Jordan dives into the fourth and final component of client perceived value: price. He explores why pricing isn’t usually the real problem when clients object to costs, but rather a symptom of not effectively communicating value. Through personal experiences at Elements and as a financial advisor, Jordan demonstrates how understanding and confidently solving core client problems leads to natural price justification.

This episode completes a four-part series examining the essential components of client perceived value: understanding the problem, providing the right solution, establishing trust, and justifying price.

Transcript

Jordan Haines:

Hello friends and welcome to another episode of elementality. I’m Jordan Haines, financial vitals specialist here, elements in your host for today’s show. And this, my friends is the fourth of a four part series around client or prospect perceived value. Now as a quick refresher for those coming in for the first time, for those who have listened to all of these, I apologize ahead of time.

We have talked about so far the four or the first three components of client perceived value. And those are number one. And in this order, we’ll talk about why that matters here in a second. Number one is problem. Do your clients or your prospects understand the problem? That you solve or that they need to have solved in their life.

And is it critical enough for them to pay someone for it? Number two is product or in our case, service is does the service or the product that you offer solve the problem that they actually understand. Number three is people do you, or the firm that you work for command, trust, and confidence. In delivering that service or that product to your clients that thereby solves the problem.

And then number four, which we’re going to talk about today is price. Can your client or prospect justify the price that you’re asking for to solve their core problem? Now doing these things in this order is incredibly important because if your client does not understand the problem that you’re solving.

If the product that you offer doesn’t actually solve the problem that they need solving, and if they do not have trust or confidence in you or your firm, in being able to solve their problem, the likelihood of them feeling like they can justify any price point is not going to work. So today let’s talk about price now.

Let me give a disclaimer at the beginning. I frankly don’t have a lot of opinions around pricing models, and we’re not going to talk about that today. Whether you charge a UM, whether you charge a combination or hybrid type fee between a UM and, and a fee for planning, maybe your fee based, maybe your commission only, uh, maybe your advice only I’m not here to talk about that today, what I am here to talk about today is justifying.

The price that you charge, whatever that price is. And so we’re going to get into this by telling a story a few years ago here at elements. Um, as many of you are well aware, uh, before I moved back over to Dennis advisors to do all our prospecting things, I ran our customer success or advisor success team at, uh, elements.

My entire role was figuring out how to train advisors on how to use the element system in their business, whether it was prospecting. Ongoing service, marketing, whatever it was, my role was to figure out the playbook that we needed to deliver. So for the first two, two and a half years, I did that myself.

Because we’re a startup. You’re, you’re trying to solve that problem, figure that out on your own. And so I probably talked to a thousand advisors at that point, testing and trying, what are the right things we need to train them to, and we got it to a point where, you know, we, we generally knew what the playbook was.

We knew what things we needed to train them to, what things they needed to understand in order to use this in their life or in their business. And at that point we were growing pretty rapidly. And so we decided to decided to hire some help.

So over the course of a few months. During this rapid growth period where, um, in our marketing, many of you might remember this, we were testing and trying a few different positions. We wanted to see what resonated with advisors. Were we a growth tool? Were we primarily a client service tool? Now, I think where we’re at today is we’re all of those things.

What we are is a tool that allows you to have meaningful conversations. But around that time, we were having a lot of growth and we were trying a lot of different things. And so this new team Some of them advisors, some of them, not, um, some of them super bought into elements had used it, had seen the value of it and their clients.

Some of them had never experienced that themselves were having conversations with people that maybe didn’t buy elements for the right reasons. They didn’t, it didn’t actually solve a problem that was acute enough or critical enough in their business. That they needed to solve, or that client or that, that advisor couldn’t tie that value or that product or service back to the problem that they needed solving.

And so the conversations we had with people tended to end up at a place of price, feeling like maybe elements was too expensive for what we were doing for them. And so the natural reaction of our team, this newly created team that maybe hadn’t seen the value, those advisors or those people on the team that had used this or had seen the value of meaningful conversations or orienting someone to their situation felt really comfortable with the price.

Whereas those who did not see that value, weren’t confident, didn’t understand the problem that we solved or how we actually solve that problem. Tended to feel one of two ways. One was maybe we need to reduce our price. Or maybe we need to do more to justify the price that we actually offer. So I share this experience because this is something I experienced with advisors time and time again, regardless of how you’re charging advisors are either one trying to justify the price that they charge or two, um, they are trying to reduce the price or they’re not charging as much as they should, just because they’re not confident in their service.

