Jordan discusses the third component of client-perceived value: people. In addition to building trust and confidence with prospects, a financial advisors objective is to generate certainty that you and your firm will apply your services to solve their problems.

Jordan also discusses the importance of positioning you and your firm in the minds of prospects compared to other financial professionals.

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends. And welcome to another episode of elementality. My name is Jordan Haines, financial vital specialist here, elements, and your host for today’s show. Now this is the third of a four part series all about client or prospect perceived value. Today, we’re going to talk about people specifically you and your firm and how we can help generate more trust in those things and what the objective is of increasing value in that area.

But as a quick review, if you haven’t yet, I highly encourage you. And if this is the first time you’ve listened in a few weeks, highly encourage you to go back and listen to the last two episodes. The first is around. Uh, problem generation, identifying what problem your clients or your prospects are trying to solve.

And the second one is all about your product or your service and creating certainty around what you do for clients. Those are really helpful. And again, sequencing is everything. If you haven’t started by identifying the problem that your client is trying to solve for, help them understand the product that you created.

It’s going to be very difficult for them to gain trust. In you. So today it’s all about you, the financial advisor and your firm and generating trust in those things. But to start, I want to share some stories. Um, this is about dentist advisors. As many of you know, I’m a financial advisor here at dentist advisors.

Um, but in particular, I do all of our inbound prospecting and consultations. Now I started with dentist advisors about four or five years ago. Um, and back then I was just a plain old, young financial advisor, taking on new clients and doing a few consultations. This was before we ever launched elements as a standalone product.

And during that time we had a podcast. So Reese Harper, our founder and CEO of elements, also founder and CEO of dentist advisor, Reese Harper and his co founder Ryan Isaac had a podcast. That they ran for, I don’t know. I think up until that point, it had been three or four years that they had been doing that.

They had been to a lot of events. They had generated a lot of marketing interest and they had really integrated themselves into the dental community. So by the time I came along as part of, uh, that firm, really, all I had to do was show up for conversations. And at that time, most people were primed and ready to go.

Meaning they had listened to that podcast for. Months, if not years in some situations. So they felt like they knew us, they knew Reese, they knew Ryan, they knew what we stood for. They understood our brand and they had slowly over time and over listening to that podcast built trust and basically gained a relationship with both them and our firm.

And that relationship or that trust was able to transfer over to me, the lowly young advisor, just trying this out for the first time. Now, the thing that they had learned is they have gained certainty that I was going to deliver a product to satisfy their needs. Now, fast forward four or five years later, and you have me today.

The nature of our leads have changed. The marketing engine at Dentist Advisors has matured. And while we run the podcast and we have a great community, we’ve embedded ourselves there, there are even more people that are finding us through more traditional things like Google and today, Reddit and ChatGPT.

And through events and other social media marketing campaigns. And what’s been interesting is most of these consultations, these first people that I talked to, this is oftentimes the first time they’ve talked to a financial advisor, number one, and it’s frankly the one of the first times they’ve ever engaged with us.

A lot of people that I talked to, I would say anecdotally about 70 to 80 percent of the new consultations that I have are from someone that just found us through Google or found us at an event or something like that and saw that we were dental specific and that we might. Satisfy their needs. So the nature of these leads has changed over the last five years.

And what’s been really interesting to me is trying to navigate that. What do I do right? When, when someone does not know who I am or doesn’t have that trust, how do I help them? Generate that trust. How do I help them gain trust and confidence that I am a good person number one and will actually solve their problem.

And that’s really what’s been top of my mind. That’s frankly one of the things that prompted me to look into client perceived value. So something that I have adopted and been really interested in is this book written by um, Jordan Bradford. I don’t know if that’s the name. Um, it’s who the wolf of wall street is based off of.

And I think I referenced this in the last two weeks, or I definitely referenced this before the name of the book is the way of the wolf. Um, and there’s a lot of things in it that are interesting to say the least. Um, I don’t necessarily love his style, but one of the things, one of the frameworks that he presents there, he calls it the three tens.

Um, essentially what it is, is At a, on a scale of one to 10, how certain are your prospects in you? So you, the financial advisor, your firm and your product last week, we talked about product, but the other two are really important. And I like that word, certain certainty, they want to understand you before they can trust you.

And that goes along with your firm as well. I think one of the first parts about gaining trust in someone that’s new to us is that we need to know who they are. We need to know what they do. We need to know what they stand for. I think transparency and authenticity is really, really important. Now those are overused words now.

But if you can be transparent, authentic, I think that’s where you generate certainty that you are going to solve their problems. So one of the big things that I would recommend, um, many of you listening to this is think about how certain your prospects are in you and your firm. If it’s just you and your solo advisor and your firm and you are so intertwined, most likely that’s basically one in the same.

But if you’re part of a larger organization, like I am, I need to understand my brand. I need to know what they think of that brand. And I also need to know what they think of me. Those are two really important things. And the easy scale is how certain are they that I will solve their problem? Which means number one, you need to know what their problem is before you understand if you can solve it.

So that’s just an example of how people can gain trust in you. And in my experience, many people. Many people that come and talk to me and come and talk to other financial advisors, while they might trust you as a person, don’t really understand what you’re going to do for them. Even those clients or those prospects that have listened to the dentist money show that our podcast for five years, it’s been interesting that as I talked to them, many of them don’t know what our financial advisors actually do.

And so creating certainty in that thing, as simple as We will talk to you three times a year. We will say these things, we will explore this idea. We will understand your situation on an intimate level. That goes a long way to help them understand what we’re going to do. Because most of the time to people, normal human beings, what financial advisors do as a professional is vague and ambiguous and hard to nail down.

And as long as the ambiguity is there, the likelihood of them actually taking action. And working with you is going to be very slim. So I’m continuing to, I’m continuing to explore. If you can’t tell, if you listen to the last two episodes, you know that those are things that I’m really thinking about. I’m engrossed in those I’m, I’m pivoting now and thinking a lot more around people, how we can help generate trust in what we do, and the first step to generate trust is generating and creating 📍 certainty.

In the minds of our clients and our prospects. And with that, everyone, I’ll talk to you next week. If you have any questions, concerns, feel free to find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S, or you can email us at podcast at get elements. com.