Brad Johnson: Your prospect’s eyes glaze over about 10 minutes into the meeting. You can feel it. They’re there, but they’re really not. And here’s the thing, the problem usually isn’t with what you’re saying, it’s that you’re only saying it. Today, I want to talk about one of the most underrated skills I’ve seen separate the top 1% of financial advisors from everybody else. It’s the ability to take the complex world of finance and make it simple. And in today’s part three of our missing visuals in finance series, we’re going to cover exactly that.
But before I get into it, I want to tell you a quick story. A few years back, during COVID of all times, I had a guy named Simon Bowen on the show. And Simon is one of the world’s number one authorities on visual-based thinking. For lack of a better term, he is a master at taking complicated ideas and drawing them in a way that anybody can understand them.
And on that episode, he sketched out a framework. He calls it the Futures Model, and we covered it in about 10 minutes. It was on a screen share. A few weeks later, I get a random message on Facebook. It’s from an advisor based out of Sweden, not a Triad member. In fact, we didn’t even exist yet. His name was Morton, and he told me he recreated that model just off the episode he watched, and it helped him close a $10 million client he had been chasing for months. He said that one drawing simplified everything, and the guy finally got it.
That story has not only stuck with me, but that same scenario has played out over and over with financial advisors that we’ve coached on this visual technique. Because the more I looked around the industry, the more I kept seeing the same pattern. Brilliant advisors, incredible plans, but they’re losing the room because they were trying to communicate the most important decision of someone’s life using nothing but words.
And here’s what all the research shows. Vision is the brain’s most dominant sense. The vast majority of the information we take in from the world comes through the optic nerve through our eyes. And explaining a financial plan with words alone is like broadcasting a magic trick on the radio. That would be silly, right? Yet we do the equivalent all the time in finance. So, today, we’re going to show you a different way, and it all starts with one of these.
There’s a concept I heard directly from Simon Bowen. When you draw, you draw people in. And here’s why words only is killing your closing rate. Almost every advisor I’ve ever met misses on this, as most communication is done verbally. They explain their process, they explain their investment philosophy all out loud, no visuals, and they wonder why the prospect doesn’t get it. In fact, stick around for Chapter 3 in this video where I share how we coach Triad members to talk about both their high-level investment philosophy and their proprietary process all visually. So, when you lead with words, you’re not losing the prospect because your advice is bad. You’re losing them because they literally can’t see it or easily comprehend it.
So, let’s get to a real-world example that also illustrates the psychology behind a whiteboard presentation. Put yourself in your prospect’s chair. When was the last time you were sitting down and learning from someone on a whiteboard? Or in my case, a chalkboard. Where were you? Most likely, you were in a classroom. Think about the psychology of putting your prospects back in the chair of being a student. What does that make you? Well, obviously, you’re the teacher. So, it is not only the concept of drawing that draws people in, but also the psychology of turning them back into a student so that you can educate them on the best options when it comes to their retirement, and more importantly, do it in a way that makes it as simple as possible.
So, here’s a first action to take. Take the single most important concept you explain in a first appointment, the one you say out loud every single time. This week, what if you tried illustrating it on a whiteboard instead? One concept, one drawing, and watch what happens in the room when you stop talking and you start drawing.
Another learning from years of observing advisors and what works and what doesn’t in appointments. When you sit across the table and you push your plan at a prospect to have them sell on it, what naturally happens is they push back. It’s not them being difficult. It’s just naturally what a human does when you push against them.
Another learning from years of observing advisors and what works and what doesn’t in appointments. When you sit across the table and push your plan at a prospect, they naturally are going to push back. And that’s just natural human behavior. It’s our natural wiring. We resist anything pushed at us. What whiteboarding allows us to do is the model actually becomes the mediator. And it allows you to co-create a plan together.
This fix is not to push harder or talk smoother. The fix is to put something between the two of you that when you draw a model on the whiteboard, that model becomes the mediator. Now, you’re not across the table from each other. You’re standing side by side, both looking at the same picture. And you’re building it together, and the energy of the entire room changes. It stops being a pitch, and it becomes a conversation. That is the difference between selling a plan and building one.
All right, back to another real-world example. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard advisors tell me they thought they were signing up to be a financial advisor, and in reality, most days they feel like a financial therapist. Well, if we expand on that concept, instead of the back and forth between you, the advisor, your prospects, imagine how that whiteboard, it now becomes a mediator or a therapist in a certain way to start to pull out the problems you need to solve where all parties can have an open dialogue.
This allows you to co-create a plan together where everyone’s heard, has a chance to speak, and comes to a solution. And not only does this work between you, the advisor, and your prospects, but oftentimes your prospects themselves. The couple across the table, many times, as you know, they aren’t even on the same page. So, now the whiteboard acts as a way for all parties to see things clearly.
Okay, another action item. Is the visual you came up with in Chapter 1 a topic that tends to create back and forth or some form of debate during your appointment process? Maybe it’s something you tend to always get a lot of questions about. These type of subjects tend to make great models.
