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Podcasts

How to Show Your Advisory Skills in a Digital Setting

“You are here.” To understand your financial situation you must know where you stand. Any financial roadmap to the future starts by showing where to begin. By pinpointing that place for a prospective client, advisors can illustrate why their guidance has value. Unfortunately, proving your worth has become more difficult as fewer people set up one-on-one consultations. For digital meetings, what you need is a tool that quickly demonstrates your advisory skills.

On this Elementality, Reese and Abby look at why using Elements to do remote assessments is an effective conversion tool that also helps establish your worth. Quickly identify the things a prospect needs to do to achieve their financial aspirations by using Elements for assessments.Using Elements to do quick assessments helps prospects better understand their financial situation and begins to establish an advisor’s value.

 


Podcast Transcript

Reese Harper:
If you send a nice offer like, “Hey, Abby said some great things about you. I would love to do a free financial assessment for you. You don’t have to meet. We don’t have to take your time. I just need you to download this app and put in your data and create a scorecard, and then I’m gonna give you an assessment comparing you to other people like you that I see.”

Abby Morton:
Right.

Reese Harper:
“And give you some feedback.” And that is like a generous thing, it’s like, “Wow, thank you. That’s cool.” And it’s a little bit more value forward than like, “Hey, will you meet? Can we get together?” It’s like, “What are you gonna do when you get together? And like, Is this gonna be worth my time?” There’s all these friction questions that come up.

[music]

Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode, we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use Elements to grow their business, and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality everyone. I’m your host today, Abby, here with Reese Harper.

Reese Harper:
Hey folks, how’s it going?

Abby Morton:
We are turning the tables. I’m interviewing Reese today.

Reese Harper:
This is so nice, you turned into an interviewer.

Abby Morton:
I am trying my best.

Reese Harper:
I love it.

Abby Morton:
So you’ll have to give me maybe some feedback at the end of the episode, we’ll see how it goes.

Reese Harper:
None, there’ll be none coming.

Abby Morton:
I’m trying my best.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, you’re doing great.

Abby Morton:
So it’s a beautiful spring day, spring has finally come in Utah to us.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, it’s awesome. Totally cool.

Abby Morton:
The sun is shining, the birds are chirping. We’re out of the crazy snowstorm and winter that we’ve had.

Reese Harper:
Yes.

Abby Morton:
Which is very nice.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, oh so nice, I got good walks yesterday, and it’s just so much better when… I love the snow, but come about March, I’ve skied a lot and…

Abby Morton:
Yeah, you’re kind of done.

Reese Harper:
I’m ready for it to be warm.

Abby Morton:
Ready for the next thing?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, it’s awesome.

Abby Morton:
Definitely. All right, well, to transition into the topic today, we’re wanting to set up kind of the next several episodes that we’re excited to do, we’ve really come to this selling point with Elements lately that, Elements is a great way to help advisors demonstrate their value, and we’ve talked a lot about how in financial planning industry, it’s hard for advisors to demonstrate their value, it’s hard to really show the prospect, someone who doesn’t work with you yet, what it is you actually do, right? ‘Cause the feelings and the work that you do like, yeah, you can say, “Oh, I invest your money and I make for sure you’re using our investments in the most tax efficient way,” but a lot of financial planning is very like, “How does it make you feel? Do you have that financial piece of mind, right?” And so we’ve talked about how we’re really… We’re talking about how Elements scorecard can help advisors demonstrate their values with perspective clients, which helps them see what they do, and helps them bring them down the funnel so that they can close as a client. So let’s kind of sit back at a high value, like we’re using this new terminology we haven’t really used before of a financial assessment, now everyone knows what that is, but can you describe to us a little bit like what are Elements do we think a financial assessment is?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, I think the… If you look at Ric Edelman building Element Financial 15 years ago, or look at any big heavily-marketed financial services radio program, from back in the day, they were selling a free consultation, right? You can sit down and have a free consultation, and I think the emotional journey that someone goes on when they open up the kimono, so to speak, and show you all their numbers, and then get your opinion on those numbers, there’s always been a precedent for this being an effective conversion tool, and I think down, brass tacks when people share something personal about themselves, especially if it’s something as private or as personal as a number, so if they give you their actual numbers, or share their actual financial status with you, it’s a really vulnerable place, so to get to that hurdle, it’s already filtering or weeding out quite a few people…

Abby Morton:
Totally.

