Jordan starts by talking about the four stages of the buyers journey and translates that to the strategies that advisors can use to usher leads through the buyers journey. He also talks about the importance of achieving the “flip” with new prospect.

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends, and welcome to Elementality, A show where financial advisors explore modern and relevant client journeys.

I am Jordan Haines, and today we’re gonna talk about the buyer’s journey. We’re gonna talk about it in two ways. One is from the client’s perception, and two is from our services. So think, demand, and supply. Let’s start first by articulating the buyer’s journey on the demand side. You’ve probably heard this before.

I’ve talked about this, especially at the beginning of this year when I was steeped in the Four Conversations by Blair Ends and Demand Side Sales by Bob mea. We’re gonna marry the two of those today and talk about how you. Financial advisors can take this and create a really meaningful buyer’s journey.

Let’s talk about the demand side. This, I want you to imagine this is generally the process that your clients go through, your prospects or your leads go through in order to make a buying decisions regardless of your intervention. This is what they typically go through. Now, again, I’m making broad generalizations here.

This is not scientific. This is just an observation and based off of some interesting reading from the, these, uh, categories are actually, I’m pulling from demand side sales, so let’s talk about them. There are four categories. And I’ll give you a brief summary of them and we’ll dive in a little bit deeper.

The four categories are number one, and they’re sequenced. Number one is first thought. This is the first time your clients or prospects realize maybe they have a problem or they have a need, or they need to make progress in their life. Typically, this happens because of a catalyst event, something happens that causes them to think, oh.

I need to do something about this. Lemme give you an example of this. Um, one of the firms I work with currently, the main job that their clients come to them for. Most new prospects come to them because they have liquidity, excess liquidity, and they’re in the middle of their career and they’re wondering, what do I do with this?

So that’s the catalyst event, is they now have that liquidity. Their first lot is when they, or their first thought is when they see that and realize I need to do something about this. Okay, so that’s the first stage of the buyer’s journey. The second stage is passive looking. I describe this as like if, if first thought is realizing I have a problem, passive looking is when I’m trying to understand and fully scope out what that problem actually is.

First thought is where I notice symptoms. Passive looking is where I draw a straight line from those symptoms to a core diagnosis. So that’s what’s happening in passive looking. I mean, typically, I mean, it’s in the word, right? So someone who’s passively looking for something, they’re not actively looking for a solution, they’re just kind of noticing different solutions.

Really what they’re trying to do is round out and understand what their actual problem is. Okay, that’s passive looking, active looking. On the other hand, let’s start from just the standpoint of what the words mean, right? You’re actively looking for a solution, and that’s really what’s happening here.

Ideally, someone moves from passive looking to active looking when they fully understand and can diagnose what is actually causing the problem. They know what problem they’re trying to solve for with the progress they’re trying to make in their life, and now they’re out there looking for solutions.

That’s what’s happening in active looking. We’re looking for solutions. And then the final one, the final stage of the buyer’s journey is deciding, and this is where we take those solutions and we start to make trade-offs. We start to say, Hey, here are the top two or three options. Here’s why I might work with one or the other.

We’re trying to make those trade-offs, and ultimately we decide to hire someone or not hire someone or do it ourselves. We are making our decision for a solution. So let me do a quick summary there. You have first thought, which is all about recognizing there is a problem. It’s noticing symptoms. Passive looking is when we are diagnosing those symptoms, we’re trying to connect and do some pattern recognition and understand what exactly are we solving for.

Active looking is when we are actually looking for different solutions. We are looking at the full landscape in active looking. And then finally deciding is when we make trade-offs. This is the buyer’s journey. Now, of course, this isn’t. Doctrinal truth. This isn’t, uh, explains how the world works. It’s a framework meant to help us understand what our clients go through.

So let’s shift from the demand side to the supply side.

This is where we actually do something about this buyer’s journey. The supply side is how we usher people through their buyer’s journey. From first thought to passive looking to active looking, and then ultimately to deciding. Now I’m gonna be again, ultimately simplistic. I am no marketing expert. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and this is meant to be a framework that you can apply.

