Episode 207- Tagging: Marketing Your Team’s Value

Episode Transcription

Speaker 1 0:08

This is the Ultimate Advisor Podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful and scalable practice. Each week we’ll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals, your team, your marketing, and your business operations, helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you’ve dreamed of. You’ll be joined by our hosts Bryan Sweet, who is moving fast towards a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to improve their operations and company culture, and Draye Redfern who can help you systematize and automate your practices marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let’s jump in to another amazing episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast.

Brittany Anderson 1:08

Welcome back to your Ultimate Advisor Podcast. This is Brittany Anderson. And once again, I’ve got with me and Draye Redfern and Bryan Sweet. If you didn’t catch the last couple episodes, you absolutely need to, you need to go back you need to listen to the last two weeks because it really brings us up to speed on on what we’re going to talk about today. And today’s topic is all along the lines of your team. Again, you may be posing the question of how does my team what on earth does it have to do with a simple marketing tip? Well, once again, it has everything to do with it. So the emphasis here and again, we’ve talked a lot about teams like that’s kind of my personal Mojo is the culture, the team build all that good stuff. But it’s a huge marketing point. And it’s actually a PR opportunity. So the side effect of this is before you start thinking about how you can market your team, how you can talk about the capabilities that you have added, it really helps you do a check to see if you’ve hired the best of the best. Have you hired somebody that is even better than you at the given job description that you’ve laid out, have you brought on people and talent that are just knocking out of the park, because if you’ve done this, right, the next thing that we’re going to talk about should be really, really easy, really simple for you to implement. So it boils down to and I’ve said this before, again, if you’ve subscribed to our podcast for a while now, you’ve heard me talk about the importance of team the importance of building culture, and not just the woowoo, warm, fuzzy stuff, but really how that helps you build your business. If you have not been subscribed for very long, I highly recommend you go back, and you listen to previous episodes, especially around the concept of team because without your team, you’re gonna have a hard time having a business. So just to kind of spin this back to marketing is that you have an opportunity through your team members to differentiate yourself. Because what’s the saying out there is that there’s one thing that are one being that nobody else can be. And that’s you as a human, right. So when you think about this for your team, the same thing rings true. What do you have? Like what do you truly have that no one else does, because pretty much everybody across the board can say, we deliver great service, we have an investment process, we have, you know, model portfolios, we take care of our clients, we put service first, those are things that technically, everybody can say now, not everybody delivers on it, which is why you need to listen to the last two episodes. But they can say that right? But nobody else not a single person can say they have you or your current team on staff. So whether it’s your concierge service, your client service gal, your marketing guy, your amazing team and advisors, the list goes on. Those are all people that you have that is different than anybody else. So I want to bring up this concept called tagging. Tagging means talking about the good. So this is something that we learned we’ve done some work with Chris Smith, the creator of campfire effect, and that’s who brought this term to us. And, and we’ve really latched on to it and not just not just because it’s a cool term, but because it actually works. So we’ve mentioned this before, but in a slightly different context. So even if you’ve heard us talk about tagging in previous episodes, I really want you to pay attention to this. So Bryan, I’m actually gonna let you take it from here on what we’ve been working on in the office and how we’re really focused on tagging or talking about the good with the amazing people with the amazing team that we have at Sweet financial I’d love for you to share some of the things that we’re doing.

Bryan Sweet 4:53

Love to I have found this to be one of the most amazing concepts and it as you alluded to earlier, it’s amazing because it absolutely works incredibly well. And I get asked the question a lot, like, how do you do all the things you do, Bryan, you run a very successful wealth management firm, you’ve got four other businesses, you take 16 weeks off a year, how do you do all that? Do you not sleep? Well, that might be part of it. But no, it’s really this tagging concept. And I’ve taken it to hopefully, another level. And it’s really about talking about other members of your team, and all of their capabilities. So if you’re getting phone calls, from clients on investment strategy, or you’re getting phone calls about a Bryan, I need to change a beneficiary, what you need to learn is you need to introduce your clients to the people that do those actual chores. And when you actually introduce that person to your client, say, amazing, wonderful, and these will all be true things. But if they don’t know all the great things that this person has done, and is capable of doing, then they need to hear it so that in the future, they know you’ve basically given permission to that person to handle that scenario down the road. And I will tell you, if you do that, in front of the team member, you are going to have one happy team member. And they’re going to remember that and feel very proud and accomplished by you saying that in front of others. And so it’s been an amazing scenario. And I literally do that for every duty or chore that I’m not uniquely qualified at or things that I know somebody else can do better, or things that I don’t do. So literally, I have very few tasks, I do what I do very well. And everything else is handled by a team member that I’ve pre qualified. And let the clients know that these are exceptional people who have exceptional talents, they’ll handle it amazingly well, matter of fact, they’ll handle it much better than I do. And we do this all the time. And we are constantly trying to promote the team instead of me and presented as Sweet Financial versus Bryan Sweet. And if you can learn to do that, and give other people credit when it’s justifiably do in front of the client that will pay big big dividends. And the other thing is, though, is it won’t work. If you don’t show confidence, or trust in others, your clients are always going to rely on you. And having done this, you know, literally for years and maybe have stepped it up. Since we’ve learned some new techniques from Chris, it’s amazing that I rarely get a phone call an email, a question from a client, because they don’t call me they already know they’re supposed to call anybody else in the office because they know that person is actually going to get it done more efficiently, faster, and do it better than I’m going to do it. Am I missing anything? Brittany, anything you could add to that?

