Advisors today face a number of challenges as financial services become more commoditized and competition from robo-advisors, low-fee investing platforms, and even artificial intelligence grows.

To survive and flourish in this environment, as a financial advisor you need to differentiate yourself and the value you bring to clients. This can be achieved through “value narratives”—unique, tailored, jargon-free stories that vividly illustrate the benefits clients can receive from you.

How can advisors develop effective value narratives?

• Focus on your best successes with clients and learn from your experience.
• Analyze the value of those successes from your client’s perspective.
• Turn that analysis into a brief, authentic story.

Steps for Building Your Value Narratives

To help craft your story, we have listed a number of steps you can take to stay focused. Your client is the “hero” meeting a challenge—for example, selling a business, revisiting investment goals, navigating changing family dynamics. You are the “mentor,” offering guidance in light of their new circumstances. You do this by helping them decide on a financial course of action designed with their particular situation in mind.¹

1. Introduce the client as the protagonist—or “hero.”
2. The call to “adventure”: The client must make an important decision. What is it?
3. A reluctance to decide: Given the “shadows” thrown up by a highly uncertain, complex, and abstruse world, the hero is unsure what to do next.
4. Meeting the “mentor”: The mentor (advisor) guides the hero through complexity and uncertainty.
5. Facing the challenges: In trying to determine the right course of action, the hero and mentor focus on the elements of effective decision-making.
6. Confronting the hero’s doubts: The hero should weigh the risks of a poor decision, effectively answering the question, “What if I make a mistake?”
7. The “Transformation”: With the help of the mentor, who offers genuine insights, the hero makes an informed decision. Insight, according to Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t, is “an unexpected shift to a better story.”