Jordan explores the first of four components of customer perceived value: identifying and isolating the core problem. Through relatable examples and personal experiences, Jordan discusses why understanding the fundamental problem, rather than just addressing symptoms, is crucial for clients to see the true value in financial services.
Transcript
Jordan Haines:
Hello friends and welcome to another episode of elementality. My name is Jordan Haynes, financial vitals specialist here, elements, and your host for today’s show today is going to be one of four episodes that we record talking all about client or prospect perceived value. As many of you are well aware over the last few weeks, few months, really at that, I’ve been thinking a lot about what is actually valuable.
To the people that we work with or come in contact with. I think many times what we think is valuable is not actually what’s valuable to them. And so it’s led me down a rabbit hole to try and really think what are the actual components of value to our clients or our prospects. And on a flight, I don’t know, for whatever, whatever reason, when I’m on flights, that’s when I think the best, I don’t know why it doesn’t matter if it’s 1am.
If I’m on a flight, I’m thinking really hard about something. And I flew home from Chicago just over the weekend from a pretty large dental convention out there. I was out there for a few days. And so after a few days of talking to people about, you know, what makes us valuable and all these things like that, something clicked and what clicked was something I had learned from a tech, another tech company, uh, three or four years ago, the name of that company is called, they said, go look them up.
They said they’re, they’re, um. Like an alternative to NPS. If those of you who have never heard that NPS stands for net promoter score, it’s what a lot of tech companies use to determine if what they offer is valuable. You’ve, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve seen it before, you know, when you log in and that pop up happens and they say, you know, on a scale of one to five, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?
Right. It’s just a very simplistic measurement for a lot of, um, support teams or service teams to understand if what they’re doing is valuable to people. And so, um, they said came up with a new type of score. They call it CPV score, customer perceived value. And within that, they ask. Four questions, four questions about four different topics.
And these are the four things that we’re going to talk about today. Um, or not today over the next few episodes. And I hope that this is helpful for you. Now, as many of you are well aware, again, I am not an expert here. I am an expert in all things elements, but I am not an expert in all things prospecting.
And so I’m going to go through these things and I’ll relate it back to elements. And I think it’ll be really helpful for a lot of you, but just know that I’m testing a lot of these things out. So if you disagree with me, that’s okay. I want to hear all about it and know that I am, I am, uh, I, I reserve the right to be wrong in this situation.
So let’s get into it. What are the four components of customer perceived value? According to they said, the first is problem. The second is people. The third is product. And the fourth is price. Let’s talk about each of these high level summary. And then we’re going to dig into the first one, which is problem.
The first problem is all actually let’s, let’s go back to that. I’m not going to talk about problem right now. Let’s talk about, um, people, right? People essentially is, do they see your people as trustworthy? Is the value, is the experience that your people bring to, um, Clients. Is it valuable to them? Do they trust you?
Are they confident in you? Are you going to screw them over? No. Right. Like those are the things that they’re looking for. People’s pretty straightforward. I would add two, two elements that there’s the actual people, the advisors, the support team, the sales team, whoever’s involved there, the investment team, the actual people in the personnel there, and then you actually have the company at large.
Right. The brand, this is going to be especially true for those of you who work part of larger organizations like myself. Do they actually trust the company that you are representing? For those of you who are solo advisors, a lot of times it’s one in the same. So that’s how I think about people. Do they trust you?
Are you valuable in their mind? The second is a product or in our case, service or solution is what we are actually doing. So the thing that the people are actually doing for clients is that. Actually valuable to them. Does it have the features and the benefits that your clients or your prospects care about?
Now, if you go back and listen to the last few episodes, last few months, um, or so you’ll know that I have, um, I have opinions and thoughts about quote unquote value ads. I think sometimes we just add value for adding value sake. We don’t actually think about. If it’s actually valuable to people, right? So this, this essentially says, what are the features or do the features that we offer, are they actually valuable to you client or prospect?
So that’s number two. Number three is price. Do you, um, offer this all for a meaningful price? Do they often think about price? Um, that’s an entirely separate conversation. We’ll probably get to that last. And then the final one, which we’re going to talk about today is problem. Is the problem acute enough or painful enough that your client or prospect wants to do something about it?
Is it a big enough problem that you’re solving for them? Because if it’s not, it’s likely that your service is just not valuable enough to them. So those are the four components of value to them. Let me repeat. You have price, people, product, and problem. Today in this episode, we’re going to talk all about.
Problem. And I have been thinking a lot about this. If you go back and listen to all the episodes, you know, that I’m a big fan of demand side sales one on one 101, which is essentially this your clients and prospects are hiring you to get a job done to solve a problem or capture an opportunity. It’s as simple as that.
If they don’t understand what that problem is, they cannot judge. If your service is actually valuable. Let me give you an example of this. I talked to a prospect a while back and this prospect has been following, uh, the dentist money show for a long time. It’s the podcast that Dennis visor has been running for almost a decade, has over 2 million downloads.
A lot of people know about it. And we have a lot of avid listeners who are DIY wires who have never hired us. And maybe some of them who never will, but a lot of people come in and they want to work with us because they’ve been listening to that. Well, this individual had been following us for some time.
He was very successful dentist. Um, he had just sold a portion of his practice and now had, um, some liquidity he’d fallen back on. And because he trusted us, he came to us because he really liked what we preached, which was very holistic in nature, very approachable, doing the right thing for you at this point in your life and making sure you’re responsible for the future, but not doing things just because they’re sexy or they look fun and things like that.
