Anyone who lets clients merely watch during an advisory session has usually lost the sale before the conversation is even over. What behavioural psychology knows about decisions makes it clear: only advisors who let clients actively decide along the way keep the process moving all the way to the signature.
The most expensive sentence in a broker's office is: “Let me think it over.” A close second, and almost as worrying: “Is there perhaps another option?” Every broker and advisor knows these client replies — and they either seriously disrupt a pre-planned advisory process or prevent the sale outright.
Responses such as “I'll send you some more information” amount to capitulation. The reason is as simple as it is uncomfortable: according to the classic experiments of psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, roughly two thirds of any conversation that is not repeated is already forgotten after 24 hours. Every document sent only afterwards is fighting the client's own memory from the very first second — a fight it almost always loses.
Presenting alone is not enough
And yet many advisory processes work directly against this knowledge: the advisor presents, the client watches, one slide after another, a monologue with a shared screen. Exactly this pattern — presenting instead of involving — is the real reason advisory sessions stall and clients want to “think it over”. The problem is usually not the product, but the dramaturgy of the conversation.
Greater impact in the advisory conversation
A professionally strong advisory session that ends successfully, with a signature, with clients — online or in person — who follow the process attentively from start to finish, is significantly affected by psychological forces. Advisors can counter these effectively with three measures:
- A person's inner attitude and their behaviour depend on one another — as shown by social psychologist Daryl Bem's self-perception theory and by the generation effect described by researchers Slamecka and Graf. On the one hand, people behave in line with their attitude; on the other, they identify themselves and their inner stance through their own decisions. So if they are part of a decision-making process, they recognise themselves in the decision. Conversely, the more others have taken parts of that decision-making away from them beforehand, the less they stand behind the outcome. Involving clients closely in every single decision from the outset, and letting them walk the path to a decision rather than walking it for them, is therefore not a courtesy but a strategy.
- The later individual decisions are made in a conversation, the more negative they turn out — an effect that US social researcher Roy Baumeister and colleagues described as “decision fatigue”. On the way to the final decision, obstacles pile up: discomfort when only the advisor controls the conversation. The thought of being manipulated. Worst of all: the advisor answering questions he asked himself. A conversation structure that collects micro-commitments early on, by contrast, reverses this effect — within the client.
- People value outcomes they helped shape considerably more highly than ready-made ones — known as the IKEA effect, demonstrated experimentally by various academics (for example Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely). A client who has clicked along, played with calculators or set priorities is more convinced of their decisions than of those suggested to them by others. Mentally, they are well on the way to signing.
Interactive digital advisory needs fewer client contacts
In practice it shows: interactive communication, in which clients are themselves part of the entire advisory process and make their own decisions confidently, needs two to three times fewer contacts than an unstructured session with clients condemned to passivity. A fluid, interactive advisory process avoids breaks between media, nothing is postponed, and cross-selling happens through the system itself — not because the advisor follows up again.
This brings us inside the digital tools: a system of various tools and media that together keep the process running continuously on a single advisory platform. The basis for this is that advisor and client can work and decide interactively on the same interface, following the psychological mechanisms described above. PowerPoint cannot do this. Nor can an Excel sheet shown via screen sharing. Both show the client a result — neither lets them help build it.
Involve clients actively and let them decide
Instead of clicking through slides, advisor and client work together in real time in one and the same slide — not on two mirrored views side by side, but in the same document. Every click, every entry, every priority the client sets has an immediate effect on how the conversation continues — not only visually, but throughout the advisory logic: what the client decides determines which slide, which question and which result comes next.
Software like this is also ideal for a structured needs analysis under DIN 77230, because it allows the standard's building blocks to be adapted flexibly to the situation at hand. Clients receive many small moments of confirmation along the way, like a guide in which they confirm goals, set priorities and define wishes. Many small yeses ultimately add up to one big, stable yes.
Clients recognise their actual needs themselves
The logic behind interactive advisory: it starts not with product gaps, but with the client's motives, goals and wishes. From these emerge cross-product protection concepts — the client sees for themselves that their goal requires several building blocks. Probably including some they had not considered. Because the actual need arose from their own actions and reflections, it is non-negotiable for them. For any advisor or broker, an ideal situation.
Not least, such a digitalised advisory journey also includes the conversation being transcribed automatically and in line with the GDPR, and summarised with AI support — including concrete recommendations for the next steps. The client receives clean documentation, and the advisor is spared the follow-up work that otherwise eats up evenings and weekends.
Advice that lands
Taken together, all of this also strengthens the client relationship. Every topic is on the table. Every decision the client made is objectively justified rather than born of a gut feeling. Clients can clearly reconstruct the whole conversation and every decision — for themselves, for their partner, for friends. Precisely this ability to retell is the basis of every referral. Because a client only passes on what they have understood themselves — and what they have understood themselves, they have usually decided themselves.
© AssCompact magazine, 22 July 2026