2024 Prospecting Strategy for Financial Advisors: Build Your Trust Visibility

Pop quiz: If you were to walk into a coffee shop and ask a few complete strangers the following questions, which one do you think the strangers would be more willing to answer?

1.     How is your love life going?

2.     How much money do you have saved for retirement?

The reality is that most people would probably be more comfortable answering the question about their love life than sharing information about their money and investments. In fact, according to a 2019 TD Ameritrade survey examining Financial Taboos conducted by The Harris Poll, Americans would rather discuss politics, health issues and religion over money and personal finances in social settings.

Furthermore, technology issues like cybersecurity hacks, inappropriate or illegal surveillance, and misuse of personal data – not to mention the impact of all the fake news (and other misinformation) along with the negative headlines highlighting lawsuits and criminal actions in the financial industry year after year – have all exacerbated the discomfort individuals have in speaking about their finances or being cold-approached to discuss their wealth management needs.

The reason for much of this discomfort boils down to one thing: Trust… and the lack of it in our industry. Trust is the centerpiece of what makes a person comfortable enough to talk about something extremely intimate to them, and money is typically on the top of the list of intimate topics for many Americans. A 2019 research report presented by the Trust Edge Leadership Institute examined trust developed across different aspects of organizational culture, and found that the #1 reason survey respondents would not buy from a specific sales person or brand is distrust. Trust was noted to be much more significant than likeability, competence, or how clearly the sales person was able to convey product information.

Building one’s ‘trust quotient’, or what makes someone trustworthy, is the key that increases the willingness of others to share their most intimate topics, such as their money and financial goals. 

But as the saying goes, “Telling isn’t selling”, so just telling people we are trustworthy isn’t going to cut it. Which begs the question, what exactly is trust, and how can deconstructing its components help us build trust with those who don’t know us yet? 

What Are The Elements Of Trust?

Trust can be subdivided into two major segments*: Competence and Character. While Competence is a reflection of the external experiences that have contributed to a person’s intelligence and abilities, Character involves the combination of internal values that an individual prioritizes and showcases to the world. 

As the graphic above illustrates, Competence comprises many factors.  Those include knowledge (such as your degrees and certificates), credibility (such as your recent Barron’s rankings), experience (that gray hair is really welcomed!), tools (your latest cyber security tools, your highly engaging app), your reputation (better check yourself on google and see what comes), and safety (keeping your client information safe and private). These components all showcase a person’s mental advancement: What a person and brand can physically and externally deliver to the end clients.

But, as noted in our article on Oprah Winfrey’s method for developing trust, trust is composed of more than just smarts and credentials. Most people don’t know where Oprah went to college or if she has a journalism degree (I never checked!), yet they still trust her completely. On the other hand, there are many book-smart people whose opinions we second guess and do not trust. 

This is because trust is not based on elements of Competence alone; the entire other half of the trust building blocks table you saw above showcases the critical values a person needs to showcase internally. A person’s character is reflected by internal factors that drive their intentions and the level of integrity they display in their relationship to others. These factors include communication, authenticity, vulnerability, honesty, transparency, and relatability; they depend primarily on the level of a person’s emotional and social intelligence development. Let’s go over 4 of these important factors:

Relatability

The more people feel connected to someone who ‘gets them’ through the various components of Character, the higher up their trust with them tends to be. As human beings, we are far more likely to trust people who are similar to us – ie. are relatable – in some dimension. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of this comes from a study by researcher Lisa DeBruine. She developed a clever technique for creating an image of another person that could be morphed to look more and more (or less and less) like a study participant’s face. DeBruine found that the greater the similarity, the more the participant trusted the person in the image, because the image of that person was relatable. This tendency to trust people who resemble us may be rooted in the possibility that such people might be related to us, and we belong in the same “clan”. 

Other studies have shown that we like and trust people who are members of our own social group more than we like outsiders or strangers. This in-group effect is so powerful that even random assignment into small groups is sufficient to create a sense of solidarity.  For example, seeing another parent makes us trust them more if we are a parent; seeing someone who went to the same college as us makes us trust them more because we can relate to each other.