So please, if you disagree with me, that’s totally fine. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send us an email podcast@getelements.com. Basically, let’s think about this in three ways. You have lead generation, which is all about encouraging per uh, first thought and being there when people are passively looking.

Lead generation is just finding new people to listen to you. You don’t have their trust yet. They don’t see you as an expert yet, but you are just finding those new people. The second is lead nurturing. Sometimes people refer to this as the funnel. That’s how I kind of think about this. This is typically where we see like, oh, you have a top of funnel versus a middle funnel versus bottom of funnel activity.

This is where we are bringing people through the trust funnel, if that’s what we wanna call it. We are trying to achieve the flip, which I’ll talk about here at the end of this show. And then finally, you have sales. Right, so think about it this way. Lead generation is where we’re trying to capture first thought, lead nurture is when we are moving people from passive looking to active looking, and then ultimately to deciding.

And sales is where we convert new clients. The purpose of each, if I were to attach a question to these lead nurturing is lead generation is when we ask where do we find new people? Where do we broadcast this? How do we, where do we go to find and get the word out? Lead nurturing is how do we prove our expertise?

How do we achieve the flip? And sales is how do we convert new clients? Now, I could spend hours talking to you about sales. I could spend a long time. Exploring all the best lead generation strategies. And I know that those are probably top of mind for a lot of you here, but we’re not gonna talk about that today.

The reason I am going through this buyer’s journey is, ’cause I was asked recently by an advisor, you know, what the best lead nurturing strategies are? Like what? What’s the point? Right? Like, should we do a webinar? Should we create a podcast? Should we write a newsletter? Um, should we go do seminars and educational events?

And I find myself asking, well, what’s the point? Why are you trying to do that? What’s your objective in doing those things? I’ve asked that for myself as well as I’ve gone out and tried my own, uh, hand in a few places. At the end of the day, in my mind, the purpose of lead nurturing, the purpose of your funnel is to increase trust and accomplish what Blair ends titles.

The flip and the flip in, in his book, the Four Conversations. The flip is that point at which people no longer see you as a vendor. But they then see you as an expert and experts need to be trusted. So lemme talk about the definition of those two things. The vendor is someone who’s commoditized. They compete on price.

Right. So typically in the past, uh, in our industry, we think about like investment management as a commoditized service. Someone who’s just fully leaning into that would be considered a vendor, right? Fidelity, all of those, uh, shops. Whereas an expert is someone who is trusted for who they are and what their expertise is, and are, people are willing to listen to them.

I mean, essentially as financial advisors, if you offer real financial advice as your core service offering. Then you need to be seen as an expert because what you are delivering to each person is somewhat different. You are being creative, you’re offering a creative service to people, and in order to do that, you need to be an expert.

Now, we can get into, um, if you go read his book, you’ll, you’ll see that he’s probably on the extreme end of. Don’t, uh, document anything, right? Keep it all. I mean, he has these frameworks and, and, uh, things like that. But if you go read his book, pricing Creativity, it’s very much on the, like, everyone should be priced differently.

You can’t create consistency in your pricing. I’m not advocating for that. Really, what I am advocating for is in your marketing, in your lead, nurturing, your lead generation, your sales, your buyer’s journey. I think your objective during this whole thing is to achieve the flip. The flip is the point at which people no longer see you as a vendor and they now see you as an expert.

And if you can do that, at least in my personal experience, doing something of this nature that is the best way to usher people from first thought to passive looking to active looking, and then ultimately to making those trade-offs in a sales conversation. I think in the future, we’ll get into these sales conversations later, but I wanted to share that with you.\

Um, kind of a consolidation of a lot of different models that we presented in the show. Again, if you disagree with me, please feel free to reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H-A-I-N-E-S, or you can email podcast@getelements.com. But with that, my friends, we’ll see you next week. I.