In these tough economic times, communication with clients and prospects gets more difficult—and becomes more important than ever. Conversations can be fraught with emotions, resistance and suspicion. How do you set expectations, answer objections and overcome resistance when the other parties are frequently feeling financial pain?

It helps to use your tools—and humankind's single greatest tool is communication. Every communication is two conversations, one verbal and the other nonverbal, the body language. To be a great communicator, you must pay close attention to both.

All Aboard

Let's start with content. Think of each communication with clients or potential clients as a chance to lead an audience on a decision-making journey. If you do it right, you're going to take them to the place you want them to go—to stay the course, change their investment mix or to remain with your firm instead of the one down the street.

Begin by doing your homework. Has your audience lost money recently? What's going right and wrong for them? What is their current position? Of course, you may already know this. If not, the quickest way to find out is to ask. That's easy in a one-to-one conversation, but a little harder with an audience of 100.

But it's hardly an impossible goal. You have a general idea, given the current economic circumstances, and you can quickly check your assumptions with a few pointed questions. Once you know something about where the audience stands, you're ready to take the audience on the journey.

There are five steps to the decision process. The first is to get the audience's attention. There are a variety of ways to do that:

• Ask a direct question, such as, "How many of your investments made money last quarter?"
• Give a startling statistic, such as, "Do you realize that, in the last quarter, more than $3 trillion of net worth in this country has evaporated?"
• Tell a well-focused, two- or three-minute story relating to your chosen subject.

The point is to frame the ensuing discussion in terms that will set up the points you want to make and the journey you want to embark on. The story, when well told, is the best way to proceed because the human mind remembers stories best.

Just don't ramble or exceed the three minutes, because you will lose your audience and never get them back. Tell stories they way they're told in the Bible, not like your Uncle Ned, who tells stories like this: "Last Wednesday—or was it Tuesday—no, it was Wednesday because I was wearing my bowling shoes, and I always bowl on Wednesday. So anyway, last Wednesday, I was on my way to bowling, when my car broke down and I had to pull over by the side of the road. It was where Route 63 meets the Pike—you know the place? Where the old Dairy Queen used to be?"

You can hardly wait for Uncle Ned to stop talking, right? Good stories are brief, have an emotional component and just a few telling details. They're also relevant and they frame what's coming next.

Once you have adequately framed the discussion, you then need to get the audience ready to change its mind. To be successful, you've got to make them uncomfortable with the status quo.

That means you have to talk, for about a third of the total time you have, about a problem that they have. This is the problem for which you have the solution. This is the hard part for many consultants, experts and others who are paid to solve problems. It's just constitutionally difficult for you to dwell on the problem. You can hardly wait to get to the solution, right? That is, after all, what you're an expert at.

As difficult as it is, however, it is essential to illustrate the problem in some detail. Changing a mind is an emotional journey, and unless the potential mind-changer has spent sufficient time wallowing in the problem, there's no way he or she is going to find the motivation to join you on the journey. So, if you've got an hour, you're going to spend about 20 to 25 minutes dwelling on the problem. Just make sure that it's one that is deeply important to the audience.

Only after you've spent this quality time with your audience can you move on to the solution. Describe the many benefits of staying the course, or moving investments over to your firm or whatever the particular case may be. What will that look like? Be as concrete as possible, because audiences generally are not very good at imagining the future on their own. You can spend anywhere from five to 10 minutes being specific about the desired future state you're pointing toward. Then you have to wrap up with a final step: You have to get the audience to do something.

Call to Action

Why is the action step important?  Several reasons. First, you've been asking your audience to be passive for the previous 43 to 53 minutes. People are not accustomed to passivity; they like to be constantly active. What's more, if you have done a good job of exploring their problem and describing an alluring solution, they have moved on another way.

Audiences begin by asking why: Why is this important? Why should I care? Now, because you've led them so well, they're asking how: How can I get started? How can I make this work for me? Leading audiences from why to how is your job—and an essential element of your success.

After that, the best way to close the presentation is to give them a little taste of the how. Action steps should be simple, nonthreatening and satisfying to perform. You might ask the audience to sign up for a seminar, give you their email addresses or do a quick financial-gap analysis—there are a thousand variations and possibilities. It's a good time for you to be creative. Just don't ask for too much and focus on getting them to do a simple task right there, before they leave the room.