By Michael Kitces
– · 2 min read
Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 512th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Chris Smith. Chris is the founder of PSBLTY, a brand strategy, design, and implementation firm that works with financial advisors, teams, and firms.
What’s unique about Chris, though, is how he works with advisors to create a more effective discovery process that closes more clients and helps advisors move upmarket.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Chris views leadership as a key element of the discovery process (as prospects want to know where the process is heading and how the advisor will guide them), why Chris believes the key to the initial meeting with a client is for the advisor to spend the vast majority of the time listening to the client (and then synthesizing and reflecting their comments back to them), and how Chris finds that closing the first meeting with an “assertive assumption”, rather than asking if the prospect has any questions, increases the chances the prospect will schedule a second meeting.
We also talk about how Chris views the second meeting with a prospect as an opportunity for the advisor to share planning insights and a strategy to move forward (spending most of the time during the meeting speaking themselves, unlike during the initial meeting), why Chris warns against going too deep in terms of analysis at this point to avoid creating confusion in the prospect’s mind, and the scripts Chris uses at the end of this second meeting to invite the prospect to become a client.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Chris shares how he got his start in the financial advice industry after working in commercial real estate (and finding that many of the same prospect communication techniques transfer over well), how Chris has identified a major difference between growing and scaling his own business (along with the importance of tracking key business metrics), and how Chris finds that a business can only grow as fast as its founder is willing to develop their leadership skills.
