Stop talking too much and wasting time

Serving clients through generations from the heart

By Li Choo Tan

To retain clients as well as serve their children and generations beyond, I engage on a personal level. In fact, most of my clients become longtime friends. What I do, beyond being their financial advisor and insurance agent, is celebrate the milestones of their lives and their family members.

I help celebrate graduations, marriages and the birth of children as well as educate their young adult children about financial planning. By offering this education, it helps my clients’ children learn how to manage money while also helping me build relationships with them so we can continue working together to strengthen the legacy of generations to come.

Going through milestones with clients and being part of their lives, though, can also mean going through a lot of emotions with them. I’ve had to talk with clients about death, critical illness and disabilities. It’s important to have the heart to listen and understand when they’re going through a difficult situation. It is about journeying with my clients throughout so many different stages of life.

Helping my clients during difficult times is sometimes about just being there, even if I do not speak much. The point is that I am with the family, and I’m able to open up conversations when needed. It’s difficult to face the reality that this is a beautiful journey that must end. I have to remember I have a job to do, and that is to deliver my promise to the family. I deliver that gift of love in the form of a life insurance policy. It’s the gift of love, a legacy, that I may have to communicate and pass on to their loved ones. 

Li Choo Tan is a nine-year MDRT member from Singapore. Contact her at triciatan@pruadviser.com.sg.

Are you standing in the way of connecting with clients? 

By Stacey Hanke

Have you ever noticed that when you ramble, your subconscious is encouraging you to keep talking, which tortures your clients even more? Eventually, you might figure out what to say, yet the power behind asking open-ended questions is to build rapport with very few words. 

Your verbal and nonverbal communication can jeopardize or enhance your influence without you 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 the ability to move people to act long after the interaction has occurred, and it is affected by your body language and messaging. If they are consistent, your clients never have to guess who is going to show up. Relationships and trust are what grows our business, and that doesn’t happen in one interaction but through a series of consistent interactions over time. The best way to grow your influence is to see and experience through the eyes and ears of your clients.  

Correcting a common communication misstep

Not being aware of our lack of brevity is one of the biggest mistakes we make that diminishes our influence. 

Start thinking and speaking in bullet-point sentences, and make sure to pause. This approach allows your clients to follow your message every step of the way. Comedians call it “pause for a cause.” When comedians hit the punchline, what do they do? They pause so the audience can catch up and experience the laughter. That’s the excitement. When comedians don’t honor that, it’s called “stepping on the laughter.” 

Don’t step 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 is the right question to ask and to build rapport, so you can adapt your message on the fly and meet your clients’ expectations. 

Remember, every interaction you have determines how your business is run, the people who come in your circle, the money in your pocket tomorrow and the influence you have.   

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. 

This was excerpted from the 2022 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation “Be the leader you were meant to be.”

Are you wasting time and reducing the value of your business?  

By Dave Crenshaw  

I’m going to share with you what I call “switch busters,” which are ways to reduce the number of times you switch activities in your day. If you can do that, you can radically decrease the amount of time it takes to complete pretty much everything.  

Most- and least-valuable activities

Advisors running their own practice wear a lot of hats, and that can create a lot of switches, which reduce the value of your business. Why? Because you want to focus your time only on your most-valuable activities (MVAs). They are the one, maybe two, tasks you do that are worth the most per hour.

What are your top two MVAs? For most advisors, it’s the direction you want your business and clients to take. It can also be in developing support staff. Consider how much time you spend on your top MVAs. For most, it’s usually around 22% or less of your total time. What are you doing with the other 78%? Well, you are spending it on your less-valuable activities (LVAs). And when you do that, you’re reducing the value of your business. Ask yourself what your most common LVAs are, and then delegate those.  

Time debt 

Many of the principles that apply in finance to money also apply to time. For example, when people go into debt, they repay it with interest. When you borrow time, you don’t borrow it from someone else; you
borrow from yourself and your quality of life. So, the switch buster we want to put into place is to underspend our time.   

Every person’s workday has a different number of interruptions and switches that take place. You want to build a budget for attention switches, such as having 50-minute meetings instead of one-hour meetings. The more you can eliminate interruptions and switches, the more unscheduled time you will accumulate.

Dave Crenshaw is an author and instructor who also develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities and organizations of every size. His book “The Myth of Multitasking” is a time management bestseller.

This was excerpted from his 2020 Top of the Table Annual Meeting Virtual Event presentation “The myth of multitasking.” (exclusive content for Court of the Table and Top of the Table members).