Jordan talks about the three ways financial advisors can begin to understand what their clients actually want—their core job to be done.

---

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends, and welcome to Elementality, A show where financial advisors explore modern and relevant client journeys. I’m Jordan Haines,

and today we’re going to talk about progress. Progress in our business, progress in our sales progress, in our marketing progress with our clients progress. In general, it’s my theory that progress doesn’t always have to feel like you’re banging your head against the wall. Think about walking into the wind versus walking with the wind.

Now. A few weekends ago, my wife and kids, we loaded up our minivan and headed off to our annual Hobson family reunion. That’s my wife’s family. They do this every year at a small mountain lake next to Salmon, Idaho. For those river bums out there who enjoy river rafting, you’ll know what I’m talking about now.

It takes a lot of effort and a lot of crying kids to get there, but I don’t see any reason to stop making this, uh, trip in the future because of the amazing views. Just go look it up on Google. Now to get there though, we drive for six hours following two main rivers, the salmon and the payette. Go look them up on Google again.

Gorgeous. These two rivers wind through vast green valleys and large mountain ridges. Now don’t be confused. These mountain ridges do not look like the Appalachian green or the Pacific Northwest Green. These are desert mountains and so they reveal really interesting. Formations Now, during this particular drive, while going around a pretty large bend in the road, I had hit what I call the sleeping sweet spot.

The, the very brief moment of time, let’s say about 15 to 20 minutes, where the entire car as asleep. All my kids and my wife and I have a brief moment to think and actually ponder things. Now don’t be confused as well. I am not one of those LinkedIn influencers that, uh. Taking a walk and finding random business analogies.

This is a pretty rare event for me to be driving or going to something personal and draw a business analogy, but bear with me here because that’s exactly what I did. Now, right in front of us, as we went around this bend, I noticed something along the mountain ridge that jetted out right in front of us, and I want you to imagine this.

This particular ridge had two large peaks, one on either SAR side with a large saddle. Connecting them. So imagine two peaks and a big dip in between them. At the lowest point of the saddle, I noticed a faint game trail that crossed the bottom point of the saddle, and which followed what looked like the winding path of least resistance down the mountain.

Now, for those of you who don’t know what a game trail is, a game trail is just a trail created by nature, created specifically by animals. Usually things like elk, deer, sheep, goat, whatever you have up in the mountains now. In Desert Mountains, these trails are pretty obvious. As you drive around, you see a lot of these trails, but this one in particular was really interesting to me ’cause it was right in front of my face.

Now. I’ve climbed over many mountain ridges like this, and the easiest path through is usually not so obvious, like it looked in this, uh, in this particular ridge. Now I’ve made my fair share of summits, and there’s typically, let’s say, three ways to get over a ridge like this. One is you can hike over the tallest peak if you’re feeling really ambitious, it’ll take a lot of stops and a use of all force.

You’re, you’re scrambling essentially now. Number two is. Option number two is you can hike just straight up the ridge, find a good crowd, a, a, a good, uh, path, and just go right up the hill. Um, you cross that saddle, that dip in the middle at just a point that feels right to you. Now you’re unfamiliar with the area, so you’re just guessing at that point.

Or number three is you can find the game trail. That usually approaches the ridge from an angle and crosses it at the most natural and easiest spot. Now, in my experience, following game trails when you’re just in the mountains is the best option. Why? Because animals know this area better than any human will because they actually live there.

They spend their life there. I can still get over that mountain ridge on my own right, but. Why would I not just take the path of least resistance that’s already been traveled by something that knows the terrain much better than me? So let’s apply this to our own businesses. Just like crossing this mountain ridge, growing a financial advisory business can be done by sheer force.

It’s like hiking straight up the steepest part of the mountain. You’ll get to the other side eventually. But it will take a lot of time and a lot of energy. Now, in hiking terms, I mentioned this previously. This is called scrambling. It’s a word many of you can likely resonate with in your own business.

