Episode 209 – A Client-First Approach: Creating an Unforgettable Service Experience

Episode Transcription

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 into another amazing episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast.

Draye Redfern 01:07

Everybody Draye Redfern here and welcome back to another week of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast. In this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can create an experience something that is memorable, something that gets people to talk about you and actually start a conversation around you your services, something that you did something that you went out of the way for, and how to really craft that opportunity to talk more about you. So that being said, a powerful experience could have a ripple effect that makes it really difficult to track. So as a marketing guy, I like the idea of tracking analytics and dashboards and opt in rates and all of these sorts of things. But if you do a powerful experience, if you go out of your way for somebody, you may not see a direct, you know, ROI on it immediately, you may not be able to track it. But you have more opportunities where someone can talk about you. And you know, refer you more clients or give you more opportunities where your name comes up in conversation. I’ll share some more examples of that in a minute. But having an amazing experience like that can really do some amazing things. But it all starts with a process. So in the last episode, we talked a little bit about like, you know, we have one type one client who loves zili ties. And so we bought him a zili tie, they could have three or $400 tie. And that was a great way of starting the relationship off on the right foot showing that we were actually listening to him. But this starts as I said, it’s a process. So when we initially onboard someone as a client into Redfern media, we ask them and have a questionnaire that we basically either have them fill out, or we simply ask them about what they’re interested in, what makes them get out of bed in the morning and what you know, who are their idols in business? And who are their mentors, who they look up to? What are like, what are the cool summer things or businesses that they like, or a joy or body? And oftentimes you hear like, you know what, I love Elon Musk, and I only drive Tesla’s really well, why is that? Well, I just love the idea of you know, being green and giving back to the environment or not not, you know, reducing my carbon footprint. So that alone, right there tells us they’re pretty, you know, most likely, maybe they’re environmentally conscious. And that opens up different ways that you can sort of explore and go down that avenue. Other things if people would like you to I love wearing power suits Zilly ties happens to come up. There’s all sorts of things that you can initially probe into and ask questions around what actually, you know, what do they like? What do they enjoy? What what are some of their dreams, where do they want to be in a year or three years or five years from now, and figure out how you can actually extract some of that information. And we literally jot all of that down. If we don’t record a meeting, which we oftentimes do in our initial meetings, we jot everything down, simply so that we can have a record of that going forward. And all of our team members make notes, we have a place that we use to store all of those that track interests, people, things that our people, you know, are interested in. And that goes a long, long way. So a couple examples of that was the one I showed last time. We also had a client a year or two ago, who loved a particular brand or particular wine that was produced in Napa that was not easily accessible. And I happen to know another individual through a mastermind who happened to end up just by dumb luck, knowing a Somalia that was affiliated with that restaurant. So I bought a bottle, it was an expensive bottle, it was like $1,000 bottle of wine, I think or something like that. And that was just an amazing way of you know, having and knowing the right people in the right connections, but also listening, in order to give someone something that really meant a you know, meant a lot. We actually had the bottle for a while and thought wait until the right opportunity because we knew that they were celebrating a big wedding anniversary, and then gave that bottle to them as a way to commemorate their wedding anniversary from a conversation that we had, you know, months previously. And that’s just a great way that Holy smokes. These people actually listened to me I mentioned this one thing in passing, and sure enough, fast forward several months, six 8, 12 months later, this is here like this. It’s important and anniversaries, obviously an important date. So finding ways to commemorate things like that. I know that the sweet financial team, like ours is a little bit more we ask questions. And we and we prod and we try to get to the crux of it using, you know, asking questions, and just really putting our Socratic hat on, I suppose. But the sweet team has a very particular very systematic way of, of getting some of these answers from individuals. So Bryan, why don’t you share a little bit about about your process?

