The Underrated Art of Listening to Your Clients

Rich Dialogue 

Daniel Finely, president of the consultancy Advisor Solutions and author of "101 Advisor Solutions: A Financial Advisor's Guide to Strategies that Educate, Motivate, and Inspire," holds active listening workshops for advisors. Through role-playing sessions that replicate advisor-client meetings, Finely helps advisors move from one-way conversations to rich dialogue. He encourages participants to rephrase clients' words, observe language nuances and empathize with their emotions. After the sessions, he often hears that those playing the client role felt most connected when the advisor was listening. 

Experts suggest that advisors approach the client meeting as a conversation with no preconceptions about the problems or solutions. This means putting him or herself in clients' shoes, tuning into their wavelength and listening from their frame of reference. The advisor should explore core issues and hidden concerns, pausing to ask clarifying questions and repeat back important points. Recommendations should only come when the conversation is complete. In the end, the proposed solutions should feel like a natural fit.

What are the pitfalls? The experts have lists. Financial planner and author Andrew Sobel offers a range of advice.

• Avoid insincere listening, such as listening faintly as you formulate your next question or point.
• Try to stop "thinking ahead." Be sure to wait for the client to breathe to jump in with your comment.  
• Don't allow yourself to be distracted. Avoid checking your cell phone or email during the conversation. Be sure to take copious, linear notes.
• No one is looking for an advisor who is in love with their own ideas or dominating the discussion.
• Advisors also must stay away from indulging biases and allowing prejudices to influence the conversation.

William Ury, a senior fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project and co-author of the best-selling business classic "Getting to Yes," calls listening "the golden key that opens the door to human relationship."

"We often take listening for granted as something easy and natural," Ury said in a TED Talk titled "The Power of Listening." "But, in fact, at least in my experience, real, genuine listening is something that needs to be learned and practiced every day … In genuine listening, we listen not just for what's being said but for what's not being said. We listen not just to the words but to what's behind the words. We listen for the underlying emotions, and feelings, the underlying needs, what that person really needs or wants."

Ury notes that empathic listening is employed by the world's most successful negotiators and mediators who must build trust with their counterparts across the table.

"And it makes it more likely that the other person is going to listen to us," Ury said. "Listening may be the cheapest concession we can make in a negotiation. It costs us nothing, and it brings huge benefits."

'You Never Listen!'

Of course, the value of empathic listening is not limited to financial meetings or negotiations. Listening issues are evident to anyone who's ever heard a spouse, partner, relative or friend complain, "You never listen to me." Experts also warn that deficient listening may be reaching epidemic proportion in this age of texts, tweets, constant disruptions and short attention spans.

As for Randy Carver, his voice has grown stronger and his practice has flourished. Carver Financial Services now manages more than $1 billion in assets for 2,500 families. Randy no longer relies on a voice amplifier to talk to clients, and his voice sounds just fine on his frequent guest appearances on Fox and CNN. In the meantime, he makes one key promise to clients and prospects: He promises to listen.