Why must you discover your niche? Not because it works… not because others have had success… because you can’t compete in the financial services industry on price. If you try, you will be replaced either by the industry, your firm or your clients. When the measure of your value is price alone, you become replaceable. You must become responsible for the ownership of the perception of your value. In doing so, you must find ideal like-minded clients to serve… because you can’t be all things to all people. Attempting to be a jack of all trades is the quickest way to be forced to exit this industry. Trust me when I say this, You don’t want to miss out on the next 10 years.
Clients that come to you for discounts will leave for discounts.
So you need a niche to remain relevant and become irreplaceable. Not because it may have worked for someone else.
1. You can’t compete on price.
2. You can’t be all things to all people.
3. Price becomes an issue in the absence of value.
4. Prescription without thorough diagnosis is malpractice.
5. Quality over quantity.
You must increase the quality of your clientele but you can’t afford to have your reputation tarnished by making promises you can’t keep. Your authentic value must be made available 24/7 for the world to see and here. This is not the corporate slogan or the company catchphrase… this begins with your client-centered purpose. You must own the words that define your authenticity and it all begins with your shared purpose. Ideal relationships are formed with a shared purpose… this is where you begin to carve out your niche.
I will pay you to solve my problems if you can prove to me that our end-game is mutual success.
~ Ideal Client
Advisor relevance in a robo world is indelibly tied to a client centered purpose.
Your unique client centered purpose is the cornerstone of the foundation that empowers you to earn trust in a digitally transparent world.
Your purpose places you squarely on the side of your clients in every possible situation.
Your principles, values, beliefs, opinions, experiences, expertise, and promised behavior allow you to demonstrate in a tangible fashion exactly how relevant you are in the lives of your ideal audience.
In a robo world advisors must have trusted partners as clients this is the new age of financial services this is the era of collaboration.
Your foundation empowers you to do more than simply earn trust to gather net new clients it enables you to keep your current clients by engaging them in multiple platforms with content that is meaningful to both you and them.
Your foundation empowers you to focus on the value that you can control the most and it affords you the opportunity to promise that value in the form of your behavior.
This tangible, purpose-driven focus supports advisors by enabling them to publish content that leads to the solutions they control the most. This enables advisors to gather complete control over the perception of their value.
This progression of value design in which advisors are making their intangibles tangible also empowers advisers to ask better questions which leads to better critical feedback.
We call this progression of advisor value design infinite advisor alpha.We make it available 24 hours a day on a 100% confidential platform that is completely free for financial advisors to take advantage of.
We are helping advisors around the world remain relevant in the new transparent digital ecosystem of financial services with models like this and micro–moments that develop real, tangible advisor value.
Last week in Newport, Rhode Island I was reminded of what a healthy and robust economy we’re currently living in.
On a quiet Tuesday night, the restaurant we dined at, The Mooring, was anything but quiet. There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. We saw tables turned over multiple times and a constant lineup of eager diners with no reservations anxiously hoping a spot would open for them.
Nearly every great restaurant was experiencing the same. In fact, if a business didn’t have this type of demand, we could make an argument they were likely doing something wrong. As one person at my meeting said, “It’s almost hard to NOT to succeed in this market.”
That restaurant reminded me of one of the “classic” questions from the marketing world: If I were to ask you, what’s the single most valuable competitive advantage a company can have, what would you say?
Some would answer by saying money, or proprietary technology, or a monopoly.
The late Gary Halbert, a famous, contrarian direct response copywriter often wrote that the single most important competitive advantage any business could have was a “starving crowd.”
Halbert argued that the only competitive advantage you needed was an audience, hungry and salivating for your products and services. These restaurants were getting it right.
I love Gary and have often talked about him in my Tidbits, podcast, and while working with clients.
But in this case, Gary was wrong.
Sure, a metaphorically hungry, starving crowd is important, and many businesses have done a fantastic job cultivating that type of audience, but what about the rest of the companies out there?
What about companies facing industry-wide disruption from the Amazons of the world?
My friend and colleague, Colleen Francis, who consults for some of the biggest firms in the Fortune 100 suggested the single biggest threat she sees all clients facing, in nearly every sector, is literally Amazon.