Reese Harper:
That aren’t willing to share that, so if you can get someone to share something personal about them, they generally are self-selecting in, number one, to making a hard choice of sharing, but if you can do what we’re calling a financial assessment using a piece of technology, it just increases the likelihood that someone takes you up on your offer, you might have seen historically a really high number of people being willing to do a free consultation, and over time with the Internet and all of the social media influencers that are now giving advice too, fewer and fewer people are willing drive to go to an office and sit down and get a consultation, and so what we’re trying to do is say, let’s take the same emotional ethos that existed with the old book of consultation, or free consultation stuff from the 90s and early 2000s, and let’s do this in a way that gets close to the same impact, it’s never quite the same, as being in front of someone, like if you actually have an in-person meeting, and do a financial assessment, you’re still gonna have a higher conversion rate than if you do it remotely or digitally, but you’re gonna get very few people willing to do a financial assessment in-person, more people willing to do them virtually or digitally. And we’re seeing almost as effective conversion rates from those virtual and digital assessments as we would… As we historically saw from in-person consultations, and we think that as advisors we get better at them.

Reese Harper:
And understand all the variety of ways to deliver a financial assessment remotely, that it’s just gonna be a really effective way to get people to move down their funnel and grow their client base.

Abby Morton:
Yeah, but why do you think that is? Why do you think it’s helping people move down the funnel?

Reese Harper:
Well, like I was saying earlier with… Most people have an emotional job that they’re hiring a financial advisor for, and that emotional job is to help them either make a decision and feel good about it, to reduce their stress about something, to just feel more calm, more relaxed. And when you do a consultation with someone or have some kind of interaction with their data, they are gonna more likely feel that feeling that they’re wanting to buy, which is, “I wanna feel better about something.” And they actually can’t feel better until they’ve heard your voice, saw your unique personality, heard your unique story, and your interpretation of their numbers, so it’s both a combination of the numbers and the advisor’s perspective that creates that trust in order for someone to move down the funnel.

Reese Harper:
If you’re not doing that, people get stuck in this… We call it lower conversion state in the marketing funnel where they’re not actually being presented with their personal information, and you’re just generally educating an audience top of funnel with content, so the content that people market with generally is not going to have the conversion effect that an advisor’s voice and an advisor’s interpretation is gonna have, and so all your content marketing should be just pushing people to take that second step of having an experience with you, we’re calling it a financial assessment.

Reese Harper:
And we think Elements makes a great piece of technology for that, but you can do that with spreadsheets and calculators and web forms, and you could do it in person over lunch or at a dinner reservation. You can have that same experience. We just think it’s important to do large volumes of these and have it be a primary way that you’re converting, and it’s more difficult to scale an in-person meeting or a face-to-face meet-up in today’s world. So we think this is just a more effective way to kind of learn from what worked in the past and bring it into the future.

Abby Morton:
I think it’s a good point you’ve made of everything used to be just localized and face-to-face and in-person, and as times have changed, people have gotten busier, families have gotten just more robust activities that everyone’s involved in, like you said, people aren’t willing to do as much to maybe solve that financial pain, and they’re looking more online for all of those problems to be solved, so if you can be online and still have that good interaction with the client where you’re solving that financial pain for them, I think you’re gonna be definitely more successful but with doing that.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, I agree, that’s a good insight.

