Using thinking preferences to connect with clients

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Why do some advisers seem to gain new clients effortlessly while others struggle to find ways to turn prospects into clients?

Wednesday, February 25th 2009, 1:08PM

The first adviser has found the value in using the latest psychometric assessment tools to help him identify his prospects’ thinking preferences.

There are many versions of these assessment tools available today. Some quantify personality traits, while others look at common behaviours. The most effective, however, may be the tools that identify thinking preferences.

In the past 25 years, researchers have identified that the brain is divided into not just two hemispheres, right and left, as originally suspected, but into four regions that have very specific functions. And people are the same everywhere. The same thinking preferences exist whether you are from Asia, Australia or North America. If we look at the four regions of the brain, you may start to see some of yourself in the descriptions.

Upper left – analytical
This part of your brain likes analysis, budgets, diagrams and models. It is also good at math. New technology is a favorite of the analytical part of your brain – both in terms of how it works and what it can do for you.

A client with a preference for the analytical part of the brain wouldn’t be able to resist playing with your new iPhone. While the analytical part of the brain likes the budget, it really only wants to see the bottom line.

Lower left – structural
Order is the order of the day for this quadrant. It likes timelines, guidelines, rules and exact data. If you love creating spreadsheets, that’s the structural part of your brain operating. The structural part of the brain has to do all of the calculations for itself to prove that everything is in order.

Lower right – relational
This quadrant is concerned with people and relationships and is associated with sympathy and empathy. This part of the brain is intuitive about people. In the budget scenario outlined above, the relational part of the brain is not concerned with the bottom-line numbers or the details, but how much of the allocated funds are available to spend on people.

Upper right – conceptual
The final quadrant is the visionary part of the brain. It sees in pictures and is intuitive about ideas. It enjoys solving old problems in new ways and looks at how information impacts the future. When presented with the budget, the conceptual part of your brain looks ahead past implementation to its impact in the future.

When you begin to understand the clues to a client’s preferences, you can provide information in a manner that makes them feel like you’re speaking directly to them. Appealing to your clients’ thinking preferences can help in your communication with them – to convert prospects to clients and turn clients into long-term, loyal clients.

By Ann L. Vanderslice, member of MDRT, extract from her 2008 MDRT Annual Meeting presentation, “Einstein, Mozart and Money”.

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