Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Raghav Sharma
RECORDING COMMENCES: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Now, for a financial advisor, we are a digital marketing partner. One of our most important functions is exposing them to the users of GuideVine, so the consumers who come in looking for a financial advisor, but over and above that, what we really want to help advisors do is differentiate themselves online and maximize their digitals footprints, so we spend time getting to know them, figuring out what makes them tick, and then drawing that out into a series of videos that they can use to show how they are different from other advisors so that the right types of clients find them, and they then use those and all their other digital properties in the right way. Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: We had one advisor down in D.C. who called us up one day and was over the moon, was just really happy with GuideVine because he had gotten two new clients from us. We kind of looked at each other, you know, everyone was kind of confused because we had never seen anyone schedule a meeting with him via our system, and so we kind of poked and prodded and we asked him a little bit more and what happened is that two different clients of his had each given a referral to two different sets of people and those two sets of people Googled this person and the first thing that came up were the videos that we had shot with him. They watched those videos and they said, hey, this person is actually someone we could see ourselves doing business with, and they reached out and it reached a positive conclusion for the advisor. So, he was tremendously happy with his digital footprint for sure. Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: You know, a lot of people can say, oh, I work with COIs or I work closely with the local CPA and if you have an accountant I’ll work with them, but it’s just the way that he introduced it. The other thing is avoiding industry jargon. Right? We could probably offer the service to advisors for free if we could charge them for every time people said holistic fiduciary. [Laughter] For a client, that doesn’t mean much. So, it’s saying what is a fiduciary? Just saying what is a fiduciary. I mean, now, after John Oliver, you can get away with it because people understand it a little bit more. So, those are the two biggest things and then the other things is [sic] advisors sometimes are afraid to be human. We have one advisor in New Jersey who — one of his videos is all about coaching his daughters’ lacrosse teams and that’s because he works with New Jersey parents and he tends to work with parents who are hoping that their kids will go to college on an athletic scholarship or that athletics is a big part of their life and that’s just who he likes to work with. By showing that, and not shying away from that, he’s been able to track the right types of clients for his practice. Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Or, the other things that we do is since we are not an RIA, we can do a lot more marketing of GuideVine the brand and GuideVine the destination of finding financial advisors than a regulated firm can. So, we can be on Facebook, we can accept likes and endorsements. We can tweet with impunity because we’re tweeting about finding financial advisors. We’re not tweeting investment advice or anything like that. So, we have a broader purview to get the name out there and to track people. And then because we tend to be a bigger site than most financial advisors, as I mentioned before, you know that becomes a reinforcing trend on search engines so that you start showing up higher and higher and you get more traffic, and we also seek partnerships, so we have a partnership with Investopedia where they get ten million people a month to their site who are interested in investing, are interested in personal finance, who are trying to learn and a decent portion of them are also seeking financial advisors. So, you know, Investopedia has their advisor network but they also partner with us because they — their business model is more around advertising and our business model is about helping people find the advice they need. So, we get some of those people over to GuideVine and expose them to our advisors, so that’s an example of a partnership. Then, we are always trying different things. We recently put out a — the definitive guide, not sure it’s quite definitive but that’s what it is called. The Definitive Guide to Finding a Financial Advisor. We have other resources on our personal finance blog and so on, to help consumers who are struggling with personal finance questions, and then the last thing that we try to do every summer is the Summer Scoop financial literacy campaign where we have — our advisors make these series of how-to videos. Like one minute quick hits. Like how do I roll over a 401K? How do I – you know, how do women’s financial outlooks differ from men’s financial outlooks? Things like that. Where it’s enough to deliver an answer to a consumer and plant the seed in their mind, if they are not quite there with working with a financial advisor, that the person who made this video or GuideVine is a great place to come back to when I’m ready for financial advice. Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing: Raghav Sharma: Julie Littlechild: Raghav Sharma: Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor your clients want to tell other people about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we will be talking with Raghav Sharma, who is President of GuideVine, which has been described as sort of a Match.com for financial advisors. Raghav is a former financial services specialist at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company and we’ll talk about how his experience there lead him to discover the need for a service like GuideVine. We will talk about the importance of video as part of your digital footprint. We will talk about how video helps build trust and helps prospective clients feel like they know you a little bit better and want to talk with you. So, on with our conversation with Raghav. So, Raghav, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us on Becoming Referable.
