Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Julie Littlechild: Now in today’s conversation you are going to learn a whole range of things but in particular there were a few things that I thought were really important. First, you’ll talk about how to train your clients to be better referral sources, what to say to clients to get them to describe you in a more compelling fashion and why your niche should be the first thing you say when someone asks you what you do and with that, let’s go and hear from Steve Wershing. Steve, welcome. So good to talk to you today. Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: So the first thing you can do is to let people know that you’re looking for more clients but more importantly what you can do is you can let them know specifically who you’re looking for, what’s the description of the person and this is where you need to get beyond just the simple demographics. You need to let people know what kinds of problems you’re really good at solving. You need to let people know what kinds of things you do that are the most valuable so that when they hear their friends say that, they’ll say oh, you know, I was just talking with my advisor the other day and he was telling me that he does exactly that. So you have a great story actually about having lunch with some of your girlfriends and somebody talking about a family member recently passing away. That’s actually a great illustration of what we’re talking about. Do you remember that story? Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: She’s in a position of going to centers of influence and to say listen, we don’t want all of your clients but if you’ve got a woman in this situation, we’re your firm and 75% of their new referrals come from centers of influence. I mean how many advisors would like to get more referrals from centers of influence. Well, she’s figured it out and the way it is, they that she did it was to develop the process, talk about specifically the kinds of problems that people bump into that they have to get themselves through, and to then communicate that clearly and succinctly to clients and centers of influence so that when they come across that issue so when that accountant or that attorney has people coming through the office and one of them comes in and presents that kind of situation, they’ll say oh, this is what Evelyn was talking about. So they think of her at the right time and they can facilitate an introduction between that client of theirs and Evelyn’s firm. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: So if you’re going out and describing your target market to your clients and to your centers of influence, that’s a good start but it’s not really where you need to go. What you need to do is to briefly describe the target market but then in more detail talk about what your niche is, what portion of that target market you’ve got something special for. If people don’t know where to start on this, one great place is to look up Simon Sinek on the TED.com site and look at his TED talk or to read his book, Start with Why. He does a brilliant job of talking not about what you do or the description of your product or the description of your service but he talks about the why behind what they do and about two-thirds of the way through his talk, he does a brilliant job of taking a set top box, cable kind of machine and taking one of their real ads and reading it and saying what do you think? How powerful is that and everybody is like oh, that sounds like an engineer describing his machine which it is and he says well, how about if you do it this way? If you’re the kind of person who wants to be totally in control of every aspect of your life and what you watch and when you want to watch it and blah, blah, blah, he goes on with the rest of it, we’ve got something for you. That’s the niche. That’s how you describe the niche is if you’re this kind of a person, if you’re seeking this, if you’re looking for this kind of thing, if you’ve been dissatisfied about that kind of thing before, we’ve got something for you and that takes a little bit of work because it takes more than if you’re looking for a trusted advisor, if you’re looking for somebody you can place your trust in, if you’re looking for somebody to coordinate all of these things, that’s not going to do it because that’s just too general. But if you can get really specific about your why, then you can figure out your niche and communicating your niche is a big part of training your clients because once you’ve talked to them about that and you’ve provided stories to illustrate that niche and you’ve shared with them real life experiences of how you’ve changed people’s situations, now they get it. Now they’ve got the tools and so when somebody describes a similar situation to that, then it’s more likely that the light bulb will go off and they’ll say ‘oh’. Just like you were talking about with going out to brunch with the girls, it’s ‘oh, I was just talking with somebody’ or ‘yeah, you know just a few months ago my advisor described exactly what you just described. You really need to talk with him.’ Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: It’s getting it straight in the first place and there’s a real possibility, even a likelihood that there’s no ‘there’ there, as they say in pogo or wherever it was that you may have a totally undifferentiated, totally un-niched kind of practice where you do a general kind of work for a general kind of client. If you look out at your clients and you’ve got this mix of all different kinds of people and all different ages and all different industries and you solve the most general kinds of problems for folks, you’ve got some work to do first. But for a lot of advisors, they actually do have some area of specialty. They have some area of focus. They have something about their service that differentiates them from other folks. They just don’t talk about it very well. There was an advisor that I worked with in Atlanta and he’s been very gracious because I mentioned him as an — I would never mention him by name but I’ve used his example and he called me six months after I started doing this thing. Yeah, I’m that guy, aren’t I? Yeah, yeah, you are. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: So the first thing to do is to script it out and one of the first things that we work on with advisors is to develop what we call a positioning statement, what we used to call an elevator speech but to script that out into a positioning statement and then test it on people. First, test on your family, test it on your staff, teach your staff how to say it. Work it until it becomes conversational, until it doesn’t sound stiff or forced or that kind of thing. Then one of the easiest activities you can do is to take it to your clients and this is something we do systematically with everybody is we develop it and then we say now listen, for the for the next month every client meeting you have, this is what I want you to say, hey, before we get started, I wanted to ask you a favor. We’re working with a coach to learn how to better articulate what we do here and what really makes us different and what I’d like to do is to try it out on you and just to get your feedback on how it sounds and invariably they’ll say sure, two minutes, why not. And you do it at the beginning of the appointment by the way, not at the end because at the end they’re all burned out. They’ve got to get to their next thing, you’ve got to get to your next thing so do it at the beginning while everybody’s fresh and nobody’s in a hurry. Then you read them your positioning statement and you can ask them a couple questions. How did that sound? Does that reflect accurately your experience with us? Does that describe well what you think makes us different? So you’ve got two things there. One is you’re getting feedback which is really important because we have had some test badly. We have had — one advisor I can remember specifically. We worked out what he thought made him different. We worked on the language a little bit. I thought it sounded great. He went out to his best clients and they all said well, no, not really. In fact, that sounds a little condescending. Thank goodness we tested it because the last thing we’d want to do is to go out and talk to real life prospects and turn them off. So first, you’re trying to get feedback but then the second thing is you’re giving them that language. You’re teaching them that and it’s not just saying it to them and hoping that they’ll remember it. By asking questions about it, you’re forcing them to deal with it. You’re doing what I call owning a piece of the client’s brain and by forcing them to deal with it, ‘does that accurately reflect your experience of us, was that a good way of describing why you think we’re different’, you’re forcing them to deal with the material, to process the material, and that drives it further into their brain so it’s more likely when they bump into somebody, they’ll say oh, I was just talking with my advisor about this. That’s the first thing. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: What I like to do is to have advisers ask their clients that question. They probably hear that back and then you can respond with ‘great, that’s very helpful. Thanks for sharing that with us. You know one of the other things I’m always so excited to tell people about is…’ and then you describe your differentiator. So you’re giving them the language and teaching them the language but you’re doing it subversively. You’re doing it in a way where you’re not sitting down and saying this is what I would rather you say. This is how you should talk about me. But you’re just sort of sneaking in there and just relaying your enthusiasm about it and that’s contagious. When you’re enthusiastic about it, people will pick up on it and they’ll internalize it themselves. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: One of the best ways of doing that is to teach people whether they’re in your target or not who your target is so that they can refer only appropriate people. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: So when we designed our process graphic, we had a whole bunch of steps and started with setting mutual expectations and then defining the goals and two or three steps in, it just says ‘buckets’. And the whole idea there is to get people to ask a question like what is this buckets thing mean and invariably people do and it gives them the opportunity to say well, one of the exercises that we do with clients is to… and they go on to describe it because we know that all of our clients respond to it really strongly and like it a lot. Giving somebody the opportunity to discover something, giving them the thrill of discovery is way better than you just rambling on and on, oh and by the way, this is one of the exercises we take people through. Just show them the graphic and let them discover it. Let them ask about it. Now it’s a conversation, it’s not a presentation. Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: END OF RECORDING
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, the founder of Absolute Engagement.com and today I’m really thrilled to be talking to my co-host Steve Wershing. Steve is a coach to advisors on clarifying their target market, articulating their niche, and designing communication strategies that really help to bring in more referrals, more referrals than they’ve ever had before. He has an amazing book called Stop Asking for Referrals which was published by McGraw Hill and has been called one of the best marketing books in the financial planning industry. He’s also a founding partner along with yours truly of the Third Wave Collaborative which is a consortium of industry leaders engaged in uncovering the new fundamentals in the profession of financial advice. He’s a top-rated speaker and acclaimed coach and a pretty good West Coach swing dancer which not everybody knows.
Good to talk to you. I’m very excited to work with you on this.
Absolutely. So look, today we are talking about how to train your clients to refer more effectively. So I’ve got to ask you about that word ‘train’ because I’ve trained dogs before.
Yep.