Brittany Anderson 8:17

No, you know, I think Bryan, the whole concept of tagging is just so powerful. And if again, if we spin this a little bit to the marketing aspect is, what happens is you’re basically marketing your people. So you know, something that we’ve done to is in some of our external communications, because Bryan said, you know, he’s not, he’s not at the point in his career, he’s not taking new clients anymore, you know, he’s servicing the heck out of the few that he sees, but that’s just not where his energy is best spent. He’s the visionary for the firm. I mean, he’s looking at ways that we can, we can even better serve our clients that we can, you know, reach greater markets that we can really, you know, be creative, be innovative, and stay at the top of our game that way. So something that we do is you know, if we have any sort of promotion going on, you know, we have anything that we’re you know, trying to drive business will actually use, we have a gal on our team will use her face, you know, we’re touting her, we’re talking about how she is, you know, so exceptional at x, y and z in the company. And that’s actually what we’ve done at some of our with some of our external marketing. You know, we’re getting ready to launch a webinar pretty soon here. And that’s all her so again, it without Bryan kind of putting that stamp of approval behind it saying, you know, here’s why she’s amazing. And here’s why you should listen to her. That credibility factor may not be there as quickly just because she’s not the one that’s been you know, that founded the business how many years ago, and that’s been the one that’s been kind of the face and the name and all of that good stuff. So this is again, if you think about this, and let’s just actually take it a step further, is if you think about what your vision is for the future as maybe a founder of the business as a primary advisor aser if you’re looking to, you know, maybe work a little less, maybe spend less time in the business, maybe you want a succession plan that doesn’t involve you working until you die, or working yourself to death or seeing, you know, those those 7080 hour weeks that you maybe you saw when you first started in this business, if you’re looking at that this is a great opportunity for you to not only tell the fact that you have amazing team members that you’ve got people supporting and Like Bryan said, I mean, we have our clients call, and they talked to exactly who it is, it’s going to take care of their issue, that’s going to solve their problem that’s going to serve them in the way that they need. And that setup for purpose, you know, not only, you know, because we do have a team, we do have individuals here that can support people so they can get faster service, but also for the fact that it frees Bryan up to be able to do the things he wants to do, to be able to be the visionary to be able to take time away, you know, a huge component of what we teach in the mastermind. And what we talk about in our accelerator program, too, is that Bryan takes 16 weeks away from the business every year. And we’re not just you know, continuing on as as good or whatever, just you know, sitting stagnant, we’re actually still growing. And that’s exciting. I mean, that’s good stuff. And that’s what you want to aim for. So when we talk about talking up your team, when we talk about, you know, making sure that you use this as a marketing opportunity to actually promote the skills that are on your team. This is huge. This is like multifaceted. Here, there’s so many reasons that you should be doing this, not just because you want to market because you have great team members, and you want to share their expertise and all that good stuff. But there’s a long term positive effect here that allows you to be freed up that allows your team to actually do what the heck they’re good at what they’re hired to do. Because again, I’m going to go on a little tangent here. But one of the biggest issues that happens when you have a primary advisor you have the founder you have the owner, is when you start crossing the line, and dabbling back into the roles that you’ve hired other people to do. So it’s basically allowing you to not only get the heck out of their way, but to also tout and talk about the amazing things that your people do. Because that just makes you an even even more rounded business. So Draye, before I take this and just start talking teams like crazy, I gotta have you jump in.