She calls the phenomenon the “Amazonification of Sales.” Colleen says that clients in every sector and every industry now expect the Amazon experience. They’re going online and price shopping. They expect fast turnaround times and speedy delivery. And they expect it, regardless of what you’re selling – even if you’re selling a 2 billion dollar piece of heavy manufacturing equipment, or making a multi-million dollar licensing sale.
I see this outside the Fortune 100 and in my privately-held midmarket clients all the time. They’re all facing customers and clients with exceedingly increased expectations almost solely because of their experiences with Amazon.
And this is why Gary was wrong. The single most important competitive advantage a business has isn’t a starving crowd.
It’s the ability and willingness to change.
It’s getting harder and harder to win with “what got you here.” The strategies and successes of your past can, if you’re not careful, create your downfall. (Consider Blockbuster passing up on buying Netflix).
As one of my colleagues said last week which I thought was brilliant, “If it can happen to #generalelectric, it can happen to you. Nobody is immune.”
So here’s a question for you to consider.
Are you experimenting with enough change?
None of us have even a smidgen of the resources available to Amazon, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be changing at a similar speed.
For example, Amazon, Google, Apple and others are famously known in business circles for innovating through small teams and constant micro-experiments running all the time.
What experiments are you running in your business?
What processes are you engaged in changing or improving?
What can you change about your sales process, your customer experience, your decision-making process, etc?
There’s enormous pressure in the business world to optimize for results today. But the magic lies in optimizing for today while innovating for tomorrow. Excellent management can balance those objectives carefully.
Your Challenge For The Week: Devise a low-risk experiment you can run for a short time and share it with me.
Here are a few examples.
If you’re a VP of Sales, consider a new step or reducing steps in your sales process.
If you’re in charge of #customerservice, devise a new way of handling complaints, criticism, and feedback.
If you’re in charge of #customerexperience, consider testing something new as part of the customer’s post-purchase experience, or try testing a new way of caring for customers in a retail environment.
If you often launch new products into the market, try pre-selling those products before launching them.
The key is to make your experiments low-risk, and low-stakes, but enough to help you change, pivot, adapt, remain relevant, and thrive well into the future.
As a bonus challenge: Ask all your subordinates (VP Sales, CMO, CFO, etc.) to make a list of all the processes, tasks, and repetitive things the company does on a regular basis. If you asked why they’re done in a certain way, and the response is, “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it….”
Start there.
In this three part blog post I am attempting to simplify what I have known to be fundamentally true about advisor value design for the past three decades… It can be tricky sometimes to simplify the complex.
Your relevance hinges on your ability to promise your behavior. By promising your behavior you are able to get and keep ideal clients with your digital filter. By promising your behavior you’re able to control the perception of your relevance. By promising your behavior you’re able to demand reciprocal actions from your trusted clients. By promising your behavior you’re able to gather feedback that matters. Your promises tied to behavior leads to the value that you control the most which allows you to take complete control over the perception of your value.
Earning trust controlling perception and creating collaborative relationships are the three main elements that are required for survival in a robo world.You must be able to promise your behavior to create that culture by design.
Amplify the value that you can control. Take complete control over how that value is perceived. And maximize your relevance to get and keep ideal clients in a robo world.
In order for your business to have a positive change 30 days from right now, you must start making incremental changes daily. And those incremental changes must add up in a way that makes sense. Your focus must be appropriate the system you choose to maximize your relevance must make complete sense and you must carry the discipline that it takes to make incremental improvements daily.
When your client-centered purpose has been defined by you, it empowers you to earn trust quickly in a digital world. This tangible demonstration of your shared interests with your ideal audience is the cornerstone of your unique foundation of trust. The words you choose to define your purpose must carry the weight of the seriousness of your calling… in other words, your purpose can’t be a catchphrase.
When you are able to align your purpose with your principles and values, you are beginning to demonstrate your integrity in a tangible format.
Your beliefs and opinions must be demonstrable as well. After all, they are why you get paid in the first place. If you aren’t forming beliefs and opinions about this industry and the value you provide to your clients, you aren’t really in the business of financial advice.