Can you answer these two questions?
Who are you helping your clients become?
What change do you help create?
Do these questions confuse or trouble you? Are you searching for an answer by looking to the services you provide?
The service is what you offer. The experience is how you do it. But who your client becomes AFTER is what you do. The outcome is the consequence of your client knowing you and being under your care.
What are the consequences of being your client?
Think about the difference between a manager boss and a leader boss.
The best boss you ever had helped you become a better you.
Every other boss you ever had was a manager.
Who was worth more to the company you worked for?
Who brought the intangibles?
Would your clients tell me that you’re a manager or a leader?
Are you doing something or saying something?
Do you answer questions or create them?
Financial advisors that help people invest, increase and protect assets are doing the assigned work. But financial advisors who do all of the assigned work but also focus on the required work – helping their clients achieve their personal, individual aspirations – are even better.
Assigned work always competes on price.
Required work, surprising work and generous work, doesn’t.
Advisors who focus on outcomes enjoy their work more and earn more money. They have fewer bad days. They have more fun and meet more clients through referrals. You can’t argue this.
Do these four things and become one of them:
Niche Niche Weird
Create something for the smallest viable audience. Namely, people who care. Challenge yourself: what is the consequence of knowing you? Where do you guide people? What inspires you? If I knew you long enough, what would you teach me?
Any negotiating you do on this point will doom you.
Create a Client Journey
Experiences are staged on exceptional service. So make sure your entire client journey is created and considered. A framework that we often use with our clients to help them ‘see’ this is the 3-Act Play. It’s a simple map to follow to ensure that the experience is cohesive.
Make it Real
The outcome(s) will have little to do with the products and services you sell. What did they tell you their outcomes were? How can you make it real? What can you send them to read? How can you help them get started?
Imagine sending a new or existing client this note …
Dennis, you mentioned that this work we are doing together is critically important to you and that it had been bothering you for some time, you said specifically you didn’t want to feel like you were wasting anymore time. To that end, I’ve sent you this …
Show your client that you are committed to the same outcomes.
Measure and Share
When you get together for reviews or service calls, make sure you get an update and share results. Are they doing more of what they wanted? Are they shifting? Can they feel it? What’s next?
I met an advisor a few years ago who made his whole business about changing human behaviour. He told people he could make his clients happier. He used all kinds of stats that he told me he got for free from a fund company, and part of the promise he made was that he could decrease the number of arguments clients would have in the course of their lives, regarding money/finances, by 34%.
He was in the business of guiding people to be happier couples.
Thanks for reading, liking and sharing.
Comments