As an advisor, meeting a client at their level allows me to avoid objections.

When we're looking at how to best connect with clients and how to break down larger concepts, we tailor that toward whatever type of personality they may be. So, there's a myriad of different personality tests that you can use. My staff and I go through these personality tests to see how we can best interact with each other. Then also so we can try to see signs of those different personality types in the people that we're dealing with so that we know how to come to them at their level.

At the end of the day, coming to a client at their level is going to be the best way to communicate with them. Someone who is more analytical is going to want more of those numbers and charts, whereas someone who's more feeling is going to want to avoid all of that because they're more in touch with their emotions.

So, we like to try to drill down on where we think someone is going to fall, and we'll use things such as their employment, an engineer vs. a kindergarten teacher, a business owner vs. someone who's in some type of clerical or support role is going to be different. And a lot of times we'll just test the waters by giving them an example of a question such as, “Tell me how do you feel about retirement?”

Depending on how they answer that question, that's going to tell us a lot about what type of personality they are. If it's a quick, to-the-point answer, then they're probably a quick and to- the-point person. If they start telling us about what their retirement looks like and what beach they're going to be on and how the ocean is going to feel across their face, we know that they're a much more touchy-feely type of person. Getting to the client at their level is generally the best way to break down that information to them, so that they can understand better.