Abby Morton:
Bringing it into the modern age. So let’s talk about… In terms of marketing activities, I know… Do you think advisors can be successful doing just one type of thing, do you think advisors need to do 10 different things, like how would a new advisor who’s getting started or someone who’s like, “I need to broaden my funnel,” how do you go about knowing what marketing tactics you should do, like what’s the best for you? Do you have any insight there?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, if you don’t… If you’ve never really taken the time… Yeah, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to become a marketing specialist, there’s a lot of people you can hire to help, but I do think it’s really important to have a cursory understanding of what you’re trying to do, what a buyer, what a client is trying to go through, before they make a decision, and you need to have a plan for what types of marketing activity you’re going to do at each of these stages that people go through, and for… I’m gonna dramatically over-simplify the marketing funnel for people in this answer, but I would just say, you’re gonna want to be making people aware that you exist, making people aware that you exist is kind of the first level, awareness of you, awareness of the problems they have, awareness of the challenges they might be facing, if people are already aware of you and they’re already aware of their problems, that’s a different person than someone who’s unaware, and so you have to have activity to make people aware.

Reese Harper:
This podcast is a good example of an activity that serves two purposes for us and Elements, in some cases, it’s making advisors aware that we exist, but it’s also doing the second level, which helps people consider or contemplate you as a solution to the problem. And after they become aware of the problem, you need to help them consider the alternative ways that they can solve that problem.

Reese Harper:
Now that, I’ve made you aware today that financial assessments could be a really effective way to convert, and I’ve told you you can do assessments in person at restaurants, you can do assessments through spreadsheets, you can do assessments through email, and I have a piece of software called Elements that allows you to do this more efficiently, now, you’re at least gonna be aware that you can consider this option, so I like making sure the audience is aware of options that they can solve their problem with, and Elements is really… Plays a strong role in, at this stage, and then the bottom stage, the bottom stage or this third stage is where people are actually making the yes or no decision, there… In marketing speak, sometimes they’ll call it, the bottom of the funnel, but if you can’t… There’s a lot of things you can do to make people aware of you, there’s fewer things you can do to show people which options they have available, so that they can consider alternatives, and there’s even fewer ways besides financial assessments, to convert people at the bottom of the funnel, at that point, the reason I would push all of my traffic or I push all of my traffic at RIA to this stage, is you want the client to see you, understand how special you are, understand how much you care.

Reese Harper:
Understand that you have a perspective on their unique occupation or life stage or niche, and I would just push all of my traffic to where, if they’re ready for it, if they’re ready for an assessment, ask them to get one. An assessment to me is a stage up in the funnel from the traditional consultation. Like a traditional consultation is even more difficult to get people to do, like you’re… We’re gonna meet face-to-face live on Zoom, or we’re gonna go and get together. A financial assessment, you can position it as something that can be done asynchronously, I can record it, you can… Sometimes I like to record videos and send them. Sometimes I’ll just write an email and send the assessment. The assessment doesn’t require the person to come and talk to you, it’s just something… You can make it require that, but that will be a lower conversion assessment than one that’s just a remote assessment, so to kind of summarize your question, what role does it play? I view like a digital financial assessment as something that happens just a step before that traditional consultation, where they’re… You’re gonna have your… Hopefully, you’re having a three-to-one conversion at that meeting, or better. So one in three people in a traditional consultation are probably gonna move through. What we’re trying to do with financial assessments is getting more people to do the consultation.

Abby Morton:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
It’s like a teaser to the bait…

Abby Morton:
More people like in the middle of the funnel, right?

Reese Harper:
Yes.

Abby Morton:
Like more people there gives you more success down below, right?

Reese Harper:
Yes, so I would say, the financial assessment, if you think about it in the marketing funnel, it’s, after a quiz, like a generic quiz, it’s after a webinar, it’s more close to the bottom of a funnel than a webinar or a generic quiz.

Abby Morton:
And I would say the reason why maybe that is, is like it’s more tailor-specific to the individual person, right?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, they’re past…

Abby Morton:
Where it’s like, this higher level, you’re talking about, like this quiz and webinar, like anyone could go to that and anyone could probably get value out of that.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Abby Morton:
‘Cause the assessment or trying to bring it down. I think there’s even two levels of it, you can be like, “This is what I could do from you, here’s a demo client,” right? Then the client puts in their data and then it’s like, “Okay, here’s an assessment about your specific situation.”

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Abby Morton:
Right?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, because they’re, the reason that that’s the case is they’ve already, like I said before, the middle is about considering and really picking whether they wanna go with you. Or deciding that they like you or comparing you maybe to other alternatives, they have. The consideration is kind of the main attribute of what someone… What’s happening when someone’s in the middle of the marketing funnel, and they can’t really consider… They’ve already chosen to consider you, which means they’re past the middle of the funnel…

Abby Morton:
Right.