Now, is there a way instead to turn this debate right here into a discussion that involves the whiteboard? Simon Bowen calls this choreographic. Did you notice how we used different colors? Did you notice the unveil? That allows you to pull your prospects into the visual model.
And bonus tip: remember when that grade school teacher called you up on the whiteboard to do the math problem? You can do that with your prospects, too. It’s a great way to pull them even deeper into the discussion. Give it a try.
I had one of my wealthiest and most successful friends make an observation that always stuck with me. He said, “Brad, you know what I’ve found with most financial advisors? Their entire business, it’s built on a personality.” Well, I’m here to tell you that from my experience, he’s spot on, and that’s a problem if you want to scale a business that’s bigger than you and maybe even take a vacation every once in a while or have a business that’s sellable someday.
Well, unfortunately, all of what lives in your head, it works great until you need to hire advisors on your team, and that’s where great models come in. They aren’t just to simplify these concepts for your clients. It actually works for scaling a team as well.
In every firm, about 85% to 90% of what you do looks pretty similar to everybody else in the industry. It’s that 10% to 15% that’s truly yours. It’s your models, your stories and analogies that tie all these together. That’s the genius people pay a premium for. But if that genius only lives in your head and you can’t teach it, you can’t transfer it, then you sure can’t sell it. And the move is to take what you do intuitively and turn it into an organized model. Then that model holds the genius, and you can hand it to your team.
Okay, time for our final real-world example, and these are the two Triad models I mentioned earlier. This one, we call it Safety, Income, Growth. It’s more high level. It’s designed to simplify how your investment philosophy works. It explains where you allocate the money, safety, income, growth, and more importantly, the time horizon to create peace of mind during your retirement. We’ve got now, we’ve got soon, we’ve got later.
Now, I’m not going to unpack the full model here, but conceptually, this is a high-level investment philosophy that simplifies asset allocation that can get really complicated for your clients and start to think about, here’s the money we need right away, that emergency fund. And as a retiree, unfortunately, our old jobs don’t keep paying us, so we probably need some sort of an income stream 10, 15 years.
And then lastly, we need an investment, a growth strategy that complements the income strategy that keeps us up with things like inflation, cost of living, a lot of inflation right now. And now, you tell them how these work together to build a plan to create peace of mind in retirement because they have income, but also not sacrifice their growth along the way.
And then the cherry on the top with the Safety, Income, and Growth Model, everything on this side of the line, it’s designed to protect your lifestyle in retirement. So, I’m just giving you a small bite-sized taste. There’s much more to this model, but you can see just with that simple explanation how that would actually create more clarity, more peace of mind, more simplicity for retirees that you’re sitting across the table from.
Okay, let’s get to the second model. And this second model, we call it Five Worlds, and it’s designed to help our members unpack their proprietary financial planning process in a way that’s easy to understand, and it allows them to educate their clients on the difference between a portfolio, a basket of investments only, and a true holistic financial plan built on a CFP standard.
And what’s really cool, as you unpack and walk them through this, it correlates with safety, income, growth. This is the high level. This is going a little bit deeper. We’ve got the income strategy. That’s the foundational piece at the bottom here. That’s complemented by an investment strategy. So, these two go hand in hand, but then it doesn’t matter how much you get paid or how much you make in the portfolio if you pay it all to Uncle Sam. That’s why it needs to be complemented with a tax strategy.
And then, oh, this thing called healthcare in retirement. That’s something we want to address. We want to plan for that, have a strategy. And lastly, what do we do when it’s all said and done? The legacy we want to leave behind, to the church, to the charity, to the kids, the heirs, so that when it’s all said and done, you’ve left a legacy behind that matters.
Quick side note, if you’re an advisor out there who wants to dive deeper on how models like these work and how you could incorporate them into your appointment process, that is exactly why we created our Triad Sales Lab. It’s designed to help great advisors better communicate in a way that allows you to take great prospects and make them lifelong clients. Check out the link below and apply to see if it’s a fit for you. We go into models like this in a workshop setting, allow you to practice them, get feedback on them, so that you can then take them and incorporate them into your appointment process.
All right, last action item. Take the visual models from Chapter 1, then apply the collaboration and discussion we talked about in Chapter 2. And as Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Now, here’s the next step. Put it into action by teaching it to another advisor on your team. When your process can be drawn, it can be taught. When it can be taught, it can be duplicated. And when it’s duplicated, it becomes both scalable and then sellable.
So, today, we covered part three in our series about the missing visuals in most financial advisor appointments and the power of bringing your concepts into the real world where your clients can actually see them. So, to recap today, first you must draw, then co-create, then teach. By the way, if you haven’t caught part one or part two of the missing visual series yet, be sure to check them out.
And lastly, make sure to come back here, leave a comment to share your wins like my friend Morton from Sweden did. We always love hearing the success stories from the channel. It’s why we do it. Catch you on the next one.
