One day not so long ago, some advisers, looking through their to-do notes, discovered clients they had not seen before. The advisers quickly Skyped them and then drove to see them. The clients welcomed the advisers with open arms. They had intuitively known that this day would come.
The advisers spent months learning about their clients, exploring and appreciating their different needs, preferences and behaviour patterns.
In turn, the clients also spent months listening to the advisers talk about the wonderful benefits that would return to the clients.
In the beginning everything was wonderful and beautiful. But, the effects of Earth's atmosphere took hold, and eventually one adviser realised no-one was talking about death.
More to the point, about death and taxes. And, in particular, death, taxes and estates. Some of the other advisers had remembered to ask their clients if they had wills and some of the clients thought they did.
So no-one was particularly worried. That is, until one client died - without a will, despite thinking she had one. Somewhere. With some solicitor.
After this, advisers thought it would be a very good idea to talk about wills and estates with their clients.
With this in mind, a group of advisers gathered to swap ideas about how to raise the embarrassing subject of death and taxes. One adviser came up with a very clever idea: begin with the end in mind, this adviser said.
Don't talk about portfolios and dynamic asset allocation, this adviser said. Talk about what the clients want to do in retirement and how they want to die.
Oooooh, some other advisers said, that's a bit confronting.
Not at all, the clever adviser said. The end determines the means - of getting there.
One very clever adviser said clients' enlightened self-interest was the key. What had someone else done in a will that had affected that client badly?
Aha, said the other advisers.
Finally, a non-adviser - who'd been invited to the powwow to make provocative remarks - said advisers had to remember two things when talking about wills and estates: men heard the money and women heard the emotion.
At the end of the powwow, all the attendees were given a copy of The Adviser/Client Phrase Translation Dictionary and they all drove back to their offices, happily ever after.
Editor's note
In ifa issue 603, 23 July 2012, I referred to AMP's Career Changer program, which will offer another as-yet unnamed program.
The not-yet-announced new program will be more flexible and will sit alongside the current Career Changer program.
So, the Career Changer program itself will not change - it will still exist as is, with incremental changes made to improve it, based on participants' feedback. «
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