Reese Harper:
Because they want…

Abby Morton:
They’re doing a little bit of work, right? They put…

[overlapping conversation]

Reese Harper:
They want… They’re like, “You know, I wanna hear what Reese thinks about this, but I’m not really ready to drive to his office, and I don’t know if I wanna do a meeting, but Abby said some great things about Reese. Maybe I’ll let him do a financial assessment, get a second opinion,” ’cause they might already have a financial advisor they really like.

Abby Morton:
Exactly.

Reese Harper:
So you just… If you tell… If you make the requirement for that new prospect that they have to get together with you, or you… Can we get together for lunch? Or, “Hey, Abby said some great things about you? I would love to meet.” It’s just gonna come off a little like hot and heavy in today’s world, and it’s gonna come across a little desperate in most cases, if you send a nice offer like, “Hey, Abby said some great things about you? I would love to do a free financial assessment for you, you don’t have to meet, we don’t have to take your time.

Reese Harper:
I just need you to download this app and put in your data and create a scorecard, and then I’m gonna give you an assessment comparing you to other people like you that I see, and give you some feedback.” And that is like a generous thing, it’s like, “Wow, thank you. That’s cool,” and it’s a little bit more value forward than like, “Hey, will you meet? Can we get together?” It’s like, “What are you gonna do when you get together? And is this gonna be worth my time?” There’s all these friction questions that come up, so we really created this to sort of get more people to take that traditional consultation step, and to increase the probability that someone moves down, at least, and is interested in considering you because you’ll have an offer that makes you stand out in the middle of the funnel, you’re now standing out from your peer group, and then you’re also… They’re experiencing your voice, your tone, your specialization, a lot more.

Abby Morton:
Totally. Yeah, totally. Something else to add on to that, that I’m really seeing in lots of assessments, is as we talked about people don’t know what financial planning is, people think it’s selling insurance or doing your investments, right? And by offering the simple assessment, I think it’s another way for financial advisors today to get into their goal… Like other things that are really making real financial advisors, the advisors that are… Elements is really resonating with, are doing those types of things. Like, “Let me show you how this is valuable to you, let me show you how your goals need to align with your money and your purpose.” Like how can we help have more of those conversations, and I think the assessments is a great way to do that, like you said, a little bit higher in the funnel, so the person can be like, “Oh wow, he’s not just asking me to transfer all his money… My money today, I can pay it in other ways,” it’s just another way to open that conversation.

Reese Harper:
It’s nice, yeah.

Abby Morton:
To start having more of those types of interactions with people.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, I think that’s a great insight.

Abby Morton:
Totally.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Abby Morton:
So yeah, the next several episodes we’re gonna be talking as we go down the marketing funnel, how Elements can help you be successful and what are different types of activities you can even do, and potentially how can you use assessments to do that? So stay tuned for the next several episodes, we’re gonna be giving lots of ideas, tips, and tricks, really like a how-to guide on how to do various different types of activities, and we’re really excited for what we have coming.

[music]

Reese Harper:
Thanks, Abby. Hopefully we’ll hear from everybody soon.

Abby Morton:
Right. See ya.

[music]

Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.

Carl Richards:
And I know you didn’t mean it this way, but the question, “Who can you introduce me to?” Is exactly what we’re not.

Abby Morton:
Yes.

Carl Richards:
The feeling we’re not trying to get across.

Abby Morton:
Right.

Carl Richards:
Right?

Abby Morton:
Right.

Carl Richards:
‘Cause, yeah, “Hey, who can you introduce me to?” It’s more like I wanna work with more people like you, I really enjoy it, and particularly the niche, the problem I wanna solve.

Abby Morton:
Yeah.

Carl Richards:
If you were me, how would you go about it? And you’re open to the… You really have to be like, you have no agenda. Because I would have never imagined breakfast meetings.

Abby Morton:
Right.

Carl Richards:
I would have never imagined skiing or golfing.

Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.

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