Do You Exceed Your Own Expectations?

Here’s a resolution we should all keep throughout the year 2020: provide backing to everything we say to our clients. Think about how many empty things you say on a daily basis, like saying that your day is going well. While this is harmless in daily conversations, it can leave a bad taste in the mouths of your clients if they don’t feel your promises are fulfilled.

We’ve found a few ways to make sure you’re using specific language in a way that demonstrates the value of your business:

• Rely on your history. If you have the numbers to back up a claim, this is the best opportunity to use it. Saying that you’re able to save your clients 40% or more speaks much more than simply saying you can save people money.
• Showcase your accomplishments  If you’ve been recognized for your work, your clients want to know about that. It increases your accountability and helps you build trust even before meeting new partners or clients.
• Share past work. Obviously, this piece comes with guidelines. You can’t violate any confidentiality you’ve agreed upon with your clients, but you can share general overviews of people you’ve worked with in the past. It can allow prospective clients to resonate with your work.

By utilizing these tactics, you’re able to really put your money where your mouth is. Not only will you be able to attract new opportunities that are in line with your mission as a business, but you can end each day knowing that the relationships you’re building are genuine.

How Do You Stand Out?

Today’s businesses are all tackling the same old problem: how do we stand out in an industry that’s full of professionals? While your expertise is certainly important, it’s the holistic image of your brand that allows you to truly impact your audience, from the services you offer, to the way you treat your clients.

One of your biggest differentiators is how clients feel after working with you. Do you remember their names and make them feel welcome when they first arrive? Do you make sure their questions are answered properly and fully? Are you able to leave them with insightful thoughts they can carry forth into their daily lives? Other impacts can include:

• Tangible items
• Compelling stories
• Valuable feelings

At the end of the day, it’s not always the things you give to your clients, but the feelings and value they’re instead able to experience. By remaining thoughtful about your impact on clients, you can make sure you’re truly representing your brand well. Genuine and authentic interactions will always outlast fads and stand the test of time.

Channel Your Expectations

When it comes to dealing with customers, it is incredibly important to make sure that you understand your business model. The phrase, “understand your WHY” has been repeated so many times that now, people are obsessed with positioning their products and services to all sorts of niche markets. However, the way that your customers perceive you is just as important, if not more so, than the way you perceive yourself as a business. Here are some of our top tips for increasing your overall customer satisfaction:

1. Pick up the phone. Take the timeout of your day to connect with your clients and work towards building a lasting connection.
2. Gather feedback. Not sure if your strategies are working? Ask your clients. You might be surprised with how helpful their advice can be.
3. Train your staff. As your business grows, chances are you won’t be able to balance every form of communication. By bringing on staff members who are open to understanding your brand, you can make sure every interaction is up to your standards.
4. Anticipate their needs. As your relationship continues to grow, you’ll learn more and more about what your clients need and with time, can have an idea of what services they’ll need before they even have to ask.

By keeping your customers in mind, you’ll be able to work with them to make sure that their expectations are not only met, but exceeded.

Manifest Your Motivators

Simon Sinek started the revolution: how can you do anything if you don’t understand the why behind it? With an open mind and some spare time, it’s easy to think about why you do things. Why did you choose this particular career path? Why do you target the clients that you do?

While this might be obvious to you, your clients might miss your oh-so-obvious message if it’s not shared properly. When it comes to sharing your why, the cohesiveness behind your message is just as important as the message itself.

Take some time to evaluate your branding presence. Does your LinkedIn bio explain why you love what you do? Does your website capture the energy of your office? By making sure every representative of your work is accurate, your clients are that much more likely to trust you with their most difficult needs.

You can even take this further than evaluating introspectively. Why are your clients passionate about their work? By understanding their actions, you’ll be able to immerse yourself in their brand and make an even bigger impact.

It’s a long conversation to be had in order to understand the underlying motivations behind everyday actions, but in doing so, you’ll be much better positioned to truly make a difference with your work.

Enhancing The Customer Experience Will Lead to More Referrals

Referrals, referrals, referrals. We constantly hear how important they are and how it’s one of the best ways to obtain new clients. But, how exactly do we achieve as many referrals as possible? What can we do to differentiate ourselves to ensure that we’re receiving those referrals? One thing I want to discuss is the importance of providing exceptional customer service. If you switch your focus from trying to obtain referrals from every client you see to focusing on providing the best experience possible, your referrals will come naturally. In fact, just one happy client could result in 9 referrals for your firm. Whenever a client feels that a financial advisor is making a genuine effort to understand the client and provides valuable recommendations, they’re more likely to spread the word about you. Therefore, a positive experience is a must when trying to obtain referrals. With that being said, I’d love to provide some basic tips on ways to enhance the customer experience that will result in more referrals for your firm.