You’ve suggested we need to train our clients. What exactly do you mean by that?
Well, do your dogs refer you more frequently? Is that working out for you?
You know in fact they don’t so maybe I’m not doing a very good job at that.
No. Well, then I think you should hire me. Exactly. So yeah, obviously, our clients aren’t coming to us to get trained as much as advisors will sometimes say well, I educate my clients. That’s fine but you found in your research that our clients want to refer us and they do in fact refer us a lot more than most advisors realize. In your last survey, what was the number of people that are willing to refer or likely to refer?
Yeah, we’ve got the comfort referring and that’s upwards of 90%. So the vast majority of clients say they are in fact very comfortable referring and some say, probably 80% or so, say they’re willing.
Yeah, and a bigger number than most advisors would think are actually referring but very few of those actually get through to the advisor. Almost a third, so between a quarter and a third of your clients report that they’ve referred their advisor in the past year but it looks more like between 3% and 5% are actually getting through. So your clients are willing to refer. They’re more than happy to help you out that way. Our job and my perspective on referral marketing is it’s largely just helping the clients do it more effectively and so you can give people tools, you can give them ideas, you can suggest to them ways of describing you and what you do so that hewn they do it, when they do what they’re already doing, they do it more effectively and that’s what I mean by training.
You’re suggesting they’re motivated to do it. They want to do it. You’re really just helping them out.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay.
I’m sure we’ll talk about this in a lot of other interviews with people but I think it’s important to clarify at this point that your clients are not referring you because you want them to. They’re not referring you to give a reward. They’re not referring you because you’ve done a good job. Doing a good job, providing quality advice, generating good outcomes are all requirements of getting a referral but they’re not enough, they’re not the reason that people refer. They’re referring because they want to help a friend of theirs, because a friend has asked to be referred to an advisor, because they spotted a problem that their friend is having that they realize their advisor could do and so if we can train them to do it effectively, we’re helping them help their friend and that’s really at the root of why they’re willing to do it and why they’re willing to “get trained”.
Right, so they do want to help somebody else. Now we know that clients are comfortable referring. We’ve talked about the data. Is there something that makes a client willing to refer actually take that action from there?
Sure, and this is where the training starts coming in. To go back to that point, your clients are referring because they heard a friend describe a problem that the client recognized that their advisor could take care of. Some of the things that we need to do, some of the things that we can do to help them be more effective at that first of all is to let people know that you’re looking for more clients. There are quite a few advisors who come across as so busy, so successful and that’s one trap that you can fall into is if you come across as always so busy, so jammed up, so successful, your clients will think well, they’re at capacity, they don’t need any more clients, they’re doing great.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I remember being out because we go out, the girls and I, and have brunch every now and then and it struck me that although I’m in this industry, none of them have ever asked me do you know a good financial advisor. It turns out that’s not what comes up over a mimosa at brunch but one of them raised this issue of somebody had passed away and she was struggling with all the complications of dealing with that and everybody could commiserate and had a similar experience and it really struck me that that’s the referral opportunity. At that moment had I been trained so we’ve got to talk about what my advisor should have done, I could’ve jumped in and said look, my advisor deals with people who are in this situation. He can help and here’s exactly how he does that. Is that the kind of thing that you’re referring to?
Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what I’m talking about is that you don’t want to give your clients the demographic description of who you’re looking for. What you want to do is talk about the client situations that you’re really good at solving and the processes that you have for helping specific kinds of clients through specific kinds of issues. You don’t want to talk about things like your account minimums and your qualifying criteria. That’s a different topic. You want to talk about who you can help, what kind of problems you’re really good at solving, and why you are the best answer for that. If you can get people to remember you at the right time and to mention not just the fact that they have an advisor and you could do an introduction but to remember the kind of solution that they can walk in with, once you talk with that person, you can get to the qualifying stuff later. So you want to be introduced to the right people who have the kinds of problems that you’re really good at solving and then it’s a question of your onboarding process and figuring out whether or not a relationship works. But what you want is for your clients to be thinking of you at those times and not thinking about your eligibility criteria. You can always get to that later.
Let me get back to that word train because I think it’s an important one because it gives us something to grab onto, it makes it actionable, there’s something I can do to help my clients if I can train them. Can you give me some specifics around how you might do that? So you’ve talked about letting them know for example. How would somebody comfortably let others know that they’re open for business?
