Jordan explores how to help prospects understand how a financial advisor’s service can solve their core job to be done, rather than just treating symptoms.

In this episode you’ll learn the importance of sequencing your service description after problem diagnosis, how to effectively position yourself in the minds of your prospects, and how to achieve service clarity through the three-ten framework.

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Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends. And welcome to another episode of Elementality. My name is Jordan Haines, your host for today’s show today. I want to talk to you about product. Now this is part two of a four part series about client perceived value or prospect perceived value. And if you’ll remember last week, we went through it.

Let me give you a quick overview of what I’m talking about. There’s a theory out there, um, that I am adopting and exploring right now. And the idea is that there are four components to client perceived value value in what we actually do for them. And those components are number one, problem, number two, product, number three, people, and number four, price.

Let me give you a brief description and we’ll jump into the second one today that I want to talk about, which is product. Problem refers to the problem being acute enough, uh, painful enough that the client wants to do something about it. These are people, and we’ve all had people that come to us that are just casually looking.

They’re not necessarily, sometimes in the world of, uh, jobs to be done, or demand side sales theory, this is called passive looking. They’re not necessarily encouraged or empowered to continue actually exploring a viable option. They’re more just curious. So the problem needs to be painful enough that you need to do something about it.

The product is referring to a solution that actually solves their problem. They feel like the product has the features and the benefits that they need that will solve their problem. Just replace the word product with service or financial advice or financial plan. And you have yourself if a solid thing, um, number three is people.

This refers to the confidence or the trust that they have in both you and your firm. Do they feel certain that if they work with you, you are not going to mess up their life. And then the fourth is, does the price, is it justified for what I am getting? And that one’s pretty simple. We’ll explore that in a few weeks today, though.

I want to focus on the second, which is all about product. I specifically list these off in this order for a reason, because you cannot. Align the product or the service, unless the person, not just you, the actual prospect, the human being knows the problem that’s in front of them. Now, if you remember last week, we talked about this analogy of a car.

My car might be making interesting sounds. It might be steering wheel or, or steering weird and veering to the left. Now that’s a symptom. I want to understand what’s actually causing that symptom. And in my experience, working with prospects myself, and frankly, working with other advisors, we very rarely double click or dive deep into the actual core problem.

So you need to start by diagnosing what the core problem is. I would even go as far to say it’s important to diagnose and. To name the actual problem. Let me give you an example of this. Just this last week I was talking to someone and I was asking her a lot of questions. Um, she’s a younger dentist, young family, um, and very productive and doing good things.

And she had found out about us through a webinar that we had hosted with one of our partners. And in that webinar, one of our advisors talked about a number of different things and she found. After listening to it, that there were a lot of things she had never considered before that, that most of the decisions she had made during her life had no real rhyme or reason.

Now, when she came to me and scheduled a consultation, there were things like, I need to figure out what to do with my student loans, or I need to figure out what to do in planning for education for my, for my kids. And what I found upon talking to her is that. Those were symptoms, right? The actual problem was that she had random acts of finance disease.

That’s what I called it to her. She had no intentionality, no plan, no strategy in place. She had just been reacting to things coming her way. She had been doing random acts of finance. Now, when I named that. With her, it all resonated. It made a lot of sense. Only when I could do that, I could check the box and say, this person actually understands and has named the problem that they have.

Could I move on and talk about actually solving problems? Now, the second part of this is you need to know the problems that you’re regularly solving for clients and prospects in order to provide a product or service that makes sense to them, because the last thing that you want to do is offer up product or solutions or features or benefits or what we call value ads in the world.

Right now in our industry, you don’t want to offer those things that don’t actually solve the problem. So let me give you another example of this in my mind. I’ve been spinning around a lot. There there’s been a big question I’ve had in this question came about, I probably posted about this or record an episode about this a few weeks ago when I went to a conference back in January.

And in that conference, we had a competitor across the hall from us. Um, they were also dental specific. Good advisor did a lot of things. And what I found is that people would come to us and they’d say, well, aren’t you just like them? And I didn’t really have a good answer as to why or how we differentiate it.

And for the last few weeks, few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about how do I position myself? In the minds of the prospects that I talked to, because a lot of these people have preconceived notions of what a financial advisor is. So the minute I say I’m a financial advisor for dentists, yes. The four dentist part is valuable, but the financial advisor part is something that they have their own unique set of baggage.

Associated with that. And what I found is that the product that we offer, the service that we offer is a holistic financial consultant, not to be confused with a financial specialist, a financial specialist might call themselves a financial advisor, but really they’re just focused on one thing and they’re really smart.