No, thanks for having me, guys. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Well, we are really excited to talk with you today because you have a platform that is really innovative and really interesting, and you describe GuideVine as kind of a Match.com for advisors. Could you tell us a little — for the people who are listening who aren’t familiar with it, can you tell us a little bit about how it works?
I wish I was the one who had coined Match.com. I really can’t take credit for that; that was CNBC and Bloomberg and I’m eternally grateful to them for that. So, for a consumer, it’s exactly what it sounds like. We’re there to help them find the best financial advisor for them and their unique circumstances. So, they can come in, they can go through our matching algorithm which will show them people who are closest to what they are looking for. Or, they can, if they are a little more self-directed, we have different directories that they can browse through, so if they are looking for a socially responsible investing — or maybe they have a particular — they’re a high net worth client and they want different needs, they can kind of go through the advisors that way, and for people who are truly at sea and aren’t sure where to begin, we have a concierge service which will ask the questions and help people narrow down what types of advisors they should be looking for.
So, it’s not just, you know, here’s John Smith and he happens to live in your town, but it sounds like you are doing some substantive work around, I won’t say value proposition, but really understanding what sets them apart. Is that the case? Is that where a lot of the heavy lifting comes in for advisors? Really thinking that through?
Absolutely. They will — we give them homework, now and we give them a set of questions that they have to think about the answers to. Some of them are very quick at getting through that, others it really sets them off on a process of thinking about what is my value proposition? What is my ideal set of clients, and what is it that I do that is different and that should attract those types of clients to me? And then, once they have that, we engage them in a conversation. We help distill those messages down and because we’ve talked to hundreds of advisors at this point, we get a sense of, okay, of these ten things you said, five things everyone in the industry can say. Three things are really interesting and if I was a consumer listening to you, that would make me sit up in my chair and say, huh, I haven’t heard that before. That sounds exactly like what I need. And the other two, well, maybe they’re not that interesting and then once they have that, they work on their videos scripts, they go through their compliance department and then, we don’t just say take your web camera and shoot a video; we send a videographer to their office or to their home or wherever they want to meet with good lights, video cameras, a teleprompter so that they don’t have to sit there and remember everything, and then they translate what we have been working with them on into a series of videos for use on GuideVine and really everywhere. On their website, on their LinkedIn profile and so on.
Yeah, so I’ve got a question you can put in your training program.
Excellent.
I talk about this in my talks, it is what I think is the ultimate question in marketing financial advice, and I apologize to all the listeners who have probably heard this already a hundred times, but it is, you know, I just came into a great big bunch of money and I realize I need an advisor to work with and a few of my friends have recommended a few people and I’ve met with three of them and they all seem like they know what they are doing, they all come highly recommended, they’ve all got mahogany and glass in their lobbies and I seem to have a pretty good personal chemistry with each of them. Why should I hire you over those other three people?
I was feverishly writing that down, Steve, and I don’t think I got all of it –
You can listen to the — I’ll send it to you later. You can read it in the show notes. You know, one question that probably occurs to a bunch of advisors who hear about your idea is, well, you know, how important is this really? Why would I need something like this? When you first described to me where this idea came from, you were still a consultant at McKinsey when you came up with this idea, weren’t you?
I was. I was an associate partner in the financial services practice serving wealth managers and asset managers in thinking about their growth strategies.
Yeah, and where this came from is a really interesting story, so can you tell us that?
