The theme at this week's FPA Conference in Annaheim centered on trust. Becoming the trusted advisor is not a new idea however, it is increasingly talked about.

The question is how do you become the trusted advisor? How do you accelerate trust in your advisory relationships, and for that matter in any relationship?

Building trust is directly related to how you behave in relation to others. What many do not know is that the starting point for trust starts with your behavior. If you do not trust yourself, then you will not trust others and others will not trust you. What we have learned from research is that some people are not naturally wired not to trust and hence will always have more inherent difficulty in building trusted relationships. So, these skeptical people have to be more conscious in developing trust with clients (and their team).

Interestingly, based on our extensive behavioral profiling of financial advisors, over 70% of them would be low on trust or more skeptical. So, why do you think there is such a lack of trust of our industry, and now being trusted is being valued so much? It is also fair to say that being completely trusting as a person can be naive. Some skepticism is reasonable so long as it is healthy.

Now, you need to address how you are going to improve your level of trust. The first step is gaining clarity of who you are, your talents and your life purpose. When you have the personal confidence to be who you are your fears start going away and generally trust builds. We help people through this step by having them firstly take the Business DNA Natural Talents Profile.
The second step is to uncover your client relationship management performance. We do this by having you take the AdvisorTRUST 360 Profile. In essence, the profile is a behavioral client performance evaluation. The process involves you rating yourself and having at least 3 clients each rating you on 75 performance items across the following 7 key areas:

1. Communication
2. Results
3. Relationships
4. Emotional Intelligence
5. Trust
6. Advisory values
7. Advisory competence

The profile report identifies areas of strength where you are positively building trust with clients and areas where further development is required.

With this information a coaching program can be put in place to help you improve your trust and level of client satisfaction. The reality is that every person will have performance aspects needing development across these 7 areas. Even those who inter personally may naturally build strong trust could be lower in demonstrating advisory trust in terms of the results and processes side of their service delivery.

If you would like to learn more and participate in the AdvisorTrust 360 Profile please contact us at inquiries@businessdnaresources.com