What one IB saw in thirty minutes of role play
This week I ran a retention role play with an IB from the academy. I was the client: three weeks without trading and I had just asked how to withdraw my money. He knew what to do in that situation; we had read it together. And even so, two minutes in, we stopped. He didn't fail for lack of knowledge. He failed on the order things came out in.
He opened with “how's it going?”
It's the most used line in this business and the one that works least. It sounds warm, but it's asking the client to do your job: to summarise three bad weeks, to name what he feels and to decide on his own whether it's worth telling you. Almost nobody does that. Almost everybody answers “fine” and politely closes the door.
When he saw it, he said it before I did: he wasn't opening a conversation, he was passing the ball.
He explained exactly when he should have asked
The moment I said I was thinking of withdrawing, he started giving me reasons to stay. Good reasons, too. The problem is he still didn't know why I wanted to leave, so he was defending something I hadn't attacked.
We stopped there. Explaining before asking turns a conversation into an argument, and in an argument the client isn't telling you anything any more: he's answering you.
He talked about the market to someone who was talking about money
My character wasn't asking a technical question. He was saying, in other words, that he was tired. The IB answered with market context and what might happen in the coming weeks. All accurate, and none of it reached me.
The retention conversation is won before you need it
The most uncomfortable part came at the end, and he said it himself: by the time my character wrote asking about the withdrawal, that conversation had been lost for three weeks. Not because of what he said that day, but because of the days he didn't show up. Churn signals warn you early; the problem is they warn you in silence.
We ran the scene twice more. The third time wasn't perfect, but he was asking before explaining, and that changes the rest on its own. Why we do this before using it with a real client I explained here: why we practise with role play.
Do it today with a single sentence
Think of a client who has been quiet for days and write the first sentence you'd send. If it starts with “how's it going?”, delete it and write it again: this time you bring something concrete and all he has to do is say yes or no.
On why a client goes quiet in the first days —before this conversation even exists— I wrote here: Why your clients deposit and withdraw within days.
The client who's leaving: Stage 3 of the academy
In IB ACADEMY, Stage 3 works on this moment: which signals warn you early, what to do within the first 24 hours and how to open the conversation without asking the client to do your job. And we practise it live, with your own cases.
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I work with the IBs in our network so their community grows with a system, not with improvisation: attract, support, retain and organise a portfolio. Here I write about that work, with no income promises.