Yeah. A friend of mine, two friends of mine actually were getting married. They were both partners are McKinsey and she actually ran the asset management and wealth management practice for McKinsey North America. So, you’d think two really accomplished people, they should know how to find a financial advisor and certainly she should. They didn’t have a clue on what to do. They had five to ten million that they were looking to put to work. They asked me for a referral and I gave them the name of my advisor who is up in Boston and we are all based in Manhattan. That didn’t work out because they wanted someone local, and then they did what anyone who is searching for things on — searching for anything, really, is they Googled it. They said, find a financial advisor, New York City. Up came these websites; they all said the same thing. You know, everyone is a holistic fiduciary. Everyone thinks about holistic financial planning and so on. They couldn’t tell the difference between any of these firms. Now, they ended up setting up ten meetings with advisors and they walked away from each one of them thinking it was a frustrating waste of time, and it all boiled down to the advisors’ personalities, because when they read the websites, everyone sounded the same, so they couldn’t tell the difference and they had to meet them in person and that is where it all broke down.
So that is why video is so important, obviously.
Absolutely. That, and getting the advisors to talk about what is different, because one of the things that we try to force is for the background information. Like, how do you charge? Or, what are your certifications? Let’s put that into a standardized set of information so that people can just quickly glance at that and understand what it is that you do and let’s focus the videos and let’s focus your bio on, really, what’s different about you and why as a client or as a prospect or a referral looking at that profile, or watching those videos, why should I work with you?
I really want to pick up on that thing that you said that really struck me when you told me the first time, was, you know, it’s such a difference, you know, reading text that a marketing person came up with and looking at a portrait is so different than watching somebody in motion, speaking in their own voice and, you know, it’s such a different experience and now that we’ve got availability of that kind of media all over the place, it’s so important for people to get the feeling like they know you a little bit before you ask them to come in.
That is one of the biggest factors that we find is that people want a level of comfort. It’s hard to build trust over a series of videos but they want a level of comfort and they want to feel like, you know, this is a personality that I could see myself at least sitting down for a few hours to have those initial set of meetings with rather than wondering, okay, this person sounds great on paper but when I get in the — when I get in the door, am I going to like them? When the chips are down, if we are working together, am I going to trust them enough that they are making the right call, and am I — is it going to resonate with me so that I listen to them when they are giving me advice?
You bring up a really interesting point that that whole idea of, you know, gradually building trust because when we didn’t have any other alternatives, when you either — if you wanted to meet somebody, you had to give them a phone call or you had to go in and have a meeting with them. That’s not true anymore and one of the things that I keep hearing about is just finding ways to sort of incrementally inch up that level of trust by reading something personal or having a chance to interact with the website or, you know, I would see watching a video of an advisor as another way of, you know, as elevating that trust level a little bit that, you know, now you’ve heard their voice and you see them a little bit so I trust them a little bit more. Even if you don’t trust their advice, you kind of like feel a little bit more comfortable and it gets that trust level closer to that level where they’d say, okay, I will take the risk to have a conversation with this person.
I think it’s one of the — online and how you present yourself there is one of the most overlooked things from financial advisors, because if you ask people you know, what’s your biggest source of clients? Everyone will say worth of mouth for the most part. What they don’t realize is that when I give a referral to a friend, the first thing that my friend does is that they go on a search engine and they type in the advisor’s name and they see what pops up, and they may choose to take my referral and run with it or they may just choose to leave it aside based on what they find there and, you know, people will say, oh, we are financial advisors, you have to come meet with us. People aren’t doing that. I think my experience at GuideVine shows us different — and then certainly drawing upon my time at McKinsey where we saw in financial services about 70% of the consumer’s decision is based on what they find online for financial — high value financial services. You know, I think that is something which is slowly sinking into the industry.
I know when — we asked a little about this of investors a while back and there was some age differences and it wasn’t that everybody was going online, but they were going on at different times, so what we might think of as younger investors, which is probably under fifty now, we used to say it was under forty, they would check out the advisor before they even reached out and made a contact whereas some of the older investors we talked to, they still checked them out online but they might have a call or a meeting first, but they would still validate. But, yeah, you’re right, either way there is probably a lot of slippage in terms of who they actually talk to.