Tip #1 

Don’t forget the little things about your clients. Is today your client’s daughter’s birthday? Send a birthday card! Keeping the little things in mind will make the client feel special and cultivate a healthy, engaged relationship.

Tip #2

Consistency. Don’t tell the client you will follow up constantly and only do it once. If there is a mistake on your part, don’t continue making the same mistake. Consistency is key when working with clients.

Tip #3

Don’t be intimidated to ask. Of course, providing excellent customer service will be the first option for obtaining referrals. However, don’t ever be afraid to ask for it. If you have worked with your client for quite some time now, feel free to mention something like “If you’ve enjoyed my service and you’re happy with the outcome, don’t hesitate to tell a friend.”

At the end of the day, ensuring a positive customer experience will result in more referrals for your firm.

Create a Culture Focused on the Value You Bring to Customers

In today’s society, one of the best ways a company can be successful is to provide great customer service. But, is that really enough? Working in customer service goes deeper than just ensuring it is “good.” We want to make sure that we deliver a value to the customer through our services or products. Some of the best companies worldwide have developed a culture within the organization around the value they deliver to their clients; companies such as Apple, Ritz-Carlton, Disney, Amazon, and the list goes on and on. So, how should companies go about creating a culture focused on delivering value to clients?

1. Customer knowledge. As you build your book of business, really get to know your customers and especially their expectations of you. A lot of the times we deliver our services but forget to check if they align with the expectations from our customers.
2. Create a customer service strategy. Often different segments of an organization aren’t aware of the company’s strategy or their understanding of it doesn’t align with the company’s. Therefore, creating a customer service strategy focused on delivering value to customers and spreading it throughout the whole organization will allow for consistency.
3. Listen to your employees. The employees are on the frontline of daily customer interaction. Therefore, they may have customer insights that could be valuable for your customer knowledge. It will also provide a framework of ways to develop your customer service strategy.
4. Loyalty. Don’t say you’re going to contact a customer in a week and then never contact them. Follow through with your promises and check up on customers regularly. What this does is it creates loyalty which means that you have provided a level of customer service that has exceeded expectations.

Not only will these actions steps result in higher customer satisfaction, but it will also greatly differentiate your business from companies who simply “deliver” their services or products.

Attracting Your Ideal Client

In today’s world, there are financial advisors left and right. As the businesses grow so will the need for clients. One thing that most financial advisors and planners are constantly curious about is: how do you attract a wealthier clientele? In other words, your ideal client. There’s a lot that goes into attracting prospects. Today, I’d like to focus on the marketing aspect of it and provide you with four tips you can use to find your ideal client.

1. Be the best at what you do. What are you doing differently than other financial advisors? What’s your track record? How are you sharing this with your prospects? In order to attract a wealthier clientele, it’s important for you to become the best at your service so that the client will feel confident with the assets they’re going to trust you with.
2. What’s your story? I know I mention this often in my blogs but I can’t stress enough the importance of having a unique story for you as an individual and your company. You need make sure your story is providing value to the customer. Remember, people will pay for your story.
3. Marketing communication must be 50% emotions 50% logic. Going off my #2 advice, how you communicate the value that you can provide to your clients is important. An example of combining emotions and logic into marketing communication would be: “Through my daily financial practices, I have been able to change people’s lives by helping 5,000 clients.”
4. Ensure you are visible to your ideal clients. I know this seems obvious, but sometimes we get so caught up in our marketing efforts that we forget about our ideal clientele. Attend networking events, whether they’re virtual or live, be a speaker on webinars and events, and write articles and books. All of these ideas will not only make you more visible but will also build your credibility!

Fostering Business Relationships

Whenever you think of building relationships so that people can trust you, and so that your relationships grow, do you think of business? If you don’t, you should. Relationships are something we do want to grow in our businesses. Especially if you’re a financial advisor and you want your clients to trust you. Why are they important? Think of all the referrals you’ve received last year from your best clients. Some of those were probably your biggest sales. Now, try to quantify that number. Once you realize the importance of how you make your clients “feel” as you build those relationships, that in return could be helping your business grow.

