snh 2018
Donna Leyens, MBA, CPC, will be speaking at Scaling New Heights 2018 in Atlanta on how clients retain information from their financial advisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and accountants.
I hear the following complaint from advisors and consultants all the time. “My clients pay me good money to advise them, and then they don’t take my advice.” Perhaps you have experienced this phenomenon in your own business or personal life. If you have, you know how utterly frustrating it can be!
Sometimes, the stakes can be quite high for your clients. You might believe that their business success or failure hinges on them making a change or taking an action that you have suggested. You work hard, giving them all the facts, figures and analyses behind your recommendation. And yet, they do nothing.
Resistance can show up in one of several ways.
- They can flat out refuse to take your advice.
- They can stall, telling you they will think about the situation, dragging out the decision indefinitely.
- They can tell you that they will take action and then not act on it.
Regardless of which path of resistance your client takes, you might find the idea of initiating and conducting a productive conversation about their inaction daunting. Suddenly, you are experiencing conflict where you expected cooperation and appreciation for your great advice.
You might even worry that you must choose between telling your client the truth, making them unhappy, or not saying anything, keeping the peace but risking the health of their business. However, there is another option. You can create a safe communication space, where both you and your client can listen to each other respectfully and have a constructive dialogue.
In the moment when someone says “no” to something we want them to do, our natural reaction is to try harder to convince them. We think if we have a great argument, we will win them over to our point of view. But more often than not, arguing with a client, or trying harder to convince them, has the opposite effect of what we want. It creates an oppositional situation where emotions start to run high. It increases rather than decreases client resistance.
If you are going to have an effective dialogue with your client, you must find a way to get all relevant information, from both you and your client, into the open in a way that everyone can hear it. That often means taking down the emotion.
What triggers the kind of emotion that can derail effective communication? Each one of us enters into a conversation with our own opinions and ideas, stemming from our own unique frame of reference. Often, the other person’s experience, frame of reference and opinions are different from our own. Add to the mix that we are each quite attached to our own opinions, and you have a recipe for conflict and high emotion. When we enter into a dialogue with the attitude that our ideas are RIGHT and anything that differs from them is WRONG, we can cause the other person(s) to feel defensive and disrespected. Even if we are not openly telling them they are wrong, if we believe that they are, and it is our primary goal to convince them that we are right, it will come across in our attitude.
The first step in diffusing an oppositional situation is to examine your own mindset. How are you contributing to the client’s reaction? Ask yourself if you are truly listening to what they have to say, or just paying them lip service until you can try again to tell them why you’re right. The best way to facilitate a conversation that leads to agreement, action and change is to open your mind, hear your clients’ concerns, and empathize with their point of view.
The second step is to stop and ask yourself if you are unnecessarily digging in your heels. Sometimes we tell ourselves that our advice or solution is the only good choice, when in reality, there could be alternative solutions, or versions of our solution, that would be just as successful and more palatable to our client. If you are willing to listen to your clients’ concerns and open your mind to alternative solutions or tweaks, your client will feel like a participant in the solution and will be much more likely to buy into it. When you hear yourself saying words like “right” and “wrong,” that should be a signal for you to stop and examine your mindset and motives.
When someone feels strong pressure to change their view, whether its you or your client who is feeling it, the situation stops being about coming to an agreement or finding the best solution and starts being about winning. Once someone needs to “win,” that automatically creates a situation where someone else loses. Since no one wants to be the loser, it now becomes much more difficult to come to an agreement and get your client to hear your advice.
The good news is that if you have the right communication tools at your fingertips, you can avoid the sticky situations all together, and create a client relationship that fosters mutual respect and great business results. If you would like to learn more specific communication tools and techniques for helping your clients get motivated to take action, please join me for my session at Scaling New Heights 2018, where I will show you how to “Coach Your Resistant Clients into Action.”