Communication

In a 2009 Harvard Business Review article titled “Rethinking Trust”, Roderick M. Kramer, The William R. Kimball Professor of Organizational Behavior , wrote the following:

To ensure that trust builds from small initial acts to deeper and broader commitments, it’s important to send loud, clear, and consistent signals. Some of the social signals we send are too subtle, though we don’t realize it. In one study I did exploring perceptions of reciprocal trust, I found that both managers and subordinates overestimated how much they were trusted by the people in the other category. This discrepancy in self-other perception – a trust gap – has an important implication: Most of us tend to underinvest in communicating our trustworthiness to others, because we take it for granted that they know or can readily discern our wonderful qualities of fairness, honesty, and integrity.

How can we better communicate our message to others to mitigate potentially large ‘trust gaps’? It starts with better presentation skills and the ability to condense lots of information into digestible content.

People who are perceived as trustworthy are able to communicate their message in articulate and passionate ways.

Going back to the Oprah Winfrey example, one of the ways she has gained so much audience trust is through her ability to communicate succinctly and thoughtfully. Not only does she intimately understand her subject matter, she is very articulate about the issues she talks (and cares so deeply) about.

In another recent Harvard Business Review article, authors Allison Shapira and David Horsager emphasize the importance of speaking with clarity:                                 

…people trust clarity and distrust what is ambiguous or overly complex. A leader might not be trusted because they’re not clear about their vision. A manager might not be trusted because they’re not clear about expectations. A sales professional might not be trusted because they’re not clear of the benefits of their product or service.

Clarity is especially important when speaking to an unfamiliar audience with no prior knowledge of your work; clear communication lets our competency shine through. 

Two ways to increase the clarity of your communication skills are to practice presentation skills and look into speech coaching. Being able to articulate your message better to cold prospects, even through video content that showcases how you will speak in person to them, helps build more trust with you. Shapira and Horsager suggest that clear communication can be achieved by first identifying the goal of what we’re going to say, formulating “a clear structure with logical transitions to achieve that goal”, and practicing the presentation out loud, adjusting as needed, until it becomes a message that will make sense to the listener.

There are many ways to enhance your presentation and communication skills.  For starters, there are groups such as Toastmaster’s, as well as improv and acting classes.  Within many of our sales coaching sessions, we use a lot of improv to help advisors become better at articulating their message, even when caught off guard.  We love using a book called “Yes, And” as a great resource around improv.

Another method that has helped me personally become a good communicator is watching people I admire on Youtube.  I almost try to duplicate their method until I improvise it to be my own method.

Finally, I use many of the strategies in my 2X3 Method, which is a fantastic way to answer any question.  I also highly advise advisors to start speaking like management consultants, which I have also created a video around.

In addition to clarity, passion and energy are also important components of good communication. As a sales coach to advisors, I often see advisors speaking in monotone voices with limited energy, which detract from the passion and character they actually have – and want to bring – to a conversation. I also see it many times in their video content and even in their writing tone and voice.

I often get asked by advisors who want to learn better communication skills what a coaching experience with me will be like. My reply: Please watch my videos. I am the same coach in-person as I am in my videos. If you like how I articulate and share my information in my videos, you will also like how I coach.

The same applies to anyone looking to build trust through good communication skills. For those who want to give people a good feel for what it will be like communicating with them daily, a good place to start is to offer video presentations. In these video presentations, being constantly mindful to present content that is clear, passionate, and energetic can help to improve overall communication skills that will build trust by conveying a person’s character more effectively. 

Vulnerability and Honesty

If we think of anyone we revere and trust, even if we’ve never met them, we can probably agree that one of the key traits about them is their vulnerability, and how much they have shared honestly about themselves to strangers.

I have repeatedly spoken about vulnerability as they key to consultative sales. When you share, people share. When you share what I call your Rocky Story – the story of the obstacles and challenges in your life that you have conquered in order to develop your character today – people immediately connect with you. 

For example, I share my story of moving to America with two suitcases when I was 12 years old, climbing my way up through global financial institutions, and now arriving here, writing this article for you . What does my story share with you about my character? Grit, hard work, perseverance, passion. Many of my readers relate deeply to this. And why does this matter to my readers? I’m passionate about what I do, I will always seek to outwork others, I have done it myself. The same as many of my readers.