Bryan Sweet 05:30

You bet Draye. It’s very important when you do the onboarding process to actually learn what’s important, and what do your clients like. So we do have a client preference survey, we call it and it asks all sorts of questions. And I’ve got one in front of me, and I’ll just maybe read off a couple of things. But we referenced this all the time. If you want to get a client a gift, you want to make sure you don’t send them chocolates, if they’re allergic to chocolate, things like that. And you want to have make sure it’s a meaningful gift and something that they like, and the only way you’re going to know that is by asking them the questions like Draye said, and so we do things like, you know, what’s your drink preference? So do you like coffee, water soda, if it’s tea, what kind of tea if it’s soda, what kind of soda Do you like? And then what happens is we referenced this before, every time the client comes in. And so first thing that the staff does when people come in the door, they go, would you like that cup of coffee with two sugars? Or would you like your diet pepsi that you had last time, and so it catches people off guard, but it shows your attention to detail. And if you have that much detail on drink preference, they go, boy, they must have a lot of systems in place to handle all the other things. But we do like a wine preference. We asked their favorite restaurants for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So if you want to treat them to one of those maybe make it their favorite meal at their favorite restaurant for that meal. What’s their favorite snack? What’s their favorite brand? And a lot of times we’re anniversaries and things will send flowers or plants. Sometimes people are allergic to certain kinds of flowers. So we like do you prefer plants or flowers or no preference? And then is there a favorite type so if they like pink roses with, you know, a spray, you want to you want to know that favorite vacation spots, hobbies, music, do they like their favorite charities, just a really good way for somebody that’s been very successful and literally has everything that they want is to make a donation to their favorite charity, and send them a note and just said I was thinking about you. I sent, you know, a donation to the American Red Cross on your behalf this as a way of saying thank you for our relationship over the last, you know, 10 years or whatever. And a huge, big, big, big one is if they have pets, sometimes that means more than their children. And so what kind of pet do they have? What type of animal is it? What’s the pets favorite treats. And so a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll put little gift baskets that we’ll give away after client appointment. And it might have what we call carnies cookies, which we bake fresh cookies in the office. So she’ll wrap some of those up. And then it might have you know Rover’s favorite dog treats. And it’s amazing if you just put a little bow on and put them in a nice little basket, the effect that that has. And then also you want to maybe know a shirt size in case you’re sending them something like that. Maybe you’re sending them a company shirt, and do they have any medical or food allergies. And you don’t want to be sending them a bag of peanuts, and they’re allergic to peanuts and ended up seeing that they’re in the hospital for the gift that your sound. So ours is very extensive. But if you can’t believe how many times we use it, and how helpful it is, and if you get all this information, it literally gives you years of different gifts. And so you can go through and check off all I did that one did that one. And you know over time, you can repeat it because they don’t necessarily remember when you sent them that last time. It’s just more the thought. And just in general, a really great book on service and experiences is a book by Ken Blanchard called the simple truths of service. So I highly recommend you check it out because it’s really a testament to how exceptional service really does create some room markable stories and Draye. And I’ve told you about some of the stories and I’ll tell you one here in a second. But it really is one of the best ways to find and tie a client to literally forever. And I can probably talk for way too long on this podcast on things that I personally have. But I’ll just give you one recently just happened literally, a week or so ago. And, and this is just the benefit of taking really good care and creating a good experience. So this particular client has been a client of ours for quite a while now. But she was a widow, originally, her husband handled everything. And she was really, really skeptical about trusting anybody, because, you know, she never had to work with it. But her husband said, you know, you want to work with us, because we’ll take good care. So she trusted him. But she just had this really uncertainty about what to expect. And can I believe anything. And so because I wanted her to experience a little bit more behind the behind the scenes and the paperwork, I had the head of my Client Services Department sit in on the meetings, I normally have somebody but it’s not that individual. And so she sat in on literally every meeting over the years. And at our most recent review, we were doing a kind of a follow up on what could we improve are, in one of the questions was, what’s the biggest service are things that we do for you that you appreciate the most. And what she did is she looked at me, and then pointed her finger at my CS person and said her, and it was because of the personal attention to her and making her feel comfortable. When she had a question, she took extra time to explain it. And now she’s one of our biggest advocates. And you know, just great, great client feels very comfortable, we don’t hardly have to, you know, tell her anything, because she just, you know, goes with the flow and, and it all works well. But just that little extra that Jessica took the time to spend with her made all the difference in the world. And that story is led to any nominee referrals we’ve gotten because of that, but they’ve been to other women who lost their husbands, which just happens to be a niche that we serve. And so she’s kind of our, you know, go to person to promote, promote those kinds of things. So Draye any other thoughts or ideas that you think of along those stories?