One of the things that you said, Raghav, is that you would give the name of somebody to a friend and they are not just going to call that person, but they are going to go online and Google the person and find them and, you know, you’ve said that a lot of these videos that you are posting on the GuideVine site are actually turning up on those Google searches. People aren’t necessarily even going through GuideVine to find them.
Absolutely. I think the way that we have built the advisor profiles and the way that Google treats video content versus text is that when you are searching for a particular name, if they have a GuideVine profile, often times that profile will show up above the advisor’s LinkedIn profile above the advisor’s webpage. Because we are a third party, we get more traffic to our website than a typical advisor website will get. You know, we tend to rank higher, but you find that those things can become a great calling card for someone who has your name and is just searching for you, that having videos, forget where they are, whether they are on GuideVine or your website or anywhere, having videos is a great way to get in front of them and show them who you are.
Sure.
Could you just — I’ll ask the dumb questions here because, I — you know, it comes easily. But we are talking about digital footprint and obviously being — Googling somebody and finding videos is part of that, but can you give me a more sort of fulsome definition of what that would mean for an advisor to have a digital footprint?
A digital footprint the way we think of it is everything that’s online and everything that is discoverable. So, it — most people will think of that as your firm website, your LinkedIn profile, maybe a Twitter account if you have one, a Facebook account, but people overlook that there are so many other places that you show up. You could show up at the comments section of investment news where you put your name in and you commented on some proposed rule that the FCC is coming out with and that will even show up. Or, you are maybe — I’m a huge Atlanta Falcons fan, so I’m pretty psyched about Sunday, so I may put a comment saying Brady is the worst quarterback ever on ESPN.com and, you know, that will show up, too. So it’s not just your formal footprint, if you will, but it’s everything. All these little breadcrumbs that you leave online and that are discoverable by the people who are searching for you.
Right. So, you’ve mentioned that video alone, just having video is a differentiator, but something you just said earlier was that an advisor could say ten things about themselves and you would immediately know that five of these, you know, everybody says. Can you give me some specific examples of things that advisors are telling you that you’d say, yeah, that’s what you need to talk about. That’s a true differentiator for you.
So, a lot of it comes down to personality and the way that they deliver their message. There are ways to introduce yourself that capture someone’s attention, because if you can get people past the first fifteen or twenty seconds of your video, you’ll start to see that most of the people who make it past that point will watch all the way to discover about you. We had one advisor who — I was sitting in his filming session and he started off saying that today is XYZ date in New York City, so I jumped in and said, hey — let’s call him Bob. I’m like, Bob, let’s not mention the date because what if someone is watching this two years from now? You don’t want them thinking that it is such a dated video. He said, just wait, see where I’m going and we started again, and he went straight into the date and he said, you know, today is the day that all of New York City is rejoicing because Phil Jackson was just named the head of the New York Knicks and he had this whole intro that captured your attention, and it worked into the fact that Phil Jackson has the triangle system which he uses in basketball and much like this advisor has a system that works with other centers of influence and other financial professionals to blend together seamlessly.
Well, and let me jump on that as well. One of the challenges with using industry jargon is not only does everybody use it, but there aren’t commonly understood definitions of a lot of those things. So, like, you know, what is wealth management as distinguished from financial planning or investment management or asset management or any of those things? I mean, every advisor has a pretty clear idea of what the difference is, but everybody’s clear idea is different, and the clients have no idea what the difference is.
