Training advisers to be resilient

Developing a career in financial services can be tough in good market conditions, but external factors can challenge even successful advisers. Honey Kolencherry, Sales Manager at Zurich Advisory Network (ZAN) and a 15-year financial services veteran, has led her team of 15 advisers past rough patches and back to boom times.

Kolencherry has a playbook for weathering financial downturns. Drawing on her background in banking, she is able to remain confident that opportunities remain, even if they are harder to find. It’s her job to help her advisers unearth them.

“Being an ex-banker, it helps me to understand the market more,” she said. “Because when there are cyclical changes happening, there are a lot of possibilities which clients normally don't look into.”

Being comfortable with uncertainty

The strongest promise financial services can provide is future security. Unforeseen situations that disrupt well-laid plans can be very distressing for clients. Kolencherry believes the best hedge against uncertainty is portfolio diversification, which she understands goes against what many people in financial services have been taught.

"The majority of the clients whom we meet might want to do whatever their parents might have been doing, whether that is investing in properties or buying commodities like gold,” she said. “They don't diversify into any other products. People find comfort investing in familiar products.”

To help advisers become more comfortable offering a full suite of products and guide them to better conversations with clients on non-traditional strategies, Kolencherry holds monthly training sessions for her team. The first hour is dedicated to professional best practices and is often led by one of the 25 MDRT members working within the larger organization. During the second hour, she helps her team understand the current economic and financial landscape challenges.

“We have sessions provided by the industry experts who talk about macroeconomic changes, and what it will mean in different markets across the globe, which can help the advisers to develop resilience,” she said.

Though she no longer works as a banker, Kolencherry offers her team members the same asset protection strategies she gave past clients. Only now, she treats those strategies as coaching tools for her advisers to use in their own client meetings. For example, she cites an extended drop in the stock market be a reason to enter equity markets or stack upon existing portfolio even for a risk averse investor.

“It comes naturally to me to talk about different asset classes and how we can help clients plan insurance and wealth-building activities in tandem in their portfolio building,” she said.

Kolencherry also makes herself available for joint fieldwork with clients who are exceptionally investment savvy and want a detailed, high-level discussion.

Showing support

Showing support in challenging circumstances requires psychological solutions. Leaders are viewed as protectors and expected to provide encouragement to anxious team members. Those team members, in turn, are expected to pass on assurance to jittery clients.

"The need of the hour in a turbulent market is to give a lot of emotional support,” Kolencherry said. Many times, clients and advisers need to feel like there is someone there to look up to, somebody whom they can call for help staying calm and avoiding impulsive decisions."

Active listening forms a crucial component of this support. She avoids platitudes with her advisers, and counsels them to throw away the script with their clients.

"Be the person who's listening actively to the clients,” she said. "Pause and think through what they wanted you to tell. Don’t just offer the answers which are already prepared in your mind."

But Kolencherry also cautions her team members to be tough. Anyone working in this profession for any length of time should know that good times and bad go hand-in-hand.

"There are a lot of ups and downs in financial services,” she said.

Much of the same advice she gives to new recruits becomes especially relevant during agencywide struggles. This includes focusing on activity goals, such as daily client interactions, as well as developing psychological toughness.

“All they have to do is keep meeting more people, even if they are not closing deals,” she said. “Everybody has doubts at some point in time. As long as they are aiming to meet one or two clients per day, they are going to come out victorious.”

Targeted prospecting

Another way to protect production in unpredictable times is to turn to referrals to source potential new clients. Although this strategy is common across financial services — referrals account for as much as 30% of Kolencherry's agency’s production already — it assumes even greater importance when cold calls and social media marketing yield lower returns than normal.

“We ensure the team members fosters strong relationship with existing clients and partners to increase referral likelihood,” she said.

The strategy Kolencherry uses is based on the cultivated target market. She said the Middle East is a highly competitive market, with many banks, brokers and financial institutions selling similar products. Agencies must specialize to succeed, and her advisers have found unique success catering to clients who are immigrants.

Maintain a long-term perspective

Perhaps the best advice Kolencherry has for stressed advisers is to look to the future. Whatever is happening in the present is unlikely to continue indefinitely. Many financial products are meant to be held over long periods of time, and there is always going to be volatility in the short term.

“We don’t provide financial solutions for the short term,” she said. “Our financial solutions extend for 10 or 15 years in the future.”

Even situations that were catastrophic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, showed few lasting effects from a financial services perspective, Kolencherry said.

“COVID had a financial market impact spanning over just three or four months,” she said. “One shouldn’t have to be worried about what happens on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. All you have to do is stay invested in the market, because you’re trying to build wealth overtime. It is a game of patience and discipline.”

As for her advisers, Kolencherry reminds them that her own success is tied closely to theirs.

By balancing diversification strategies, emotional support, targeted prospecting and a steadfast long-term outlook, leaders can guide their teams through market turbulence and toward better days.

The article was first published in MDRT - Center for Field Leadership