It goes without saying that building rapport and earning trust quickly is essential to establishing a mutually beneficial and enduring relationship, but how do you ensure you achieve this when you may only get one chance?
If the client says it, it’s the truth…
The first lesson that I ever learned more than 35 years ago has stuck with me every day since then. While working with a very wise adviser and multiple MDRT qualifier, he said to me…“Jason, if the client says it, it must be the truth”.
In other words, don’t ever tell the client or prospect that things are important until you have skilfully engaged with well-thought-out questions that evoke their insights and inspire them to tell you. As mentioned earlier, mind mapping, discovery maps, and visual “lifelines” are remarkably effective in getting people to think differently, visualise, realise, and tell you what is important to them.
Depending on how you physically use various mind mapping techniques, you will create increased engagement and highly effective dynamics in your meetings. Whatever technique you use, the focus of your prospect or client will revert from looking directly at you for most of the meeting to your skilful creation of their world on paper or a whiteboard. And their ownership will elevate as they navigate their world with you, as opposed to the disengagement that happens when you take notes opposite them.
When implemented effectively, your prospect or client will most likely ask you for a copy of the mind map you have created together. If you are working from a whiteboard they will probably ask to take a picture of the work. I have had many advisers come back to me after successfully creating mind maps with new prospects and clients to let me know that they were surprised when the person asked for a copy!
There is also a specific framework that you can implement in all meetings that applies this philosophy over the “cycle of commitment” and create “imperative needs”. Additionally, developing exceptional engagement skills is a core component of our GROW Adviser Capability program.
Keep an eye out for my next article:
“Client expectations”
So do you regularly use mind maps of any kind with your prospects and clients? Have you ever attempted to use different mind maps?
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