Now, what most advisors don’t realize is that there’s a natural game trail that leads to growth. The path isn’t hidden and it shows up in what clients actually want, what’s actually relevant to them. But instead of following these trails, too many firms try to grow by hoping that what they supply will find resonance with someone.

They build new, quote unquote value adds that don’t actually resonate. They launch lead generation initiatives that fall completely flat, and they hire team members to support services that clients never actually asked for. The difficulty then is to find the so-called game trail. There are lots of ways advisors can start to uncover what clients actually want.

So today I wanna talk to you about the three ways that advisors uncover these proverbial or these, um, pretend game trails, these clues that advisor or that clients give us that basically tell us the actual job we done. And so from here on out, you’ll hear me reference this as the core job to be done and where the game trail.

Now there are three options. The first option, I’m gonna call this educated guessing. Right. In my experience, this is the default that most advisors fall into. Essentially, the advisor and their team will leverage their experience across each stage of the client journey, from marketing to sales, to service, and assume what client core job to be done is.

Now, the positives here is that advisors like this. Can often have a pretty accurate pulse on what is actually relevant to their clients. Let’s say it’s like 80 20, 80%, they can get 80% of the way there. They’ve been in the meetings, they’ve heard all the challenges to overcome and the opportunities to capture.

They’ve seen what resonates and what doesn’t. And for that reason, educated guessing can get the advisor in the general ballpark pretty quickly. And also it’s just pretty easy to do. It doesn’t take that long for the advisor team to do this.

Now, the negatives to this type of approach is that advisors often arrive at the client’s core job to we’ve done through the lens of service delivery. And it usually doesn’t reflect how clients actually experience value. So for example, one of the core jobs I hear quite frequently is quote, financial peace of mind.

Now. This might be the job, but they’re not the words that clients would use to describe what they’re actually trying to get done. When do you hear people walking around and saying, I want financial peace of mind? Typically, they express it in different ways, and so it’s helpful to understand what clients actually say in their own words.

Now, assume, assuming just it’s only gonna take you so far. So that leads really nicely into option number two. We’ll call this one to Many Survey Inc. Now, simply put, this is just a questionnaire that you send out to a large group of your ideal clients, and I mean, there’s a lot of tools out there to help with this.

The positives to this approach is that surveys are really easy to implement at scale. They’re easy to distribute and they can reach hundreds of people with a tiny investment of time. They’re also really great for collecting demographic insights and other quantitative data. It makes it easier to identify large, what I call macro trends among your clients.

The negatives to this approach is that, to me at least, the biggest downside is that it starts and stops with quantitative data insights, um, primarily in the form of like functional jobs. The emotional social aspects of the client’s cord job we’ve done are often missed and don’t come through. Very cleanly.

You also lose a lot of nuance, a lot of story, and the ability to go down rabbit holes and gain greater understandings with clients. I mean, how many times have you looked at survey results? I’m sure many of you listening to this have seen that where you see an answer to something and you’re just questioning, why do they answer it that way?

What do they mean with that? And we don’t have that opportunity when we do a survey like this. And finally, surveys don’t offer. Quality insights, unless the sample size is large enough, you have to survey enough people to make it useful. Five people isn’t gonna cut it. I, there’s a lot of data out there around, um, client and customer interviews.

So the numbers and, and we’ll probably do future episodes about this particular topic. Um, numbers are usually ranging between a hundred to a hundred. People in those surveys for it to actually be useful. So I mean, bottom line here is I like interviews for identifying specific macro trends in groups of clients.

I mean, honestly, really good for marketing, but for the purposes of understanding the core job to be done in your client’s own word, it’s really helpful to spend hands on time with them. And that leads nicely into option number three, which obviously pretty transparent here. This is my favorite option.

We’ll just call this one-to-one interviews. Um. I’ve done this with a lot of firms. Uh, they’re semi-structured conversations with individual, individual clients, prospects, lost clients, doesn’t really matter. These are designed to help you explore the functional, the emotional, and the social jobs a client is trying to get done.

