If you are a successful adviser, or wish to become one, you need to be a good communicator. In fact some of the best investors – Buffett or Soros – both are good communicators. IN case of an IFA the ability to communicate across generations and across people with different levels of understanding, different ages, etc. is a pre-requisite for growing your profession.

If you get a 55 year old single woman as a client, and she is insecure, you may need to relax her, especially if she is a first time investor. She is very different from a 55 year old who has lost her husband – but has been an involved investor. She could be different from a housewife who is grappling with investing her husband’s life insurance proceeds.

You will have to make an asset allocation suitable for their age, and be able to explain it to her 80 year old mother and 22 year old son. It is this skill which one has to develop well.

The successful advisers that I have seen working in some of the highly complex fields though have become great by staying simple in their communications with clients and the people around them.  They are certainly not simple in their level of competence or commercial knowledge. Far far from it.  However they are basic in how they begin to approach a simple or a complex case.  They begin with simplicity, and are able to communicate the simplicity with their exemplary skills and knowledge to ensure the case remains as simple as possible for the client throughout the engagement.

The choice of words (say safety instead of risky), the diagrams, the drawings, the reduction of jargon, or saying “lemme clear the jargon first” or saying “i will give you funds but let us call it a basket for each goal”. I have seen a few of them at work who do not get into midcap, multi-cap, large and mid cap…..kinda terminology. Or explaining to the investor that it is perfectly all right for 63 year old to be in a mid cap / small cap kinda portfolio if he has a 8-10 year kinda time frame and he is doing a sip. The ability to communicate that a 9% return over 30 years creates serious wealth if the inflation during that period was 2%, and a 13% pa return is bad if inflation was 12% pa for most part of that period. However, looking for real return in the whole portfolio is the challenge, not chasing a single number.

The ability to articulate the problem and the solution comes from developing good questioning skills, and then ensuring that the client and her points of influence are all on the same page. Make sure that you carry enough paper for you to be able to draw/ write /calculate. Leaving that ‘working’ paper with the client is a very useful brand building exercise. The client is going to refer to it time and again, and thus think of the adviser whenever he needs an explanation. However, it requires some great communication skills to be able to do that. What say?