Draye Redfern 12:19

I love this. And there’s a lot to that I can say weighing on here, there’s a couple points I want to make. Like for me inside of my company, it is the same business with the financial team, like a week doesn’t go by all right, don’t get complimented by someone on my team. Because they do go above and beyond, they’re willing to to stay late, they have authority to go above and beyond what the clients whether it’s giving out a phone number or calling after whatever the scenario is. But there’s something really cool with the tagging concept that I want to bring up, you tag the client handed off to a fellow team member. But sometimes you have more confidence in them than they have themselves. And that’s just a human thing is that some people just really struggle with confidence, they may have the best work ethic and the best work product and they take great care of the people around them. And they do an amazing job. And everything is wonderful. But they still don’t necessarily feel confident in themselves. So tagging can do an amazing good to help increase some of those confidence levels. I’ll share a brief story about this. I have had someone on my team for about two and a half years now. So I won’t share her name. But she has been with me for a while. She’s a single mother with two kids. Absolutely one of the hardest workers you will ever meet nicest absolutes we aren’t will bend over backwards for you. But as struggled with confidence, because she’s been a single mom. And she’s like trying to work at trying to piece all of these things together and just trying to do her best. And it’s a really tough scenario. And one of the things that I I’ve used the tagging concept for a while now is talking her up every single time that she’s on a joint call or handing off tagging via email even on how amazing it is that it is to work with her and be around her that the client is an amazing hands working with this particular person. Well, I do that because I want the people around me to to recognize and feel appreciated and valued. But there are so many ancillary benefits that are really hard to quantify. And I’ll tell you one of the things is that over the Christmas holiday she said something like basically working for you has been one of the biggest blessings of my entire life. Because you have given me so much more confidence in myself than I ever realized that I had and I feel like I’m a part of something bigger. I feel like I’m a part of a family and I could not have had that without you. I melted I I’m getting like choked up even just sort of talking about it because that’s like there’s so many things that you can do for your team when you not only just talk up your team and how great they’re going to take care of with the with the people around them, but it’s just it’s so good. It just it takes five seconds of your time. And your client feels like they’re going to be taken care of and your team member, we don’t always know what our team members and our employees and team, you know, are dealing with outside of work. And those little things, those little boosts can go the longest way to make like someone’s day, make someone’s week and give them the confidence, they need to even step it up to the to the next level. So, along that path, you know, that’s something that I wholeheartedly agree with, and embody and all of these things, but to that effect, you know, Brittany was mentioning Bryan taking 16 weeks off here, I’d love to get to that point, I’m, my business is not quite there yet, to where I can walk away from basically a third of the year, one day, embodying all of the principles that we’ve talked about on the podcast isn’t just something that’s like platitudes, like, we do it, you know, different stage in my career than what Bryan is that. But it’s a really cool feeling that when you actually embody a lot of the things, and you have the team there, and they have the confidence and all of these sorts of things. I walked away for basically three weeks and the business grew, I wasn’t involved in any of it, the no front end sales calls, no back end client service, nothing. And it’s just it’s a really cool experience to know and feel that when you make these things, and you instill them in your practice, it’s not always immediate, anything worthwhile takes time. But when you have that team around you, and you do build them up, they’ll want to go to bat for you even when you’re not around. And that’s just it’s so freakin fun. And it’s so cool. And it’s just an amazing thing to be a part of, to have just amazing people that you want to be around, in or out of the office. So a couple things there, I guess pretty do impact or maybe your loopback on but that’s my take on some of the the team building side of things.

Brittany Anderson 16:42

Yeah, Draye, you know, I think, Well, for one, I’m sitting here thinking I know exactly who you’re talking about on your team. And she’s absolutely amazing. So I love that you are that for her. And you know, gosh, think about this for a second, if you’re listening here as the primary, the key advisors, the head honcho, the boss, whatever it is, you know, think about what Draye has shared, and really what that does for your team. So by you talking people up by you doing the tagging method that Bryan kind of elaborated on there, too. You know, by doing those things, you have no idea how you’re impacting people’s lives. So yes, it is a cool tip, to be able to basically use the resources you already have, let’s just call it in your business to be able to do you know, marketing, and to talk people up and to share their expertise and all of that great stuff. And it makes you look really good to your clients. Because they’re seeing, it’s more than just you, they’re seeing that you actually have a support system around that can serve them and do what needs to be done for them and all of that good stuff. But you just don’t know, the side effect, like you don’t know how you’re impacting somebody’s life by talking about them in such a positive way, by saying those things in front of them even by building their confidence, and really helping them soar and spread their wings. And you know, you just don’t know. And so I think that’s so important to remember is that as you’re doing this, as you’re building up that team, as you’re ensuring that, you know, people are being promoted for the good things that they do, you know, it’s really darn easy to catch somebody screwing up. It’s really easy to be like, Oh, you dropped the ball, or you’re, you know, messed up on this one. But it’s a little bit harder to be intentional with catching people doing things, right. And that’s what this is all about. It’s about focusing on what your people do, right. It’s about, you know, putting that out into the world and sharing with your clients sharing with your prospects, about all the great things that your team does, and continues to do for people. So before I go into a couple quick takeaways, Bryan, Draye, anything else at all that you want to add?

