Ask Nick Sample 2025
More heart, less head
Q) I am running into an issue of creating urgency with my clients. After just five years in the business, I have millions of dollars of AUM in my pipeline—mostly thanks to the language in your newsletters. Many clients have agreed they want and even need my help. They understand my fee. They understand the power of proper diversification, annual rebalancing, and—most importantly—the value of behavioral coaching. However, it seems difficult to create urgency. With insurance products it is very easy to create urgency—the client is getting older and their health is not guaranteed to stay the same. So clients apply for insurance as soon as they can.
I fear the lack of urgency is a result of a mistake I am making in my process. I am getting clients to recognize they need to roll their assets over to me, but they are putting this into the “important, not urgent” category.
I believe if I was articulating my value well enough they would want to move their money to me yesterday. Is this a classic example of working with the wrong people? Or is this my problem? What am I missing?
A) I think the first thing to realize is that there is no urgency (as such) to start a lifelong/multigenerational journey to wealth—an income one doesn't outlive followed by a significant and growing legacy to the people and/or institutions one loves most. The sooner one begins this journey, the sooner it will begin to produce the outcomes I've just described. But (I say again) there is no urgency, and you cannot create what doesn't exist.
That said, if you've mastered the principles of Behavioral Investment Counseling in just five years, you're already in the top one percent of your peers, in terms of the probability that you'll achieve outstanding success. The plan we advocate always succeeds, and so must the advisor who consistently advocates for said plan. Keep telling our story to more people.
And keep telling it with more passion and conviction—speaking into people's hearts as much as and more than their minds. I have a very unscientific hunch that this may be where you need to look.
I have no doubt you are convincing people intellectually of the superiority of our approach. I wonder if you're touching them emotionally with glimpses of what that approach insures. “Can you imagine what it feels like to know that you won't run out of money in retirement—that your dividend income alone historically grows at twice the inflation rate?” (Voila: heart first, then a supporting statistical squib.) “Can you imagine what it would feel like to be reasonably sure that your grandchildren may never have to take student loans?” (Presupposes you've discovered how much the client couple loves its grandchildren.) “There'll come a day when most people you know will be panicking out of their long-term investments, and you won't be because of the work we'll be doing together.” (In one intensely human sentence—that I assure you no one ever forgets—the essence of Behavioral Investment Counseling.)
And/or: invite people who said they liked your approach but didn't follow through to tell you why they didn't. “I accept that the plan I proposed didn't move you to action. I promise you I'm not trying to restart that conversation. I'm asking a favor: Please help me understand what I did, or failed to do, that held you back.”
So, in sum:
(1) Maybe more heart, less head. Or in sales jargon: fewer features, more benefits.
(2) Remember that you can learn something from each interaction, even the “failed” ones. (Maybe especially them.)
(3) Remember above all: in the end, you cannot help people more than they want to be helped by you.
Editor's note: Our young friend wrote back immediately and confirmed my guess that his issue is indeed heart/head. As younger advisors instinctively (but wrongly) tend to do, he'd been carrying an entirely self-imposed burden of “proof.”