And if you look at peoples’ value statements on their websites, you look at their services offered, I struggle to figure out what it is that an advisor does and what they don’t do and why they are different from another firm that I am reading their website because they essentially say the same thing. So, you know, it’s moving beyond what is common in a firm or what is common in the profession to get to what is different. Also, another thing that we try to do is we try to get advisors to recast what they do from the point of view of the client, so don’t just tell me that you work with a business owner, tell me that I work with a business owner and the way that I do it is the first thing that we’ll do is we’ll sit down and we’ll really focus on your business. Do you have your employee benefits in place? Are you thinking out your 401K? Do you have ENO insurance, et cetera? Let’s make sure that the business is shored up, and then once we do that, then let’s turn to succession planning. Do you want someone in the family to take over? Are you going to need to look for a liquidity event to transfer the business over to someone else and then, once you do start to take cash out of the business, eventually, hopefully, right, how are you structuring it? Do you want a family trust? Do you want to bring it into your estate and so on? As a business owner, when I listen to that, I say, you know, this is someone who is tuned into the things that are top of mind for me, and has proven and demonstrated at least at a superficial level that they get it, and that I’m not going to waste my time going in and say, hey, so how do you work with business owners and the person just gives me a blank look back.
One another thing about jargon before we leave it entirely and Julie, I wanted to ask you this question. All of — so many advisors like to call what they do, you know, holistic financial planning and when I’ve tested that in client advisory boards, the word holistic doesn’t test well. Have you ever looked at that, Julie? Have you ever tested –
Yeah, I’m trying to think about that word in particular. We’ve done some testing on words and I can’t think of that immediately but I can tell you that, and both of you have said this, most of the words we use are either the same as everybody or just mean nothing, and so I love this notion of recasting what you do because one of the things that I was thinking about as you were talking is part of the reason that I think, and you know, I could be wrong, but I think that a lot of advisors say the same things isn’t because they don’t know how to communicate their differences. They really believe that that’s different, so we talked to advisors and we said, you know, what fundamentally, what is — how would you rate these things in how they differentiate you from every other advisor and 72% said client service. So, A, it’s mathematically impossible but, you know, 90% of drivers are better than the average. I suppose it’s the same sort of theory, right? But my point is they genuinely believed that they were set apart on that basis and maybe that’s where we need to start, is — it’s simply not true.
Well, and one of the things that we’ve started recommending that advisors do is before they tell us what’s different about themselves or what’s unique, is that we make them go to the site of four or five other advisors that, who look for the same kind of client that they do in the same town and look at the stuff that is on their website and say, listen, whenever you answer this question for us, make sure it’s not the words you find on those sites, whatever those words might be.
Absolutely, and then as you find people who are really good at targeting that type of client, you know, they can draw inspiration from that because let’s say I want to focus — let’s say I was an advisor in New Jersey who is working with athletes’ parents. Why would I ever have a picture of Adirondack desk chairs on my website? You have to — or why would I talk about things under services and so on that are kind of blocking and tackling and aren’t tailored to the people that I’m trying to reach? That’s one of the biggest things that we find with advisors is that they know what they do, and they are able to talk about it in a really compelling fashion, but the way that they use their marketing collateral, whether its online or offline, it just is so generic and it doesn’t talk to the people that they actually want to talk to.
Well, and that –
That’s the sad part about it is like they really do this wonderful work, right? And it’s just, how do we tease that out to make that clear?
Let me reframe that. I don’t think advisors should be talking about what they do, I think they should be talking about what they help clients achieve because, you know, if I hire somebody to do something, I don’t care what they do, as long as they generate for me the outcome I’m looking for and so it goes back to — I heard somebody say a while ago, and this is brilliant, so many advisors say, well, I’m fee based and that’s what sets me apart and he said, how about if instead of a fee based practice we have an advice based practice? Wouldn’t that be better?
So, one of the things I’m interested is advisors are using GuideVine and they’ve got their amazing videos put together and their profile. Then, how do they go about being found? Like, what’s the actual process whereby you help them get discovered?
So, the great part for an advisor is if they were on GuideVine, there’s things that they can do to be found but a lot of it is they are putting that burden on our shoulders and they can go about doing what they do best, which is working with their clients and giving them advice, and letting us worry about getting out there. So what we do is, first and foremost, for any online platform is we make sure that the search engine optimization is always evolving and always meeting Google standards so that that way when someone is typing in find a financial advisor, hopefully GuideVine is coming up its fair share of times.