All of that comes down to not understanding in my experience, what the problem you’re actually solving is. Or understanding how your service. Actually solves the problem that your client has, which is why we do this in order. Why we start from a place of understanding and diagnosing the core problem clients are trying to solve.

Number two, offering a solution that actually solves, they could draw straight line to that problem. And number three, having the right people there. Let me bring this all together and pricing will then make a lot of sense. It’ll be justified. Today at dentist advisors, I, uh, run a playbook right now that basically addresses these four client or prospect perceived values in that order.

When someone signs up for a consultation, they meet with me for 30 minutes. In the past, I used to just jump right in and start pitching. And say, this is, these are all the things that we do. Sometimes I bring in elements and I’d say, let’s talk about it. Let’s get into it. Now, what I do is I spend some time asking questions.

Now I’m trying to ask very specific questions and you can go back and listen to part one of this series where I go through problem diagnosis and things like that, that’s essentially what I do first. The reason I’m trying to do that is I want my clients. I want to personally, but I also want these potential clients or prospects to understand the problem.

That they’re trying to solve for, because if the service I offer doesn’t actually solve their problem, then we should just end that conversation. Right? So I try to understand what the problem is that you’re trying to solve for. And a good example of this is so often the problem that I’m trying to solve for is what I call random acts of finance disease, right?

It’s something where I feel like I’m just chaotic. There’s no intentionality. There’s no strategy or plan in my life. I’m just kind of reacting to things as they come. And I feel chaotic. It’s random acts of finance. So I’m allowed to, I’m enabled to articulate to this client or prospect. Look, the problem that you’re solving is random acts of finance.

Let me now show you how I solve that problem. So what’s really important about this though, is I understand as a financial advisor, that the core problem or the core job that I’m solving for, for my clients is random acts of finance. It’s not in depth tax analysis. It’s not estate planning. Those are maybe tangents to that, but that’s not the core problem.

I’m actually solving for them. And then what I do is I show them, Hey, here’s how I solve that problem. We create a plan with you. Initially, we understand what’s on your mind, what’s important to you in your life, what goals that you have, and then we create a. Cohesive strategy, one that incorporates all the holistic elements of your financial health.

And then we meet with you when you monitor that and we make sure that you’re still intentional about the things that you’re doing. So that’s a really simple way of how I can present a solution that actually solves a core problem. If I don’t understand, right. If, if to me as a financial advisor, and I think most advisors like this, if what I do is I help.

People feel better about their money. Okay. Well, how do you help people feel better, better, better about their money? Apologize. Um, if we don’t understand exactly what that feeling is that we’re solving or how we are helping people feel better, we are going to continue to add and add and add until we feel justified in the price that we actually offer.

And I don’t think that’s, that’s a good place. So in order for you personally. In order for client, let’s start here in order for clients or prospects to justify the price that you offer, you need to have that justification. It starts with you. And until you feel like you can justify that price, you will never be able to stand confidently and say, this is what I charge for, for the service that I offer.

And that’s going to be a really hard place because if you don’t feel confident in what you charge, naturally, you’re going to add and dilute your service. Or you’re going to continuously discount what you should actually be charging. And that’s not a great place for you to be in. So again, Regardless of what you charge, regardless of what you charge, you need to have confidence that your service actually solves a core problem that your clients have.

And if you feel truly feel like your service or your offering actually solves their problem, you can start to have confidence in the justification of your price. And until you have confidence in your price. Your clients will never be able to justify it. So start there. And I, and I promise you, I think it’s going to help a lot.

So this is, uh, I think this is it guys is a wrap. Um, we’ve talked about the four. Uh, I’m sure we will revisit these again in the future. Next week, I’ll get back on the, the, uh, regular schedule. Uh, plan to have a few people on that we’re going to talk to. To understand what they’re doing in their business, um, as it relates to elements and maybe prospecting or growing or a lot of the things that we’ve talked about here.

But if you guys have any questions or any thoughts or concerns about things that we’ve talked about so far, please feel free to reach out to us podcast at get elements. com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S. And with that, my friends, we’ll see you next week.