Bryan Sweet 18:42

Brittany, I just wanted to make one quick comment and maybe simplify it by saying tagging costs no money, and takes no time, but pays unlimited benefits. So why wouldn’t you want to do it?

Brittany Anderson 18:59

Yeah, that’s so good. taking just a couple minutes to talk people up is so good. So I think that’s a good lead in into, you know, the first takeaway is before you can do this before you can really use this tagging method before you can start promoting your team in a way that helps you to grow your business to grow your impact. You have to do a quick assessment of your team. Are you proud? Like really? And this is a tough conversation to ask, especially if you’re somebody who is a relationship person, because chances are if you are that if you’re wired that way, this can be a tough gut check. But are you proud to promote them to the public? You know, can you honestly take a look at your team members? And for each and every one can you say gosh, I would love to talk this person up because they are amazing, because they are if you listened to last week, they’re totally in congruent with what they talked about what they deliver their incomplete congruency with what the company promises and what the company delivers, and I’m excited to be able to promote them If you cannot answer yes, for each and every team member, you have some really, really big decisions to make. And I completely understand that that is painful. You know, I’ve heard it happen, you know, with with all of the different we do a lot of discovery calls, people checking in on our programs, you know, talking about the mastermind and the accelerator, and all of this good stuff that we help people with. But one of the biggest things I hear is that they have a team member that’s been there for a lot of years. And you know, they know they’ve probably outgrown them, they know, they maybe need to make some upgrades on the team. But they’re really reluctant to do so because you know, that person has helped them get to where they’re at. And that’s, that’s really tough, and you have to handle that with care. So I’m going to do a total shameless plug here. You know, if you found yourself with that, especially when it comes to team because we have a lot of content and material. In our 90 Day sprint in that accelerator program I’ve mentioned, we go deep on teams in our Mastermind program as well. If you want to talk, I highly recommend you to book a discovery session, book a quick call with us. And we can talk through how we actually help people do all the things that we have talked about in the last three weeks, it makes a difference. And we understand that some of this team stuff, you know, some of the marketing things around team can be kind of tough to navigate, and you need a who in your corner, you need somebody that can help you navigate this with a totally unbiased perspective. So shameless plug, I highly recommend you book a discovery call you book a strategy session to see how we could potentially help you. You know, and the other thing too, is we try to save some of our very, very in depth really cool tricks for our mastermind members just because they’re great, they’re awesome, we all have the same objective, we have a really great time together. But one thing that I wanted to just give a little bit of highlight too, is that there’s things you can do with your bios. So if you go to any financial advisors website, you’re going to see literally the same bio structure across the board. Okay, it’s going to talk about your schooling, it’s going to talk about, you know, maybe your journey a little bit to become a financial advisor, you know, maybe a little bit about you know, your process or what you do. And then it’ll round out with a quick update on your family. And that’s it. And literally, if you go start searching, I guarantee that you will find that across the board, because we all structure at the same. That’s how we were taught to write bios. So what I would encourage you to do is to have your team actually write up something like what makes them different, what makes them special, have them toot their own horn horn a little bit, you know, maybe tell a little bit of their story. So I’m not going to give away the whole secret sauce behind it. But that’s something to just look at, that’s something to consider is how can your team differentiate themselves through something that maybe has higher traffic, like your website, like your collaterals, that you put out all of that good stuff, so I’m gonna leave it at that, because those are a couple things that you you really need to do. So number one quick assessment on your team. Are you proud to promote everybody? Do you feel like they’re they’re really difference makers? Are they movers and shakers? You know, are they people that you feel so excited to be able to promote to be able to tag and then the second thing is, is help them differentiate themselves on your site on anything that people would look at, that allows them to see the team that you have and the how they make a difference for people and how they serve and what role they play in your company. So that rounds us out. This was week three of the three part series where we talked about really simple marketing tips for your business. We will catch you right back here as we dive into the next episode of your Ultimate Advisor Podcast. Hey there, Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you’re hearing on our Ultimate Advisor Podcast, don’t keep us a secret. Share us with other advisors that you think would benefit from the messages that you are hearing. The easiest way to do that is to simply send them to ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. And if you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimate advisor mastermind.com. As always, we are so happy to have you here with us as part of the Ultimate Advisor community and we look forward to a continued relationship.