Nick Murray’s Scripts

Nick Murray's Scripts replaces Behavioral Investment Counseling (2008), which remains available as an eBook. Scripts incorporates all the material in BIC -- and very much more -- but organizes it in a completely different fashion.

In Scripts, I’ve collected the most effective ways I’ve ever found to express the critical truths investment advisors most often need to get across, and have stated those truths in the simplest and most direct language. Still, the powerful statements and responses to questions/objections offered in this book will not prevail unless they’re impelled by your most fundamental beliefs. Technique, unsupported by passionate conviction, is merely an attempt at manipulation, at “making the sale.” That’s why the very next thing you’ll read is a recitation of the bedrock beliefs upon which the scripts are built. Moreover, you will find each script and response accompanied by the specific principle that drives it. Again, those principles will be stated in the fewest possible words. Because the whole focus of this book is not what to think, but what to say, and exactly how to say it.

A number of the scripts in this book have been collected from my previous books, including some that are no longer in print. Many others originally appeared in my monthly newsletter for advisors, Nick Murray Interactive, which I launched in 2001. All these have been refreshed, updated and sharpened. Still others are entirely new. The whole rationale for this book is to save advisors from having to scratch around among the million-plus words I have in print to find exactly the right script for the occasion.

More than 50 years in this potentially noblest of professions have convinced me that, in the end, the messenger is the message. People rarely buy the plan; instead, they almost always buy the planner. The ability to speak and write to clients warmly, clearly and compellingly is therefore to be prized above all the other arrows in the advisor’s quiver. My goal in this book is that you never have to struggle to find the right words, ever again.

—Nick Murray