Well, there are two things I can say to that. One is being specific about who it is that you’re looking for in terms of the problems you can solve. I was doing an advisory board a few months ago for one of my clients and they were having a big event and they wanted their clients to bring people to the event to introduce to them and all advisors have clients who probably could think of somebody that they’d like to introduce to their advisor and they were asking the advisory board well, how can we help you invite people, how can we make it easier for you to bring people to us? One of them asked well, who should we bring, who should we invite, and the advisor’s response to that was well, really anybody that you think we should know, anybody that you think could benefit from knowing us. I get what he was trying to do. What he was trying to do was not to force his clients to qualify people ahead of time because that’s not fair. They’re not equipped to do that but also his answer wasn’t terribly helpful because it doesn’t help them think of this firm at the right time. So let me give you a really good example of this and that’s somebody I just profiled on my blog Evelyn Zohlen who runs — you know Evelyn.
Yeah, she does great work in this area.
She has Inspired Financial in California and they work with women in transition and specifically women who are recently widowed, going through divorce or recently divorced or had an unanticipated career change relatively later on in their lives and she’s really good about describing to people who they’re looking for and so they describe the situations and then they describe the special process they’ve developed to guide people through, that’s specifically tailored to those people. They took inspiration from a number of different programs and tools out there. They got inspiration from the Sudden Money Institute. They got inspiration from Money Quotient and they built their own process. The process stresses right-brained activities that will help people navigate that kind of a change and they trained their advisors on things like listening and storytelling and those kinds of things because it will help them communicate.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Is part of the issue that so many advisors simply haven’t defined how that target is in the first place? Is that what’s tripping them up to start with?
Yeah, I think it is and one of the things that I’ve been talking about a lot recently and will probably do a lot more work in the next few months is a little point of confusion that I’ve been as guilty as anybody in perpetrating and that’s the difference between a target market and a niche. In the trades, in the articles that you read, even in some books and like I said, I’ve been as guilty as anybody of this up until about a few months ago, is they’ll use those interchangeably. They’ll use target market and niche market as the same thing and they’re not. The target market is the group of people that you’re shooting for as clients and that might include demographics, it might include stage of life, it might include income level, asset level, it might include all kinds of things like that but then what you’ve got to do is carve a niche out to appeal to a certain portion of that marketplace.
Because it’s funny. We do that with other things very naturally. Oh, I was on this website you should read. I saw this book. I read this article. We do this all the time and yet it’s not ‘I’ve got an actual person who can help you’. I mean if we try to unpack that a little, we’re talking about training your clients but it almost sounds like you’re training yourself a little first. I couldn’t go to a personal trainer if he knew nothing about how to lift weights. So does it start with you and what you’re trying to accomplish?
You know it’s funny because you mentioned training puppies before and we used to have a Golden Retriever and as soon as we were able, we took him to class that he’d be obedient and we could take them on trips and things. One of the first things the instructor said was look, you’re not training the dog. You’re training you. The dog knows how to sit. The dog knows how to lie down. You don’t have to teach it that. You have to teach yourself how to be consistent in your communication, to clearly communicate what it is you want them to do. They have a limited vocabulary so you can’t just talk in narrative form to them and so it does start with training you and one of the reasons for that is that for many advisors, it’s just not even clear in their head. It’s not a matter of communicating it more succinctly.
Got you.
I met him at an event and said tell me a little bit about what’s special about your practice, what’s different about you, and what he said was well, we work with accredited investors and we really focus specifically on using these tax-based special programs that are only available to those kinds of folks but the fact is that they require a lot of research. They’re not well-publicized and we spent a lot of our time learning about these things and so that puts us in a position of being able to introduce to our target clients the kinds of programs that 99% of advisors never even hear about and I said that’s amazing. That really sounds great. So let me ask you, if you were to bump into somebody at a cocktail party for the first time and they said what do you do, what do you say and he says I’m a financial advisor.
Kind of missed the point.
Exactly. It’s like because you don’t want to attract clients? I don’t understand and then as soon as I said that, of course he got it and then so we worked a little bit on really just teaching him to say to new people what he said to me because I was asking him a more specific question but people don’t know to do that. All they know to ask is so what do you do or how do you help people and so you need to lead with that, lead with the niche even if it’s a small portion of the financial plan that you do, even if it’s a small portion of your whole collection of services. If you hook them with the niche, if they’re in your target market, and they’re attracted that niche, you’ll get a chance to talk about the rest of the stuff but if you start with the general stuff, you may never get the chance to talk to these specific issues that you’re really good at. If you ever want to shutdown conversation at a cocktail party, just say I’m a financial advisor.
