Oren Klaff.
Nowadays, it's not enough to deliver a great sales pitch about your idea. You must take folks on a path to discover their own ideas — to which you've been guiding them all along.
So argues sales and negotiation expert Oren Klaff, author of the bestseller "Pitch Anything," in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.
The key to financial advisors' sales success — and that of others who sell — is making clients feel they're in control instead of feeling pressured. Financial services veteran Klaff tells how in his new playbook on persuasion, based on neuroscience and behavioral economics, "Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idea Is Their Idea," written with Andy Earle (Portfolio/Penguin Random House-August 2019).
In the interview, Klaff, founder and managing director of Intersection Capital and partner of its $200 million private equity fund, which he manages, discusses ways to tap into investors' innate feelings of fear and anxiety in order to bring about a sense of certainty about a potential advisor.
Klass opines, too, about why taking on different personas — such as Angel and Wolf, as he labels them — in reacting to clients' attitudes moment by moment is the "Loser's Formula."
ThinkAdvisor recently interviewed Klaff, on the phone from his Carlsbad, California, office. He has advised blue-chip companies such as Cisco, Google and Xerox and was a venture analyst and partner at several midsize investment funds.
Here are highlights of our conversation:
THINKADVISOR: Please explain your technique of "sales inception."
OREN KLASS: It's implanting an idea in someone's mind so they think it's their own. That gets the investor, or buyer, to the point where they say, "How do I get in? How do we work together?"
Why should advisors consider using this sales method?
The investor's world has been gamified: It's a game to find the same deal at a better price. So the moment the advisor says, "Here's my offer. Here's the price. Here are the terms. Do you want it?" the investor hits the pause button and says, "I'll get back to you." And then they look for something similar but better.
How do you finesse it so an investor thinks something is their idea when it's really the advisor's?
[That happens] when they believe you've solved their very hard investment scenario a thousand times before because you're an expert in a particular area — and so they're certain their problem is an easy push-up for you. It's rising to their level as a peer and expert. Status plus expertise gives them certainty that in the future the things you say will actually happen.
What's delivering "pre-wired ideas," and how does an advisor capitalize on that?
Language was designed to communicate information about danger: Fire is coming! Don't eat those berries! You're on a tiger trail! The idea is to put your very complicated concepts about investment products, for which the brain was not designed to easily and quickly understand, into pre-wired idea receptors that understand things like danger and fear.
What's an example?
The concept of "winter is coming." The obvious "winters" in the advisor's business are taxation, tariffs, regulation, bond pricing trends [etc.]. That is, we have to find a way to survive once this unprecedented [winter] freeze, in, say, a certain asset class, comes because everything we normally do won't work. You establish that you're an expert in how the world will work once the freeze sets in.
How does an advisor communicate that they're different from the competition?
No wealth advisor has ever answered the question, "How are you different?" so that someone goes, 'Oh, yes, I totally see that!" The way to answer is to say, "We're not different. Every wealth advisor is the same: We all have to be FINRA compliant, have registered products, provide ROI [etc.]. We're all plain vanilla." Saying that commoditizes the competition.
What might the FA say next?
