When working with clients, we tend to connect organically with those who are most like us. But those kindred spirits typically only represent a small portion of our overall client base.

Even if you focus on a narrow niche, such as airline pilots or anesthesiologists, each client within that niche is a unique individual. Each person has a lifetime of experiences that influence how they communicate, behave, and interact with others. And those distinctions ultimately define each of your clients’ personality styles.

Understanding your clients’ personality styles is central to your ability to provide tailored advisory services and create a more empathetic and personalized approach to financial planning. Such an understanding will empower you to craft strategies that resonate with clients on a deeper level, leading to stronger rapport, increased trust, and enhanced collaboration – and ultimately driving long-term client loyalty.

Recognizing how different personality styles influence decision-making and financial behaviors also enables you to anticipate clients’ needs and challenges, so you can go beyond a one size-fits-all approach and offer guidance that aligns with individual preferences.

Here, I’ll outline a three-step process to recognizing and understanding clients’ uniqueness so you can “flex” your communication style to suit their distinct needs and preferences.

Step 1: Conduct an audit of top clients’ personality styles.

To keep the process manageable, I recommend starting your personality style audit with the top clients in your segmentation model and enlisting your team in the effort.

Spend time with the team to understand the various personality styles of your clients and think about how they behave and communicate differently. The Practice Management experts at Janus Henderson have developed a WOW Audit that breaks personality types down into the four segments shown below.

Step 2: Use the audit to capture insights on top clients’ personality types.

Once you and your team members have assigned a personality style to each of your top clients, input the relevant details into Salesforce so everyone can view them. Be sure to continue updating and adding to the findings to capture what you and your team learns about your top clients’ expectations and the values and traits that make them unique.

Over time, you’ll gain an understanding of what each client values. The goal is to create a memorable experience for each one based on what you’ve learned.

Which brings us to step three…

Step 3: Create a WOW experience based on your client’s personality style.

With your team, discuss what each of your top clients might appreciate based on their personality style. Remember, they are all unique, so consider what they would value most when it comes to a memorable experience.

Also consider that experiences can take many different forms. I find it helpful to use the following categories when working to identify new ways to WOW clients:

• Tokens – Tangible expressions of appreciation
• Acknowledgment – Verbal or written expressions of acknowledgement or praise
• Service – Acts that show someone you care about them
• Time – One-on-one time invested in the relationship

Certain personalities will value your time or an acknowledgement more than receiving a physical gift. Below are some examples of potential experiences that are tailored to each of the personality styles identified in our WOW audit.

Driver personality

Social personality

Empathizer personality

Analyzer personality

Understanding the different personality styles of your top clients allows you to gain greater awareness of what drives their behavior and what they value most. By following a consistent and structured approach to defining and categorizing clients’ personality types, you’ll be able to cater to each client’s uniqueness, find ways to celebrate life moments, and surprise and delight them in unexpected ways. And with each WOW experience you deliver, you’re creating clients for life.

If you’re interested in completing a WOW Audit or diving deeper into this topic, reach out to your Janus Henderson sales director.