So they might give advice on other things, but the thing that they’re actually focused on is that one thing. So for example, they might be an insurance person. Disability insurance or life insurance. They might be someone that’s really just focused on investment management. Might be a tax accountant, might be a bookkeeper, might be someone who does estate planning, right?

Those are all financial specialists at dentist advisors. We are holistic financial consultants, meaning that we look at the whole picture and we help satisfy that part of your life. Once I stumbled upon that, then what I started to do, it opened it up where now the client is not confusing me with another type of professional, right?

Because the minute I would say financial advisor, if they were coming to me for random acts of finance to solve that concern in their life, and I immediately presented myself as a investment manager. In their mind, they’re immediately going to rule out whatever product or service that I’ve created. So I found that I have to be able to position myself to my client in the mind of my client and prospects in order for me to then successfully present the product or the service that I actually offered to them.

For me specifically, that is presenting myself as a holistic financial consultant and then drawing that distinction between the two. For you, it might be something different. And by me creating this or showing this to you is by no means disparaging financial specialists. Or other people who say I’m a comp comprehensive financial planner or whatever that is, your market is different from mine.

But at the end of the day, they need to have that initial positioning, because if that initial positioning is not right, it’s very difficult to actually have a substantive conversation about the product or service that you’re offering and see if it solves the problem, because you might do really good at diagnosing and naming the core problem that they have.

But at the end of the day, if you can’t frame yourself in the minds of your consumers, well enough, it’s gonna be really difficult to move forward. So that’s, that’s my first disclaimer here as we get into it, let’s go down to the product, how do I actually create certainty? What’s my outcome? I’m looking for the outcome you’re looking for with the second client perceived value of product is you are trying to create certainty.

You’re trying to create clarity. You’re trying to create, I really like the word lately is predictability or reliability. I want my prospective clients, my prospects to look at my service and feel like they can rely on that thing to feel like it’s predictable. They’re going to get something out of it.

That’s actually valuable to them. And so all the things that I’m going to do is going to be increasing predictability, increasing reliability in what we offer. Now, this is somewhat of a moving target for me, but there are two big things that I’m doing right now for this. One is I’m talking about the how, and the other is I’m talking about the what.

Let me break those down. The how is what I actually do. This, the, the process that I follow, this is going to take something like that’s, that’s vague and intangible, like financial planning. And it’s going to create some tangibility to that. So what, what would I do here? Um, well today, if someone signs up to, to talk with me and we’ve thoroughly diagnosed their problem, I framed myself.

Effectively in the mind of the consumer, what I will then describe is what I will do for you initially. So let’s take this client example that I mentioned earlier. They have random acts of finance disease. The job that they’re trying to solve for is feeling like they’re intentional in the decisions that they make.

So if I were to translate that into financial CFP brain speak, they want a financial plan. Okay. So what am I going to do? I’m going to show them the process that we go through to create a financial plan. I’m not going to create the financial plan for them right now, free of charge. I’m just going to show them what we do to solve that problem.

Because again, what they’re trying to do is, is determine if we are predictable and reliable in solving the problem that they have in front of them. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to say. If you decide to sign up today, let’s assume you do, what we will do is assign a financial advisor to your situation.

This is going to become your financial best friend. They’re going to know everything about you and your life. They’re going to spend two to three conversations with you. Just trying to understand what you want out of your life, out of your career. And it’s important to keep in mind that this person is not just working with you.

They’re working with. Your spouse or your partner, they want to know about your family. They want to know about your career. They want to know everything. And they’re going to start from that level. So you will have one meeting, a welcome call with them to get to know them better. And then they might schedule one or two after that, just to get to know you on a more personal level.

At the same time, you’ll have your financial planning team reach out to you separately to start getting information. The objective there is to get. All of your information into one single place. We’re going to get things like tax returns, investment statements, uh, profit and loss statements from your business.

We want to know pay stubs. We’d love to know your transaction data, where things are going. We want to know everything. And the rationale there is we can get it all into one place. So we can start to orient you to your financial situation. Now, let me pause there for a second. I’m personally using elements to do something like that, right?

Let’s get all your information in one place. We’re going to use this tool called elements because that will allow us to orient you, but this is somewhat, um, technology agnostic, just, just something that I’m doing for them. So let me pick up from where I left off. Pretend you’re the client again. So these are the things that we’re doing initially.

Then what will happen over the course of a few days, a few weeks, we are going to create your financial strategy. We’re going to analyze all the information that we’ve been given. We’re going to get it all into one place and we’re going to come to you and collaboratively. Create your financial plan or your financial strategy.

