problem that the financial advisory industry has as well. As you all know, there's been any number of different types of scandals, and Ponzi schemes, and other things that have sort of rocked the financial services industry. That's globally, that's in the US, it's in the UK, and a lot of different locations. So, it's really eroded people's trust in the industry, and also in the advisors who operate in the industry.
But to illustrate my point, there was a 2017 Spectrum Study in the US of more than 3000 potential investors. And they were discussing what the most important traits that these individuals would use when choosing a financial advisor. And the most important trait that came up in 96% of cases was that the advisor would be honest and trustworthy. Again, seems pretty obvious, but this was at the absolute top of the list of all of these different respondents.
Now, whether you like it or not, as a financial advisor, your job is to sell and market trust. If you don't have trust with your prospects, or your clients you don't really have a business at all. And they're, certainly, not going to trust their pensions, their investments, and potentially their money from their business to you. It's as simple as that.
And listen, it's all around us every single day. We want to have trust with our family, with our friends. We want to be able to trust our colleagues. We want to be able to trust our legal representation. Of course, trust is so important to us as a human race, but particularly in financial services.
Now, how can you actually go about generating more trust in your business? So, let me give you three points that are going to help you. Number one is positioning. You need to position yourself as the go-to expert for a segment of the market. Not the whole market, you're not a generalist, you're not trying to appeal to every single person in the market. Position yourself as the big fish in the smaller pond. So, really understand, and show that you understand the needs of a particular segment of the market, and that will help your message to resonate with them. That's going to position you as an authority to that segment of the market. When you have that authority, that's what drives trust.
Number two, produce content for that specific market. So, put out articles, and videos, and short posts, mostly to demonstrate your knowledge, to show that you understand the needs, problems, and challenges of that particular market. Don't assume that people know that you're well qualified. A lot of people in the market really don't understand what some of the financial services qualifications, like CFP for example, a lot of people really don't know what that means, or what the role of a financial planner actually is. So, if you can put out some great quality content, keeping it simple, and addressing the needs, problems, and challenges of your target audience, again, a great way to position yourself as an expert.
Number three, have a consistency of message. So, from your LinkedIn profile, any other social profiles that you have, your website, and through any other communication that you have, and when somebody gets on the phone with you, you want to make sure that you've got a consistency of message in terms of what you're actually putting out there. What happens is if there's ever a disconnect in any of those different pieces of the puzzle, that's where you lose people. That's where you end up with friction in the process, and their trust just drops away.
And, I suppose, the most important way you can actually help people drive that trust is walk the walk. So, if you talk about dealing with a segment of the market, and understanding the problems and challenges, you need to demonstrate that as well. So, show it, provide proofs, provide different testimonials of clients that you've dealt with, and the results that you've actually got for them. And this includes if you're a newer advisor, even if you're setting up a new advisory practice, or you're early in the stages of building your book, it doesn't matter. People want to be able to trust you, so give them different ways that they can actually do that.
I want to leave you here with a quick quote from a recent Forbes article by Jill Griffin. "Trust doesn't just happen and it can be very fragile once it's earned. But if you earn it and you keep it, it can be more valuable than gold." Thanks for checking out the video today. Please hit the Like button and the bell notification to be notified every time we put out a new video, which generally happens every single week. And subscribe to the channel. You can also click the link to join our free Facebook group for financial advisors. The link will be in the description below. Thanks very much for your time.