We’ve discussed the benefits of building business relationships, now let’s focus on how we should go about doing so. When you first attract a possible client, here are a few things that will go through their head: Can I trust this advisor? Will they understand my unique situation? And, will this advisor’s advice be unbiased? The goal for you is to triumph all of these questions. Do so by being transparent in your process, empathize with their situation, and trust them back.

Following these guidelines will not only increase trust with your potential clients, but also develop those business relationships. In return, both the client and you, as a business professional, are better off.

From Cold Calling to New Clients

Cold calling has been around for longer than we can imagine. Yet, it’s still very alive today even with having a 2% success rate, which is mostly for the highly skilled sales professionals. Why doesn’t cold calling work nowadays? Firstly, it’s simply annoying for the consumers to receive, especially since they are busier now more than ever before. With ever increasing technology, consumers can easily research anything online. Therefore, they’re most likely not to engage or listen during the phone call. For that reason, we must redefine modern cold calling. Have you ever been persuaded to choose something simply because someone you know told you to? Let’s be honest, we all have! So why don’t we do the same when we’re reaching out to potential clients? Think of how different your cold calling conversation would go if you said: “Hi, my name is Jodie Binning, I’m the owner of Three Point Marketing. One of my clients mentioned that you need a little bit of help in growing your marketing and developing your website.” By hearing “one of my clients mentioned,” the consumer instantly develops trust. Instead of randomly cold calling, find connections and turn them into “warm calls.” I’ll leave you with a couple of tips to ensure your call is successful:

1. Create a list of all connections. And use them. Doesn’t matter how big or small you feel each connection is.
2. Practice. Practice. Practice. Do you think actors ever film a scene without practicing their script? Absolutely not. Write out what you would like to say in your call and the call is half done for you.
3. Listen. One of the main issues in the modern age is that we talk before we listen. When you actively listen, the customer feels that you care. You also want to ensure that you’re asking strategic follow up questions.
4. Ask for a meeting at the right time. After you’ve used your practiced conversation, listened to the customer’s needs, and know that you can help them: ask for the meeting.

And just like that, you’ll turn your modern cold call into a connection!

New Year, Stronger Marketing For Your Firm

As 2017 comes to an end, it is the perfect time to look back on annual reports and evaluate your progress. Although it is important to look back on your performance, it’s also just as important to plan for the upcoming year. The new year can be intimidating, especially when competition is heavy. While planning your marketing for the new year you should make sure that it is: strategic, measurable, attainable, and cost effective. There are various ways to develop your marketing plans on a budget but one of the best ways is to provide a “personal touch” and connection that most clients don’t expect, but certainly value. This means going above and beyond for the customer by showing extra care and doing things out of the ordinary that the customer doesn’t expect. Here are 5 methods in approaching a “personal side” of marketing:

1. Have someone in charge of marketing. This doesn’t mean you need to develop a whole marketing department. Is there someone in your office that you consider a “people’s person” or someone who likes to put events together? Assign them to the marketing tasks. The tasks could vary from arranging seminars and events to updating the website and blogs. Rather it’s having a marketing consultant, an intern, or someone from your office, having someone assigned to the job will ensure that it gets done.
2. Arrange a reverse seminar. Instead of you presenting to your client, have them present to you. This will put the “spotlight” on the client and will allow for them to feel engaged.
3. Conduct an annual event. We all know of a few companies in our areas that are associated with certain charity events. That’s the goal for your firm. Having an annual event, especially involving charity, will not only help out your community but will also provide advertising opportunities.
4. Pick up your phone and call! Sounds like something you should already know, but it’s one of the more effective (and free) ways to market. Instead of sending an email, give your client a call. Have the call be from the financial advisor or attorney that is working with the client. Discuss with them any business updates and ask if they have any questions. This also allows for the client to develop a relationship with the firm and feel like they are a part of the process, instead of being left in the dark. Make sure to personalize each call and switch up the subject.
5. Go above and beyond with the simple things. This means whenever a client is in the office, make a fresh cup of coffee and add a snack with it. Have a welcome sign whenever the client is entering the office. Provide a welcome package, make parking arrangements, give a map, etc. Go the extra mile so that the client feels truly appreciated. And this will not only help your “personal side” marketing, but will also provide word-of-mouth marketing. The clients will tell their families, friends, and coworkers about this.

Have more ways on providing a “personal side” to marketing? Tell us by leaving a comment below: