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Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Become Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. Usually, my co-host and I, Julie Littlechild, have a conversation with someone, often someone not well known in financial services circles, who can help you become more referable. This time, I will interview my co-host on some interesting work she’s doing that can benefit you. Julie has worked with and studied successful financial advisors, their clients, and their teams for more than 20 years. Julie sat on the National Board of the Financial Planning Association from 2010 to 2013. Investment Advisor put her on its list of 25 most influential people in financial planning twice, and she won the Influencer award in practice management from Financial Planning magazine. You might know Julie as the person who developed the client surveying tool, Client Audit, now offering through ActiFi. In doing her client research, she found that referrals come from clients who are not just content or satisfied, but engaged with their financial advisor.

In the past couple years, she’s turned from client engagement to advisors and engagement in their businesses, which she found leads not only to more client engagement, but higher levels of satisfaction and success. She’s gone on to write a book about that called Absolute Engagement, and now offers several courses for advisors who want to become more engaged themselves. In this conversation, we talk about some of the interesting ideas she has uncovered in that pursuit. We talk about an engaged experience. We talk about the client journey and how to map it out, and how to utilize that map to create a more engaging experience. Of course, we talk about how all of that relates to becoming more referable. Listen through until the end, where we talk about how designing the experience you want to have helps you create the kind of experience your clients want to have. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Julie Littlechild. Well, Julie, nice to talk with you directly this time instead of having the two of us ganging up on some poor, unsuspecting soul.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. I like this idea. It takes somebody out of the middle. Just be gentle with your questions please.

Steve Wershing:
Of course, of course, because I know I’m going to get it back at some point when you want to interview me.

Julie Littlechild:
Exactly.

Steve Wershing:
You’ve gotten a lot more involved in engagement on all different kinds of levels. You wrote the book about absolute engagement a little while ago, and you’re working with advisors on a few different projects. One of them is Engagement Edge, where you work with advisors on helping them get their clients more engaged, and you use a few different terms in there, a couple different ideas that I wanted to get you to help us clarify a little bit, so as we go into this, the listeners can sort these things out better. You talk about the advisors’ offer, you talk about the client experience, and you talk about the client journey. What’s the difference between those, and what do each of them mean?

Julie Littlechild:
I think that’s a good question, because to a large extent, there is some confusion. The words we use matter. Clarifying that is probably a great place to start. The way I think about it, and it’s not like there’s a right or wrong answer here, but I’ll tell you certainly how we look at it is, the client experience for us is a catch-all term that reflects everything that an advisor does for a client. The two more specific terms that we try to use so that it makes it clear that they are different are the offer and the client journey. Perhaps the easiest way to think about it would be, the offer is what an advisor delivers to a client. That could be what is offered in terms of the service. I provide comprehensive financial planning, for example, but also the fundamentals of things like, and in order to do that, we deliver four meetings per year and two educational events. That, to me, is the offer. The client journey is how the client experiences what’s being delivered, experiences that offer. The offer has a more internal lens.

The client journey is very much through the eyes of the clients. I think that the simplest example I could think of to try to make this clear would be to say, as an advisor, as I’m mapping out what it is I’m going to offer to my clients, I might determine that it is appropriate to meet with my A clients four times a year. I’m making that assessment based on what I think their needs are, but frankly also based on the value of the client and what will make meaningful economic sense to the business. The client journey is more about, how does the client experience those four meetings? How are they set? What happens before? What information do they receive? What happens during the meeting? What kind of technology is used? What’s the follow up like? What’s the actual discussion? It’s very much how that client experiences it, and when we think about crafting an extraordinary experience or defining the client journey, we’re all about that latter part and what would make that extraordinary for a client. Does that make sense?

Steve Wershing:
Sure. Can you give us a few examples of how an advisor might design a journey to be extraordinary?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, sure. We actually work through a fairly structured process, because that’s how I think. There’s a couple of different things if we think about just the process of defining the client journey. Maybe we can step back and talk about where all this starts, but in terms of the journey itself, we usually go through a process by starting with, what are the key touchpoints in the relationship? First of all, let’s acknowledge or remember that the relationship starts before somebody becomes a client. The touchpoints might be pre-client or introduction phase. Moving to initial contact. On boarding. The client review process. Education. Appreciation. That might be an example of the key touchpoints. The goal would then be to say, what would extraordinary look like in each of those areas? What would an extraordinary experience be if somebody just reached out to get more information? What would an extraordinary experience look like if I was running an appreciation event or finding a way to thank my clients? That’s part one. The second part of the client journey, which I think is easy to forget is, ensuring that that experience is consistently extraordinary, no matter how somebody reaches out.

Again, quick example. Let’s take initial contact. Somebody is referred to an advisor. They go on their website. They reach out. They give the office a call, and they have this amazing experience. The woman that answered the phone was friendly and inviting, and she understood the value that was delivered. She was able to communicate that. She took information. She sent them some details on the firm, and it was just one of those experiences where somebody felt warm and fuzzy about the whole process. What is easy to forget is that if I reached out via your website, it’s going to be a different experience, but it needs to be equally good. If in that situation, I filled in the form on the website, the one we all have, just add a comment and send that over, if I got an automated response that said, ‘Thanks for your email. We attempt to respond to all emails within 24 to 48 hours,’ that’s a different experience. A, what’s extraordinary across all touchpoints. Then, B, is it consistent no matter how somebody reaches out? That’s the basic process that we follow.

Steve Wershing:
If, for example, the phone call gets that warm and fuzzy kind of an experience, are you looking to have a warm and fuzzy experience through the website as well? Is that what you’re talking about?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. We’re looking to have a great experience either way. Now, warm and fuzzy may not be your MO.

Steve Wershing:
But if that’s what you’re aiming for with the receptionist—

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely. What would that look like? Maybe you’re far more responsive, first of all. Maybe it says, we will back to you within two hours, and perhaps there’s a personal note that comes out that says, thanks so much for reaching out. We’ll be back to you within an hour. In the meantime, thought you’d like this video of our founder talking about the firm. Or something along those lines that makes it great as well.

Steve Wershing:
Okay, okay. Then, how much detail do you get into? You were talking before about the review meeting. When a client would come in, if you say your offer includes two client meetings a year, that the journey would involve what happens before that meeting, what happens in that meeting, and I’m assuming what happens as a follow up to the meeting. How detailed do you get into as somebody is becoming a new client and going through the on-boarding or planning process?

Julie Littlechild:
Are you asking how much detail is shared with that prospect? Or how much detail do we give—

Steve Wershing:
How much detail do you include in developing that client journey?

Julie Littlechild:
Got it. The client journey is A, detailed. We get into as much detail as possible, but it’s something that’s co-created, I guess is the best way—I use that word a lot, but co-created with the advisors that we work with. We see our job is to say, here’s the process. Here’s the methodology. Here are examples. Here’s a way for you to understand in your firm what extraordinary looks like by talking to your team, by talking to your clients. We want them to get into as much detail as possible, but we don’t prescribe exactly what that process should look like, because quite frankly, it could be very different from one firm to the next. In fact, I’d argue that it should be different from one firm to the next, depending on who they’re focused on attracting.

Steve Wershing:
Well, sure. Yeah. It seems like this would be one way of differentiating your firm, is what all is included in the experience and how it’s carried out? That would make sense to make it different than other firms as well.

Julie Littlechild:
And who it’s built for. To me, it’s not necessarily that your offer, your journey, looks bigger than somebody else’s. It’s differentiated, I believe, when it is more precisely tailored to exactly the kind of clients that you want to work with.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. Before we get deeper into that, it may seem apparent, but let me ask it anyway. Why does this matter? Why does it matter to think about what the client journey is?

Julie Littlechild:
You mentioned one point there. It’s differentiated. When you have created something, a client journey that is extraordinary, it is something that is memorable. It is something that goes to the heart of what is really important to your clients or to your prospects, depending on where you’re at in the journey. That sets you apart. It also, as the name of the podcast suggests, makes you more referable, because quite frankly, when we can get this right, when we’re going deep, when we’re really hitting on the things that are so important to our clients, this is what people talk about. These are the stories they share with others.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. Do you think it’s reasonable—what parts of this do you think that people would pick up on and tell their friends about? How do you incorporate into the design of the journey that you’re creating?

Julie Littlechild:
There’s probably a few places where I think it’s most obvious about the stories. Actually, let me step back. It’s not just necessarily the stories, but it’s doing things that are shareable. It might not be a verbal story. It could be information that you’re providing that’s shareable. Let’s look at maybe the pre-client introduction phase. I could go to somebody’s website and read all about the work that they do and the credentials they have, and everything could look very smart and well-designed, and I may or may not decide to meet with that person, but I don’t think I’d be telling anybody else about that. Alternatively, I’m a business owner. You’re a business owner. Let me pick on that. Let’s say I go to a site as a business owner, and instead of just seeing all the normal information, I see something that says, first of all, we’ve built our business around business owners. If you would like a report that we created on the top 10 resources for running an efficient small to mid-sized business, click here. Immediately, I’m drawn to something that is more impactful for me on that website. Of course, the advisor’s getting my email address if they do it right. Now, think about, this is something shareable. Once I get that resource, it’s something that I will share with others that are business owners that I work with.

Those kinds of things, I think, are shareable. Think also about the kind of education or appreciation that we share. I’d be interested in your perspective on this. I see a bit of a disconnect, often. I know that when advisors are in meetings with their clients, they’re going deep. They’re talking about issues that are important and their families and their lives and their futures and their hopes. Then, often, I look at the communications that are going out, and it might be a market update. There’s nothing wrong with a market update, but there’s a disconnect there between the relationship they have and the issues that they might be talking about and the communications. But if we flipped that around and said, all right. The education that we provide is going to be specifically tailored to the unique needs of my client, I might talk about family issues or communication, or it could be cyber security, if that’s an issue that comes up. Whatever those issues are, these are the things I’m going to share with my friends and family. These are the things I’m going to talk about, because now you’re truly impacting something that’s important to me.

Steve Wershing:
Right, and I totally agree with you. I think one of the values of defining what that journey is for the client, part of it is getting that feedback to just confirm what’s most valuable to the client. What you just mentioned is what I see most frequently. What I would consider to be a communication mistake, which is we consistently hear that it’s the planning type stuff that’s most valuable to the clients and it’s most meaningful to the clients, and then they send out communication about market updates. They’re hiring you for that. What they’re interested in hearing more about is guidance that can help them get to where they want to go, or guidance to help them improve their lives. Not which sector of the market did better last quarter, right?

Julie Littlechild:
It’s so true. I wonder if this happens because we’ve become so insular as well, which is easy to do. When we’re thinking about client experience, we look to the benchmarking reports that are in the industry, all of which are very well done and provide important information. What that tells us is, other advisors are on average meeting with their clients four times a year or two times a year and running an appreciation. It just gives us the basics. I’m starting to believe, and a lot of the work that we’re doing is really in this area, that we need to look outside this industry. We need to understand why people love Ritz and Disney and Apple, and try to apply that thinking to our client journey. Otherwise, we run that risk of just focusing, just like you said, everybody else was sending a market update. I should send a market update. I think we need to think differently. I think the role of the client is changing, and that if we don’t start to think differently about engagement, we run that risk of being left very far behind.

Steve Wershing:
I’ll disagree with you a little. I won’t disagree with you, but I’ll modify that a little bit. There are things about—I see advisors still come off the rails a little bit when they look outside of our industry for that kind of inspiration, because they look to the Ritzes and they look to the Disneys and those kinds of things. One issue with that is that Disney and Ritz and those kinds of folks are providing a different kind of an experience, because it’s a different objective for the client. The client is going to Disney for one thing, enjoyment, escapism, whatever it might be, and they’re going to a financial advisor for something different. Trying to replicate the Disney experience, there’s a chance you’re going to go off the rails because they’re built for different reasons.

The other thing is that, by looking outside as opposed to looking at their own client relationships, you’re still just dreaming up things that you might do, as opposed to asking people, what was most meaningful about this process? What changed your life the most about going through the planning process? I believe that’s where you can get really good information about the journey, because you can find out what’s really important to them and find out what was valuable to them as opposed to going to a Nordstrom’s or a Ritz-Carlton and looking for inspiration there, rather than just asking people, what was most significant to you?

Julie Littlechild:
I like if we can disagree. I don’t think we’re disagreeing, but I like to think we are, because it makes it far more interesting.

Steve Wershing:
I think we should much more violently agree with each other.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s right. Let me tackle that a bit. I don’t disagree with what you just said, but I do think there actually is value if we do it right. First of all, yes. I think we should talk to clients about what is most valuable, what impact the advisor has had, and I think it’s an incredible learning experience to do that. Having said that, I think that we can miss opportunities if we don’t look outside the industry and get creative. Let me give you an example, just to see if this fits with your thinking as well. One of the things that we strongly encourage in addition to asking clients about what they’ve experienced and the impact is to talk to clients about what they consider their one greatest client experience, and dig into that. That’s when they might say Disney or Ritz or Nordstrom’s, and that’s fine. In fact, I encourage advisors to have these conversations with the caveat that the advisor can’t talk about them in that moment. That’s a separate conversation.

Then, understand what made the experience great. In the context, of course, it’s about a completely different offer, but if you dig in, you start to understand, it was very personalized. It gave me time to step back. I’m thinking of Disney at the moment, only because I was there recently. We can learn about what extraordinary looks like in a bigger context, but then, and I think this is the missing piece, how does that then relate to our business? I was talking some time ago—this is going back a couple of years, but I’ve never forgotten this example, to Jack Thurman. They operate out of St. Louis. They’ve got a few offices. Jack and his team at BKD are big proponents of Ritz-Carlton and their training. They love Ritz-Carlton. They believe in what they do, but they don’t run hotels. At the same time, they understand they don’t run hotels. If you really dig into Ritz, what you see, of course, is one of the tenets is anticipation. Ritz wants to anticipate your needs before you even do yourself, in a way. What Jack and his team did is say, what would that mean for us?

What they ended up doing, this is just one example of the things they did, they redefined their on-boarding process, because they said, how can we better anticipate the needs of our clients? When are the times when they have a lot of questions about what we do? Well, it’s on boarding. Have I made the right decisions? Have things transferred? Where are we at? They go through, I got this new statement that I should understand, but I’m not sure I do. They created this process whereby they would have Jack reach out, because he wasn’t working directly with clients, as soon as somebody became a client, and that gave them some reassurance about his role in the process. They had a client service associate reach out at predefined times to bring people up to speed on where they were at, even if there was nothing wrong or nothing was off the rails, just to keep them informed. They had the advisor reach out and talk them through the statement as soon as that came out, and they sent a new client survey after three months. This was, for them- this is what Ritz’s tenet looked like in their business. I think you can make that link.

Steve Wershing:
I agree with you.

Julie Littlechild:
Oh, come on. Disagree with me, Steve.

Steve Wershing:
I think you’re totally wrong on that, Julie. No, it’s an excellent point, and looking to what those kinds of organizations have done to figure out what their clients are going to want and what’s going to enhance their clients’ experience and then adopting those same tenets or ideas to developing your own journey, I think that makes a lot of sense. My son works at Disney, and we’ve talked about those kinds of things. If there’s one thing that Disney has thought long and hard about, it’s the client journey, and it goes everywhere from what kinds of rides they offer and how they structure the lines to wait for them, and what they get people to do while they’re in line. The whole thing is extremely well thought through.

Julie Littlechild:
Oh, yeah. It’s amazing.

Steve Wershing:
Let’s jump from there into the advisor realm. What would an engaged experience look like? And how does that differ from what most advisors do today?

Julie Littlechild:
I guess the first thing I would say there is that an engaged experience, I’m repeating myself, but I think it’s the place to start, is designed around the unique needs of your target or your ideal client. It’s not meant to be designed for everyone. If we try to build a client journey that is right for every single person we work with, we’ll probably fail. We will dumb it down or get to the lowest common denominator. I think the engaged experience is very much designed for who we’re trying to attract and work with. I would say that it’s created through the eyes of the client. That’s why I like the terminology client journey, because instead of us standing in front of a white board, figuring out how often we want to meet with clients, we put ourselves in their shoes. You can almost do a 360 journey to look around how they perceive everything, from the moment they drive up to your office to walking through to the meeting room, to how that’s set up, to the information they receive.

This notion of, we’re walking that journey with the client to understand, I think, is part of engaged. We haven’t really touched on this, but I would also say that engaged experience reflects a number of trends or realities, certainly, that we believe are important. Things like co-creation of value. Things like personalization of the communications process. I think there are some clear trends that are, I’m going to say disrupting how we engage. I don’t know if I’m overstating by using that term, but I think it works. I think all of that differs from just saying, I’ve segmented my clients and I’ve tiered my service offering. Not that I don’t think that there’s where we should start, because I do, but it’s taking it to the next step that would be different for most advisors, I think.

Steve Wershing:
What’s the implication—of course, I have my own thoughts about this, but what are the implications of advisors who try to do more than one target market when they design a journey?

Julie Littlechild:
I just think it’s very difficult to add significant value when you’re trying to do it for different target groups. Can it be done? Yeah. It’s possible, but it’s complex. It requires scale.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. That’s an excellent point.

