Bob Veres and Spenser Segal provided advisors with great ideas last Friday about communicating with clients through the recent market turbulence, as our second “crisis communication” webinar played to a growing audience. My presentation, quite honestly, was not great, but I learned a valuable lesson that will make future webinars better.

With the global financial crisis grinding on, about 200 financial advisors attended the webinar, the second in our series about crisis communication with clients. Ending another week of wild market swings, the 4 p.m., Friday session delivered well-timed messages.

Spenser Segal began the webinar with advice about how advisors can apply “the four Rs” to guide crucial conversations with nervous clients. The “Four Rs” concept has been espoused by Doug Lennick, managing partners of The Lennick Aberman Group and co-author of Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance And Leadership Success. By adopting a deliberate four-stage process— recognizing, reflecting, reframing, and then responding—advisors communicate more effectively with an emotional client, Segal said. Segal is CEO of ActiFi and a contributor to AdvisorBlogCentral.

Bob Veres, editor Inside Information, a practice management newsletter for advisors with1,500 subscribers , spoke about the emotional angst many advisors are feeling as a result of the crisis. Regulatory agencies that have limitless resources and are responsible for monitoring financial markets failed understand the risk of credit default swaps, underestimated the impact of the failure of Lehman Bros., misjudged the cost of bailing out AIG, and stood by passively as Wall Street brokerages leveraged their capital to unprecedented levels, Veres said. “If those people, with greater access to information than any of us, were taken totally by surprise by the meltdown,” Veres said, “why should you expect more of yourself?” Veres reviewed letters written to clients by some of his subscribers, giving attendees concrete tips for crisis communication.

I began my presentation by using the webinar polling tool. I wanted to provide instant analysis about how advisors have been holding up in the crisis. Unfortunately, it wasn’t instant enough. Though many attendees generously praised my effort in a post-webinar evaluation, I was embarrassed about my performance when I watched a replay of the session. I failed to realize that attendees would be bored while waiting for the poll results to be displayed. I apologize to those in attendance and will not make that mistake again.

Happily, the poll results were indeed revealing, however. In a post Sunday, I highlighted the findings, which provides hard data about how the global financial crisis has affected advisors.

I am arranging another webinar at 4 p.m. EDT, Friday, October 24, and shortly will let you know who the speakers will be for that the session.

Email me at agluck@advisorproducts.com to receive an invitation to this and future webinars.

View the webinar (it starts playing after it's 10% downloaded) by clicking here: View the October 17 webinar with Bob Veres and Spenser Segal (Edited to exclude my polling fiasco.)

Download Bob Veres's slides: Veres_CrisisWebinarSlides.pdf (1.29 mb)

Download Spenser Segal's slides: SpenserSegalSlides.pdf (546.20 kb)