He really liked that about this. And at the same time. He really just needed someone to invest his money. So there was this tension because on one hand he’d not, he wanted, he really wanted a holistic financial advisor, someone who did the whole thing, looked at his entire situation, gave him a plan, helped work with him, was proactive throughout his relationship.
He wanted a relationship with someone who was holistic in nature. Comprehensive and actually helped him and had his best interest at heart. And at the same time, the acute problem that he was experiencing at that point was I’m sitting on a bunch of cash. I need to make use of this and I want it to be as high growth as absolute possible.
And so he’s sitting here and we’re talking about. Pricing and what we do. And he’s looking at us and saying, well, you guys are far more expensive than if I just went to a Fidelity or a Vanguard and just, you know, put it into passive mutual funds or whatever it is, and, you know, charge a little bit more, or frankly, just go find a financial advisor.
Who’s going to do fancy investments for me. What I didn’t realize at the moment that I realize now. Is I never really spent the time to help him actually understand what his pain was. What ended up happening is we ended up talking about symptoms the whole time, the things that were just presenting themselves to him.
I’ve got liquidity. I’ve got these feelings. I’ve got these things that are happening, but I can’t really tell you what the pain is. And over the weekend, I started thinking about this situation on this plane. And I was just thinking, what are the, what are similar services? To, uh, financial advice. And the first thing that came to my mind were two.
One is medicine. Obviously we talk about here. The other one is actually like finding a mechanic guys. I moved three years ago from Utah to Boise, Idaho, and my wife’s family is from here. And so I at least have that. Um, but they’re all like do it yourselfers. And I’m not, when it comes to my car, I want to have like a good, trusted mechanic that I can go to, I feel like is not.
You know, screwing me over and, um, doing bad things. They’re actually giving it to me straight and they’re honest. And I feel like I can trust them. I have been looking for three years, almost three and a half years at this point to find someone that I can trust that I know is going to do good work. Now, um, when you go look for a new mechanic, those of you who have done this, you’re very familiar with this.
Usually you go to them when there’s some problem with your vehicle. And sometimes if you’re like me, you’ll drive on a, on a check engine light for a long time. Or something like that, or a weird sound. You’ll do that for a long time. And then at some point, something happens where that thing gets so annoying or so big or affects you in a way that you say, I need to figure out what the actual problem is for most of us that are not familiar with cars and how they work.
I have no idea what’s causing this thing, right? I’m experiencing symptoms. But I don’t know what the problem is, so I don’t know what needs to be done to solve the problem, right? Do I just need to make, have you make the sound go away? Or is that sound, um, a result of something that’s even bigger? And so the first thing that I want my mechanic to do is to diagnose the actual core problem, not just the symptom.
Don’t just put a band aid on it. I want you to solve my problem, but that also means that I need to understand what my problem actually is. Because what if it’s something very basic? Right. So the best mechanic, the mechanic I had for years and years and years in Utah, the reason it was my mechanic is because he explained everything to me.
I, he would always help me understand what was actually causing the problem. And if I didn’t understand it, he would pull up a little piece or a diagram or something, and he would describe it to me and he’d pinpoint and say, here’s the problem. This is what’s causing. The symptoms, our clients and our prospects are walking around noticing symptoms, not necessarily getting to the bottom of their problem.
If we don’t isolate those symptoms and diagnose the core problem, the likelihood of them perceiving any value in what we do is just hard to figure out. And so that’s why that is the very first step. The very first component of client perceived value is having the people feel like the problem we solve is big enough in their life.
That they could justify the fee that they’re paying for us and the relationship that they made with us and all the things it needs to happen. First, we cannot present a solution where there’s no attached problem, because if you don’t, they’ll never be able to draw that straight line there. Instead, they’re going to draw imaginary lines to other services, pull it back to that client that I was talking about earlier, right?
He came to me with a presenting situation of, I have liquidity. And if I dug in and I dug in and in hindsight, I would say that likely the actual problem, the reason he was feeling like he needed to do something with this liquidity is he was in a partnership of three or four other dentists at a very highly productive, high growth practice.
And he’s watching them invest their money. The thing that he had at heart was a social job to be done. He felt like he was falling behind if he didn’t do something with his money right away. The thing that we offered was holistic financial advice. To spend time, not urgently, just randomly investing money where it needed to go, but actually understanding our clients and helping them know where they need to go, right?
Diagnosing them with something like elements to say, look, this is the thing that’s causing the problem you’re feeling right now. The reason you’re feeling this way is your liquidity is too high and your taxes are too high and all these things are happening. Let’s help you understand that. So we can draw a straight line from there to the actual solution that we offer.
So we’re not going to get into the solution today, but I want to spend time on that problem. So if I were to name this episode. It would be the value and the importance of isolating and naming a problem. You want to find the actual core problem, not the symptoms of the things that your clients are experiencing.
And if you can do that, that sets the stage one of four to help them perceive the value in that you offer. If the, if the pain or the problem is not big enough, the value just won’t be there. Otherwise you’re just doing overkill for most people. They’re not going to see the value in it because you do too much for them.
Yes. That’s a thing you can do too much for people. So with that, let me know if you have any questions. Find me on LinkedIn, Jordan Haynes, H A I N E S, or you can email us at podcast at get elements. com. Stay tuned because next week we are going to talk about, um, product. I want to talk a little bit about product and solution and how we can make our product or solution, at least in our prospecting process. 📍
Feel more tangible. And you’re going to not want to know what the missing link here on this is. It’s going to be elements, specifically the scorecard that we use as a way to make our process more tangible with that, everyone, I will see you next week. And happy week. And,