This strategy works universally. Even though I’ve had many advisors share with me, “Yeah Amy, but I don’t come from a humble background or much adversity.” It doesn’t matter. A Rocky Story doesn’t need to be a world catastrophe! It just needs to highlight how your character has developed into where it is today. Grew up in a small town and now working in a skyscraper? That has shaped your character. Grew up going to Bible Study school every weekend? That has shaped your character. These are personal details that require vulnerability to disclose.

Make sure your audience knows who you are by being vulnerable. 

Although you might think sharing such details might reduce your perceived dignity or gravitas, what it’s really doing is enhancing your character-based trustworthiness.

Want to highlight that you’re a fiduciary? As hard as it is to hear, using the word “fiduciary” in marketing materials doesn’t automatically make people believe that you are being honest with them and have their best interest at heart. How can your marketing support that you are a real fiduciary and convey that you are an honest person?

One of the best ways to prove you’re honest is by being honest. Rather than maintaining a “game face” during work and revealing a completely different person outside of work, successful advisors see their job as a lifestyle. They are honest to the outside world about what their life really looks like, who they are as a person, and what their personal views and opinions are.

Authenticity

According to social psychologist Dr. Gary Alan Fine, authenticity can be described by sincere, innocent, original, and genuine behavior. Notably, authenticity is also thought to enable “individuals to understand, emotionally as well as cognitively, how information can relate to their everyday existence.”  

A lot of times advisors seek to not say anything outside the box at the risk of upsetting their followers and viewers.  I totally understand this, as we are in a highly regulated industry and your reputation is everything.  

But as our building blocks showed you, reputation isn’t the only component of trust.  You can maintain your reputation, all while standing to your roots.  For example, you may want your reputation to portray a professional and highly conservative investment advisor.  This is great, but it may not be the FULL story behind you.  Your full story may be a hard working, conservative wealth manager, but also a loving parent, a loving spouse, etc.

I once worked with an advisor who came across to me as highly technical with a great reputation.  But every time I would coach him, I would leave feeling a bit empty, like I didn’t know anything about him.  I’m pretty sure he felt the same, because we couldn’t get past that “transactional” coach-coachee relationship.  One day, I started asking about his personal life, and he let his guard down to me.  He started telling me that he and his wife had been having major difficulty having a child, and so they had gone out of their way to adopt a son.  This melted my heart.  From that point on, not only did OUR relationship completely change to the tune that I felt I knew him for years, but our marketing strategy changed for him too.  I let him know to start posting more pictures about his son, the adoption process and more.  He had developed an entire new process for building trust with his audience.

Another advisor I coached was having a very hard time relating to his prospects.  He would always lead with his technical knowledge and portfolio management strategies.  As we got to know each other, I started learning that he actually was passionate about being a “nerd”, but was always hiding it from the outside world to come across as a suave financière.  I started changing his marketing tagline and brand to the “nerdy advisor.”  At first he was hesitant, until he started embracing it.  To this day, he still maintains the “ultimate finance nerd” as his tagline!

What are some simple ways you can demonstrate authenticity? Show visually what you’re up to outside of work. Show, besides the S&P and the Nasdaq, what you focus on that are important and interesting to you personally. What books are you reading? What food are you cooking?  Where are you traveling? 

If you’re worried your clients will start thinking you are living elegantly, keep this in mind: if you don’t show your true self, you will always have that barrier to increasing your trust factor.  You’ll be surprised to find how many of your like-minded clients will like seeing those images, and how many NEW people will start feeling closer to you as well.

By relying on all – not just some – of the components of trust equally in their branding and marketing efforts, advisors can potentially speed up the pace of developing deeper relationships with people who they may have never met by focusing on a broader range of elements that comprise trust.

For those who tend to rely on their competence as a way to build trust, focusing on the character aspect of their brand – which would involve communication, authenticity, vulnerability, honesty, transparency, and consistency – may be helpful to increase their overall trust factor score.

Article Sources:

Stephen Covey

*The Value of Trust