Fair enough.
The next comment you’re going to hear from the person you’re talking to is oh, look at those hors d’oeuvres or where’s the bar? So you start with the really interesting thing and then you can broaden out from there. It does start with you to answer your question in an extremely long-winded way. It starts with you and when you can start learning how to talk about what’s different, maybe you have to develop what’s different but once you’ve done that and you can start talking about it, that’s the first step in training your clients. You train yourself to have that discipline on how to articulate that differentiator and once you do that, you will be teaching the language to the client and that’s what I mean by training is you’re not going to put them through a six-step program but it’s giving them the language, giving them the tools, teaching them what to say subversively almost, just modeling that language, and then they can then repeat it to other people.
Okay. Let’s assume I’ve done the hard work of figuring out my niche or at least it’s a portion of my business, I have found a way to comfortably talk about the problems that I solve. Now I’m feeling uncomfortable. What do I do with that information? How do I actually start that conversation in a way that doesn’t make me sound a bit silly or scripted?
Sure, exactly. The best way not to sound scripted as to script it out.
Well, ironically.
Yeah, counter-intuitively. People will say I don’t do scripts well, I don’t want to sound forced, and that kind of stuff. Listen, think of the best actors you know, think of the Meryl Streep’s and the Dustin Hoffman’s, and the favorite people and think of the roles that were most powerful, think of the performances that really moved you, and then remember, they didn’t write those words. They read other people’s words and then they memorized them. Now true and I’ve heard this from advisors so I will anticipate it, oh, I’m not Meryl Streep, I’m not Brad Pitt. Well, true but it’s worth learning from them just like if you want to get good in the gym, you can look to Olympian athletes. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be an Olympian but we look to them because they’re the best at it.
That’s awesome. That’s such a great tactic because it’s authentic, you’re in a way — you know I talk a lot about co-creation of value and in a way you’re co-creating with your clients because they will help you tweak that and you’re legitimately looking. It’s not like you’re trying to manipulate the situation. You legitimately want that feedback. Love it.
Exactly, exactly. You’re speaking persuasively. The other thing that I love to do is to ask clients how they describe you now and so another exercise you can do with your clients is ‘hey, let me just ask you this because we’re trying to get better about how we communicate what we do. So let me ask you if a friend were to come by and ask you about your relationship with us and what it’s like to work with us and who we are, what would you say?’ They’re probably going to say what most clients say which accounts for the spread between the third that recommend you every year and the 3% that actually walk in the door is they’ll probably give you a response like ‘oh, well, what I usually say is that we love working with Julie and she’s been great for us and she gives us good service and she calls us back on time and our portfolio’s done pretty well.’ Well, that’s fine, it’s accurate, it’s positive, not powerful, and it’s the same exact thing they’re going to hear from all their other friends.
Absolutely. Let’s assume I go through this process, I’m meeting with my clients. Couple of questions on that. First of all, am I having that conversation with every client or am I choosing the people who are in that niche?
Yeah, well, that’s a great question and it’s a question I get from a lot of advisors. My feeling as you say it to everybody. Now you want to specifically say it to the people who are in that target market but you also want to teach the people who may not necessarily be quite in your target market who you’re looking for because one of the big challenges that advisors have is sometimes they get referrals and they get them seldom enough so they’re really excited to get them but they get people outside their target and you don’t want to take those people. You’re going to have to overcome all of those urges that came from the early days in the business when you only ate what you killed. You need to get past that and not take people in your target.
Right, right. Can you have more than one target market?
You can but from my perspective it waters things down. I know several advisors who have multiple target markets and work in multiple niches and they’ve made a success out of it but from a marketing standpoint as a professional marketer, if you’re looking to establish a better reputation, whenever anybody talks with you, whenever people open their mouths in public about you, you want them all to be saying the same thing otherwise you get — a big point these days because things are changing so much with social media and the Internet and those kinds of things, referrals aren’t made like they used to be. It used to be back before the Internet, back before all that stuff happened, your client would meet a friend at a party and they would describe something and your client would say oh, you should really talk to my advisor and the friend would say well, how do I get hold of her and so they would say well, here’s her card, here’s her number. Give her a call and they would call and then you’d talk and then it’s your game to lose but that’s not how it happens anymore. Today we have the Google effect. Now your client goes to a party and the friend says something that triggers a memory and so your client refers you and the first thing they’re going to do is go home and search you on Google and if the stuff on your homepage does not match the stuff your client said, you’re done, you’re over. They’re going to go to somebody else and so if you have multiple markets, multiple niches, it makes that vastly more complicated.
