Curiosity Leads To Success

How curious is your team? In the financial services industry, it pays to be curious. When your team is curious it creates opportunities to better understand the needs of your clients. This leads to more sales, but also better service. 

By asking more questions and taking the time to be curious your clients will be able to tell that your team cares. It goes back to the underlying promise that you make to every client. Often that promise is to help the client protect against risks and to maximize their financial future.

This promise is difficult to fill if your team isn’t on the lookout for the risks and opportunities in each client’s everyday lives. And to do this well, your team needs to be curious. Curious at what the client’s lives looks like. Curious enough to understand what the client wants to protect. Or what financial future they want to build.

Being curious will help your team see risks that the client doesn’t see as a risk at all. Or to identity opportunities that a client had never considered. Most financial services professionals will agree that clients simply don’t know what they don’t know. They will agree that it’s their job to help the client understand risks and opportunities better, but the same saying applies to your team.

Your team simply can’t know what they don’t know, without being curious. Without stopping to ask questions and learn about each client and their unique risks and opportunities. Therefore, it pays to be curious, because curiosity leads to better service.

A few tips to creating a more curious team:

• Practice! Curiosity is a muscle. If you don’t encourage your team to use it then it’s likely they won’t. It’s also important that they continue to develop this skill set. Practicing this skill doesn’t take a long time. Just dedicate 10 minutes at a weekly meeting. Your focus can be a product and you simply ask your team to brainstorm questions around that product. Or you could pose a client scenario such as buying a new house and then have the team brainstorm questions they could ask about that situation.
   
• Give them the right language. Sometimes people don’t ask questions because they don’t know what to ask. The beauty of curiosity is that short, powerful questions are often the key to finding out the best information. There isn’t a need to overcomplicate the questions that are asked. Instead, teach your team to use short, powerful questions that create conversation. Create a list of one or two questions that your team can ask to create an opportunity to talk about life insurance, disability, and other products that you sell. Or create the questions around life events such as getting married, buying a new house, having a kid, etc. Better yet, implement the insight above and build your list as you go!
   
• Encourage your team to take time. Being a service-based industry there’s never a lack of work to be done. If your team is rushing to answer the phone, help the next person, or to complete paperwork then it’ll be hard for them to “find” the time to be creative. Instead, set the expectation that quality service takes time. It’s not about how fast you can get to the next “task,” but it is about the quality of the service. Change the way that your team defines great service and make sure that it includes “making” time to be curious.