Draye Redfern 12:54

Yeah, I think that there’s there’s a couple of things in there. Like when we do anything along the lines of like gifting or gifts or anything like that. And we sort of break it down into three categories. It’s basically something that they shared with us. And I gave you a couple examples of that with, you know, a wine a minute ago, and Zilly ties the last episode. But there’s also in my opinion, I think that there’s, I believe in experiences more than just learning from a textbook. And so how we sort of go about that my wife and I is that we usually spend a month or give or take in Europe every single summer, so that our kids have different experiences, and they get to travel and experience different cultures. And we’re very privileged to be able to do that. But what that also allows me to do is have experiences that I can share with other people. And one of the ways we do that, as I was, you know, in Morocco a few years ago, and so I bought a bunch of Moroccan slippers, which is like their traditional garb, and I sent them out to a bunch of clients, we were in Tuscany, and I bought a bunch of wine, I sent that out to clients and you send it with a no like, you know what, the fact that you know, we get to have these experiences to do these things, because amazing clients like you and I just wanted to share a piece of our, our trip with you because I value you so much something along those lines. And that goes a long way. Because all of a sudden, like you’re not only you’re just are you gifting them something, but you’re sharing a piece of you. And maybe they like it, maybe they don’t as far as whatever it is that you share this stuff with them. But it humanizes you, and it makes you more of a relatable person. And that should it doesn’t have to be big or expensive. It’s just a thing that helps to deepen that relationship. And then so that’s, you know, experiences that I have that I could share with clients. It’s information that we share, or that they share with us. And that could be like as a ties, wine, other examples. But there’s also personalized things. And I think that’s the third category of this mix that we sort of think about. And we’ve got a friend of ours, not a client, but a friend of ours travels a lot. And he’s in Japan all the time. And he’ll go to Japan and spend 100 or $200 on dinner or whatever the amount is, and it’s all in Japanese writing and nobody can read it. And so What he basically has a doing is at the end of each dinner held this right like, Hey, Bill, I was thinking of you during this dinner, you know, hope all’s well, all the best. And that’s literally it helped mail a receipt to a client from a dinner that he had in Japan, just as like as a cool one off little odd and then thing that becomes a conversation point. It doesn’t have to be these overt crazy expensive gestures. But that’s one example. Another example of Brian, you could talk to this. And the second is the idea and concept of gift ology. And just finding ways that you can personalize content or things or items to somebody. And I’ll give you an example of that real quick before I turn it over to Bryan. An example of that is dates back 110 or 120 years to this point in time, to the book, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And the main premise of that book is that the sweetest sound to anybody that they could ever hear is their own name. Because people love to hear their own name. So you’d be a fool not to take that idea, that premise, and give that back to somebody. So when you give something that with your own stuff on it, your own swag, and I don’t want to steal the thunder for Brian, but also put their name on it instead and personalize something to go out of your way to personalize it for them. That’s an additional level of care and attention to detail that most people don’t go to, to the to the extremes to do and it’s really making taking that extra time and effort. So that being said, Bryan, I know you guys take the gift-ology concept in your own framework and your way of implementing. So I’ll let you elaborate on that.