Got it, got it. Makes sense. The other thing that I wanted to ask you is we’ve talked to all of our clients as we’ve gone through this great exercise. It’s probably generated some referrals. What about after that? How do I find a comfortable way to reinforce this message over time?
Well, there are a number of ways that you can do that. One is to master a number of client stories. These are client stories you could put in your newsletter, you could tell people about, you could pass around, and if they illustrate the differentiator, if they illustrate what’s really separate about you, that’s one great way of doing it. Another way is to have educational programs that focus on that differentiator and related ones to generate content. So write articles for the newspaper, write articles for magazines, post things to your blog, those kinds of things but don’t post general messages, don’t write articles about — there’s one advisor I’m working with who is really struggling with getting this idea. He’s got a PR firm that helped him place articles and the articles that he writes are typically about here’s the state of the market, everybody should have a savings plan, and everybody should have this kind of thing in their financial plan. He’s got a specialty, he’s got a niche but he’s not talking to it. He’s not writing about it. He’s writing about general things. When you generate content, when you hold an educational program, do it about something that relates to your niche, to your differentiator. That’s one of the best ways of driving that home. If people keep hearing messages that reinforce this is what special, this is what’s different, this is what makes me unique, if you hear it four or five different ways, the idea will sink in a lot more effectively.
Okay, love it. Yeah, people are hearing your message from so many different ways. We do forget about that.
Exactly.
Look, couple more questions for you. Let’s assume like a lot of advisors, I’m getting some referrals. If I’m doing good work, I’m going to be getting some referrals but I really think that I’m missing some opportunities. What are the three things you think I should do to start?
Well, the first thing is make sure you’ve got a niche, make sure you’ve got a differentiator, and make sure that you can communicate it in a way that’s compelling, that actually separates you from other folks. As a sidebar, it’s probably not an investment strategy unless you’ve got something really weird, unless you’ve got something really different, your investment strategy won’t do it and we can talk lots more about that. Consistent feedback from client advisory boards, the investment angle is not the way to go. So figure out what your differentiator is. Work to articulate it and articulate it in a powerful way that really zeroes in on what makes you different. You’ll get a chance to talk about the rest and then craft that into a compelling positioning statement and the way that we construct them, we can put something up on the site that shows the construction of a positioning statement. There are three parts to it and each part has a separate role and one is a gateway to the next so you can be actively engaging people while you’re saying it. Then check it out with all the clients who come in, all the prospects who come in. Sit down with your centers of influence and test it on them, tell it to them and that’s where it really starts. That’s the best place to start refining that.
So great as a process. Is there one thing beyond what you’ve just said that you think advisors can do to get more people talking about them or is it doing those three things?
It starts with those three things. There’s a lot that you can build around it but it really starts with those three things. You can do things like having a process that includes those unique aspects in it so when you describe your process, you’re not just talking about the CFP financial planning process, you’re not talking about first we have a discovery meeting and then we have recommendations and then we do implementation. That doesn’t tell people anything. You can develop a graphic that illustrates your process because people remember pictures better than they remember words and whenever we do a process graphic, we always put a couple little Easter eggs in there that are specifically designed at get people to ask a question. For example, one advisor I worked with, we found out from their advisory board — we were taking their process apart and one of the things we found from the advisory board was that they do this one particular illustration that everybody related to really well and what they do is they separate the portfolio into different buckets and the buckets correspond roughly to timeframes so short-term, intermediate-term, long-term. A lot of advisors use buckets and it’s not terribly unique however what we noticed was that everybody was really excited about that particular exercise that they took the people through and they said once she did this with me, I got it. I totally understood what she was doing. I totally understood why she was doing these things with my portfolio and why they were pulling together all my accounts and showing them to me this way.
Love it, love it. Some great ideas, Steve. Thank you so much for sharing those thoughts with us today.
Thank you. Thanks for talking with me about it so long.
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