Do you have clients who are frightened by the bank failures in the news?
This is your opportunity to offer financial leadership.
Help your prospects and clients manage their fear. This “buys” you the trust to help them manage their money.
So, what are you doing proactively to calm jittered nerves?
As you consider your plan, here are a few thoughts about how the human brain works.
Think of the brain as a three storey house.
On the top floor you find the thinking brain.
You have the professional discipline to stay in your thinking brain even when there are scary economic forces at play.
Your ideal clients to make sound prudent investment choices with their thinking brains.
However, the field of behavioral finance explains why your clients don’t behave like ideal investors. Most of your clients make most of their investing choices with their feeling brains. Think of the feeling brain as the main level of the house. Feeling brains make predictable investing errors.
When scary things unfold and survival is threatened– like the 2008 market crash, the COVID pandemic or a personal business failure– our reptile brains are activated. We go down into the basement. The reptile brain only knows how to do a handful of things intended to survive an immediate threat: fight, flee, freeze or fawn.
To access better solutions and take smarter action, we ascend to the feeling brain or ideally the thinking brain.
For some of your clients, news of the bank failures sent then into the basement with a fully-triggered fight-flight-freeze response.
What does someone in the basement need to hear to find the courage to climb up those stairs and take smart action?
Your clients and prospects who face financial threats want to hear, “You are safe.”
Ideally, here’s what you say, “Not one of my clients has ever lost a dime in a bank failure. Why? We build safety into our wealth-building process for unlikely events like bank failures.”
Sometimes you cannot protect your clients from losses. If the threat is ongoing, like the financial impact of the pandemic, you can reassure people with the message, “Yes, this is scary, but you are not in it alone. I’m here and I have experience managing situations like this. Further, I’m dedicated to finding the best ideas to get us through this crisis.”
I recommend that you reach out this week by phone or email or video and deliver a message that has three elements:
- Bank failures are scary.
- Even if your bank fails, you don’t have to lose a dime.
- We can walk you through the steps you can take NOW to protect yourself from losses when unlikely circumstances— like bank failures or other threats that you might not have even considered—unfold.
I recommend against delivering detailed technical financial information. Your prospects and clients don’t need to know HOW you protect against losses. You can do that in a 1:1 consultation.
All your prospects and clients need to know is that you recognize that bank failures can trigger fear, they are not alone, and you know how to deal with situations like this.
What action steps are YOU taking?