Now, because it’s our gig on this podcast, besides just attracting new folks how can advisors — or how can GuideVine help advisors generate referrals?
I think, you know, we’ve become a reinforcing part of someone’s digital footprint and we help them put the digital footprint out there so that is going to attract the clients that they want so that when someone gets a referral or someone gives a referral, if I’m a consumer and given that everything is shifting to people vetting — pre-vetting people by their online footprints, that this puts a great professional face of the advisor out there and then also the videos help tell the story so that, Julie, you had mentioned, you know, fifty and below are really sort of focusing on what they find while the fifty plus crowd is still going through with meetings. We actually have a thriving set of consumers who have just retired and they did it all themselves and now they are kind of struggling with retirement and figuring out how they have income, so we have found people from seventy years down to late twenties sort of people who have maybe sold a business or something are using the service. So, I think those videos, whether they are ours or someone else’s, anything — it’s just a great way to reinforce a referral and our COO has a, he says it’s not just about the referrals you get, it’s about the referrals you lose because when people search for you they just see the comments on how terrible a quarterback Brady is and they don’t see anything about – sorry Steve.
Well congratulations on getting that in twice.
Exactly.
Excellent work.
But it’s a – I can’t do any better than that. I’m just going to stop talking.
That is very funny. So we – I’d love to know just – I know we are going to wrap up shortly, but as you look forward, what do you think is the next big thing that advisors need to be thinking about?
I think for a lot of people, and I’m going to stick to my area of expertise. I mean, gosh knows what is going to happen in the next ten years or even the next five or even the next one, but I think what we’ve seen as the way the industry and the way the consumers have evolved, and the way the regulators have shifted what they allow you to do, is that for the vast majority of advisors who still don’t have one is that you do need a good digital footprint. Even if 100% of your practice is referrals, and the way to go about it is starting small. You know, it’s focusing on your website, focusing on LinkedIn as kind of the core aspects of what you are building out there and then reigning yourself in and keeping it simple. You know, I think the days of data dumping where you tell everything on a website or, you know, if you think about the old CNN.com or ESPN.com where they were very dense and text heavy and everything and the kitchen sink was out there is over, and it’s about publishing the most pertinent info to reach the demographic and to reach the clients that you want.
Help us understand that a little bit more, Raghav. When you strip it down and publish only the stuff that’s most relevant, what kind of things would that be?
So, Stephen, you touched upon what are the goals that you help people achieve? And then we talked about recasting. Recasting it from the client’s point of view. What does it feel like to work with the firm rather than just saying we have a client account manager and we differentiate ourselves on the client experience, and then thinking about does your investment approach actually — does it need to be on the website? Because everyone seems the same and it’s hard to distinguish so it’s just understanding that clients are not looking for as much as information as they used to online about the traditional type and shifting it to these things that make you more relatable and more human and easier to understand.
Okay, well, Raghav, there is so much more that we could talk about but we are at the end of our time and I would love to help people find you out there so that they can ask you more, find out more about GuideVine and maybe get themselves up on it. Where can people track you down?
So they can always reach me a Raghav – so, R-A-G-H-A-V – at GuideVine.com (Raghav@guidevine.com) or they can find us on Twitter at @GuideVine_FA or at the website itself, Guidevine.com and you’ll — if you scroll down, you’ll see a place where advisors can learn more about what we do and set up some time to talk to us.
Well, Raghav, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a great conversation and I am really excited that we get to talk to advisors about the GuideVine service and I hope that we will be talking again soon.
I enjoyed it and thanks for having me on, hope you and Julie have a great afternoon.
Thank you. Take care.
You too.
Hey folks. Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you have been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com; you can also get our free report, “Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth” and connect with our blogs and other resources, so until next time, so long.