Bryan Sweet 16:32

Thanks. Draye. Yeah, you mentioned the word gift-ology. And it’s actually the name of a book by a gentleman by the name of John Rulon. And so if anybody’s having any difficulties on, you know, what do I do? Or how do I do it, first of all, he’s got a service that will automate it for you. And that’s, that’s a really neat service. But if nothing else, it’s a great way of getting some ideas. And as Draye alluded to, it’s a totally different concept. I think we’re all ingrained of a let’s give a you know, a sweet financial t shirt or golf balls with our names on it or something with the firm’s name on it, this is actually 100% different, you don’t really want to put anything with your name on it, but you want to give a nice gift that they want to keep that has a specially made for the Joneses, or Bob and Sally, and that they’ll leave out as a piece so that when their friends come over, they go, where did you get that neat, you know, cheese board, or whatever it happens to be, oh, I got that from our, you know, wealth manager. And it’s a big, big difference. And we do things from, you know, giving for people that have motor homes will make customized mats in front of their, in front of their motor homes. We’ve done you know, wine and cheese thing we do. You know, the big thing is these insulated mugs, and we put their their names and, and things on it because people love those nowadays, they carry them with them. And there’s all sorts of ideas. And obviously, we’ve got limits on what you can spend $100 for any one client $500 for an event. So you can do a lot of great things. without spending a ton of money. And this gift, ology is a great way of kind of getting the idea or actually hire them to do it. Another great way of trying to figure out well, what experiences or things should I be doing for clients is through your client advisory council. So if you don’t have one, this is a great reason to start one. Because what better to do than to ask the actual people that you’re trying to benefit or health? What’s important to them? And what types of things would you like to see what types of events because that’s the other thing that creates an experience that we haven’t talked about is having an event where you invite a certain group of people or all of your clients. And those are great from the standpoint that if it’s multiple people together, you have other people that come and see that you know, their neighbor down the street works with you also. And another great way if you’re doing an event is simply allow your high end clients to invite some of their friends to this event one it’s non threatening to they’ll get a feel of who you actually are as people and that’s really the you know, the people they want to work with is totally understand who are the people behind, you know, the business signs and the big brick building, if you will, and we’ve had great luck with things like that. And for those of you that have been around for a while and know of Ron Carson, Ron’s been doing a concept called Love of Pharaoh Marketing for literally ever. And it’s just really doing events or things for clients that both you and your clients love together. So then it becomes not really work. But it’s a really fun event because one you like doing it, too, you’re gonna hang around a whole lot of other people that have that same interest or passion. And three, it allows you to attract others that also have that passion that you may not have met yet, and give you the ability to maybe get some introductions. So, you know, those are some great ways, but it’s a, it’s a very easy thing to do. But it is something where one you got to capture the data to you gotta make it an ongoing process on how you’re going to deliver it. And three is automating this at some point as much as possible, or how to collect the data in an automated way is really, really important. And I think that’s going to be one of the topics we’ll spend a little more time on, on the third section of the client experience in the next podcast.

Draye Redefern 21:12

Yeah, there’s a lot that we’re going to cover next time around how you can automate certain facets of that, which is going to be really, really solid. But in order to sort of recap some of this, one of the things that we do, especially for our mastermind members and our accelerator members, is talk on the very tactical ways that they can actually go deep on a lot more of what we’re sharing here, the ways the actual strategy is actually facilitating we shared a couple of nuggets with you. But if you’ve ever considered it, I would learn more about the accelerator or the mastermind, because it’s a, it’s a great way for us interact with you at a much deeper level that would actually help you get some of this stuff implemented in your practice this week, or this month, this quarter. And not sometime next year, or the year after that actually helped me make moves a lot faster. So in order to recap, everything we talked about in this episode, we want to help you and you should really should focus on creating an experience. Obviously, like Bryan said, this requires information upfront. So ask for it, you can follow the sweet financial framework. And you could have an actual checklist in a fillable form that they can have to answer their flowers, or their preferences or their wine, or what they like or don’t like all of the facets of that. In order. When you give gifts, you can do one of three things you can share a piece of your experience that you had, you can share a gift or something based off of their preferences. Or you could basically come up with something that’s completely personalized. Like we talked about personalized cheese boards, or mugs, whatever else with their name on it, one of the great resources you can use for that is gift ology. So next week, we’re going to build upon this, taking it to the next level on a variety of ways you can actually be much more intentional with your certain level of service, create the vision for that level of service, and then actually find ways to automate various components of it. So that being said, thank you for listening this week. We look forward to having you next week and another episode of The Ultimate Advisor Podcast. We’ll see you there.

Brittany Anderson 23:02

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 ultimate advisor podcast.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.