And you get to hear it in their words, right? They hired you to do something. What is that thing? In their own words? Now, the upsides to something like this. Is that interviews, I mean, really clearly are just the clearest path to uncover relevance. I mean, you can hear the client’s language in its natural form, which is their own words.

You can ask follow up questions and dive down rabbit holes. You can spot patterns across conversations in real time. You can get deeper responses from clients. Um, you don’t need a large sample size, right? Six to 12 interviews is plenty to see themes. Um, and most advisors, honestly, we’ve all done this.

We’re we have a pretty strong ability to interview well. We spend our time with clients doing discovery. And trying to understand what actually is important to them. So we already have the ability to do this. Now, the downsides to this is that it does take a lot of time. Each interview could be about an hour.

I did one this morning on the recording and it took me 45 minutes. It took me about 15 to 20 minutes of prep work. It took me about 30 to 45 minutes of work after. So I mean all in. It took me almost two hours just to do one interview. It also requires a pretty hefty mindset shift. It, it requires you to separate yourself from the solution you offer.

I was talking to an advisor about this recently and one of the things, the misconceptions they had about these interviews is that they would be feedback interviews, meaning I’m getting feedback about the solution that they offer, which is absolutely not the case. I’m not trying to understand how they feel about my services.

I’m trying to understand their journey, their personal journey in their own words of what caused them. To hire me in the first place. And I, I’d say the final, uh, downside to this is, it’s really easy. It, I maybe reframe this. It’s incredibly difficult not to bring your own biases to the conversation.

You’ve been pitching this service for years, right? You’ve been, you’ve been run, a lot of the advisors have listened, listening to this, have run their business for 20 plus years. And it’s really difficult to take your own biases outta the conversation, which I mean, really simple. You could just have someone else.

Someone’s separate, uh, from the servicing relationship. It could be someone in the firm that just doesn’t necessarily have FaceTime with clients all the time, or it could be someone else that you offer to just run these interviews. Um, it, it helps to have some outside people on that. So those are the three options.

Now, at the end of the day, you, the advisor, the founder advisor, can keep scrambling your way up that mountain, or you can find the game trails that your clients already leave behind. You just need to spend time intentionally to listen to them without a service driven agenda. Again, you’re arriving at this from the, the demand side, not the supply.

So start small, pick one of these methods, stay in the problem space. Then trust that when you know what the client actually wants to get done. Man growth decisions are gonna flow really naturally. I’m gonna leave you with this one concept. We’ve talked about game trails. One other analogy that I think is really helpful for those bikers out there.

There’s this, there’s this concept called a slipstream where someone in front of you either driving, riding their bike, I mean, geese follow this when they do their V formation, when you are behind them and following that person, it makes progress. A whole lot more effortless talking to someone who’s big into biking and, and they were telling me a stat that, and don’t quote me on this, that if you are the person, the biker positioned right behind the lead biker, your effort to go the same speed, I think is about 30% of the effort the other person is deploying.

So again, let’s find those game trails. Let’s find the path of least resistance. It does not have to be this hard if we just understand what clients and our prospects actually want. Lemme know what you think. Uh, I think at future episodes we’ll explore each of these three options in a little bit more detail.

Um, maybe we’ll get into a little bit more tactical detail, how to do an educated guessing session without getting too much in your head, how to do these surveys, um, how to do these interviews. I’ve spent a lot of time researching all three of these options and I think they’ll be really helpful for people listening.

Now, bottom line, let me bring this back to elements because obviously there’s show by elements. Elements was created with the client mind to solve a problem that mattered really a lot to them. One of the big problems, and you’ve heard me reference this in the past, that Elements solves for clients is getting organized orientation, helping them understand how they’re actually doing or if they are on track.

The only reason you could offer a tool like Elements and Replace Elements with any other tool in our industry is if you know what actually matters to your clients. And now my friends is what I’ll leave  you with. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us, uh, podcast@getelements.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn at Jordan Haines, H-A-I-N-E-S.

And uh, we’ll see you next week.