We’ll sit down over the course of two or three meetings. And we’ll talk about if you’re using your income wisely, if you’re prepared to make work optional, doing the right things for that. If you have the right mix of assets, if you’re taking the right amount of risk in your life. And if you want to even break that down, we’re looking at all things related to your insurance, your tax planning, we’re looking at your debt management strategy, your liquidity, your qualified retirement accounts.

We are looking at everything and we’re creating an intentional plan. For all of those things, typically that process takes anywhere between 30 to 60 days because we are going through so much work. That’s what we do initially, after you have worked with us for some time, then we’ll start to implement some things.

We’re going to start taking action and we want to monitor that plan. Your kids are young, your life will change. We want to check and make sure that the original plan we created is actually serving your needs and creating your rich life. And if it’s not, we need to adjust. So we will meet with you X amount a year.

You’ll get these reports throughout the year that lets you know that we’re proactively checking in on your situation. And there you go, Bob’s your uncle. That’s what we go through for people. So that first step, I want to create certainty in the minds of my prospects, that the product and the service that I’m created is actually going to solve their problem.

Now you’ll remember that in this situation, the problem that she had was that she had random acts of finance. There was nothing intentional about her life right now. What I just showed her is we are going to take you through a process to create your intentional financial plan. This is exactly what we are going to do.

These are the number of meetings that we are going to have. This is what we are going to talk about in those conversations. I have found personally, and frankly, if you were to talk to me months ago, I might have discounted this, but I found recently that the more granular, the more specific I can be in this part of the problem, the better.

Now the problem comes in as if I’m too specific and too granular too early on. If I have not sufficiently. Diagnose that client or that prospect, and they know what their problem that they’re actually solving for is. It’s very difficult to provide any value here because in this conversation, I’m constantly drawing it back to the original problem that we had identified together, random acts of finance.

Do you notice how, when we do this, we are creating an intentional plan that directly is going to solve your random acts of finance disease. That’s what I’m trying to do in explaining this process. The second part of this that I think is really valuable in creating certainty or predictability or reliability, the minds of your prospects.

I think what that is is showing them what you actually do in those conversations. And this is where I think something, a tool like elements, again, it doesn’t have to be, there’s other tools like asset map and e money and write capital and money get pro they all have different functionalities there, or honestly create a spreadsheet.

That’s fine too. The thing that I’m trying to do is almost create a teaser. Of the, of the assessment of the analysis, right? Like it’s one thing to know the process that you’re going to take me to, to solve my needs, and it’s an entirely different thing to show me the type of thing that I’m going to get.

And then, so in this case, sometimes I like to show a sample financial plan. And in some cases I like to do a full financial assessment, depending on the complexity of the client, right? It’s easy for me to start with someone really early on where their life is pretty simplistic and I can talk about it.

It’s another thing for me to talk to someone that’s close up to retirement. You have 5 million invested. They have a lot of complex decision makings to do, and I use a system like elements to say, look, here are the types of things that we talk about. Let’s start at a high level, discuss those here so that you can have more certainty what I do.

So at the end of that, there’s two things that I’ve done for them. I’ve created certainty and predictability in their minds around the process that I follow to solve their problem. And I’ve given them a teaser in the types of conversations that we will have, if they continue to move forward, the only, and let me, I’ve said this multiple times, but the only way that this works is if you do it in the right sequence, they need to understand what their problem actually is not their symptoms, their problem.

You’re not talking about symptoms right now. You’re talking about their problem. Once you’ve done that. Then the likelihood of them becoming a client, I think it increases dramatically. There’s a book that I’m reading right now that kind of backs up a lot of this right now. Um, it’s a really interesting book.

I, some of them, some of the stuff is, uh, I would classify it as interesting. Some of it is incredibly helpful, but it’s, it’s a book that’s called, uh, the way of the wolf. It’s by the guy who, who the wolf of wall street is based off of. And it’s got some really fascinating principles in it. And, and the system that he uses, he calls it the three tens, meaning that you are creating certainty, a 10 out of 10 around three areas.

The, uh, company you and the product that you offer or the service that you’re selling, they need to have certainty in those things. And I like that word certainty. I think that goes along with predictability. So that’s it, my friends. This is the second part of customer perceived value as a reminder again.

Quick summary, the four components that we’re reviewing is number one problem, which we talked about last week. Number two product, which we talked about today. Next week, we’re going to talk about the people. So how people can gain trust in you and your firm or your company that you work with. And then the fourth is justifying your fees.

We’ll talk about a few things there. That’ll be in two weeks. Um, let me know what you think, if you have any 📍 questions, thoughts, concerns, anything like that, I’d love to hear it. Uh, you can find me at LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S, or you can email us here at elements at, uh, the email address is podcast at get elements.

com. And with that, everyone, I will see you next week.