Julie Littlechild:
It requires almost two completely different client experiences being run simultaneously, and I think that’s challenging. What I need as a business owner and what would be completely engaging for me is going to be very different from someone else. Who are you building this for? It’s like trying to build a house and wanting to make it right for anyone who could possibly walk through the door. Doomed from the beginning.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. I think you can do it for multiple targets as long as you’re designing a niche that satisfies the needs of both. For example, if you have a niche experience that you’re designing for physicians or for high-level corporate executives or for university professors, that the key to that would be finding where the needs, wants, and desires bridge from one to the next so that they all line up. I think if your target markets are business owners and widows, like you said, it’s doomed. It’s hopeless, because there’s just no overlap. You can’t design a niche that’s going to be equally attractive to both.

Julie Littlechild:
I also wonder if we need to ensure that they’re to some extent mutually exclusive. You want overlap, and this only came to me because I went to a website a while back and there were three target markets defined. They were women, families, and business owners. I had a moment of not knowing what to do, because I was all three of those things. I think if we’re going to have that multiple, we need to help people, it has to be very clear on the path they should follow.

Steve Wershing:
Julie, we’ve been talking about what a journey map is and what kinds of things go in it. How do you go about mapping out an experience? Mapping out a journey?

Julie Littlechild:
The actual process, at this point when you’re ready to do that, you should have a pretty clear sense of what extraordinary looks like for you and your team, and I think bringing the team in is important. Then, it just becomes a two-phased process I like. Maybe it’s three. First step is really those touchpoints we talked about. What are the key touchpoints in our client journey? Second would be then, for each one of those, to brainstorm. Just get all of the ideas out. What kinds of things could we do to make our appreciation extraordinary? Or our client review process extraordinary? Get all the ideas on the table, and then begin to use the filters that you really created. The filters come from your client interviews and your team meetings to say, this is what we’re trying to accomplish, so let’s begin to choose the experience, and it’s just documenting it at this point. It doesn’t have to be fancier than that. You can use mind mapping technology to gather the ideas, or just document what you hear. It’s really in the next phase, which is about bringing it to life where we need to start thinking about process, but you can do this on a white board, on paper, or in a mind map.

Steve Wershing:
You’re talking about working with your staff and the people involved in it. You mentioned before co-creation of this. How would you get a client involved in helping you develop a journey map?

Julie Littlechild:
There, I would go back to the interview process. There are different ways to do it. One is, you’re looking for qualitative information from clients on what they value and what they consider extraordinary. The first one’s about you. The second one is about an experience that’s not you. It is qualitative input that I believe that we’re looking for here, by the way. I don’t think we can use a survey to gather this kind of information. Surveys are great to tell you if you’ve succeeded at doing it, but this is about qualitative. So, how do we do that? Well, you’ll know about advisory boards. I think advisory boards are a really ideal way to get this information. If you don’t have one or you’re not considering putting one together, then I think simple client interviews. Interview five to 10 clients with a set of questions about your value and what they consider to be extraordinary, and you get amazing information. You could even do a focus group. Maybe that’s the mix between the two, where you’re bringing people together for a one-off discussion on what great really looks like. That’s how I like to go about it.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. What does engagement look like at different points along that journey?

Julie Littlechild:
I think that what’s consistent about it, to answer a completely different question, what’s consistent about it is that it should always reflect the needs of the client. It’s just that it’s going to manifest in very different ways. Extraordinary is consistent in the filters you use. You could say, at every stage, we are looking for a client journey that reflects the needs and challenges of our target client that is personalized to those needs and challenges. Those could be your two commonalities, but how that looks will change. When you’re providing education, that could mean you do workshops on very defined subjects that reflect the needs of your client, but personalization in the client review process could mean co-creating the agenda, for example. The topline piece here I think that’s helpful to get to, is understanding what’s important to you. What are those filters that you want to apply and use that to assess and create the specifics of the client journey map from there.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. We’ve been talking about crafting the client journey and mapping it out. I know that our main goal here is to get better client engagement, but a lot of your work recently has been on advisor engagement. Are the two of those related somehow?

Julie Littlechild:
They are related. I think that’s a great question. I would say that the work that we’ve done around personal engagement or advisor engagement, as you’ve said, really is premised on the notion that you need and want to build a business around the clients with whom you love to work and the work that you love to do, and that in an ideal world, that’s where the whole journey starts, is deciding who it is you want to build this business around. It’s only then that we can begin thinking about client journey. I feel that if you haven’t gone through that process and done the thinking around your target, your ideal client, your niche, the kind of business that you want to create, the kind of life that you want to lead, and you just focus initially on client experience, it can be a bit of a challenge. The two are incredibly tightly connected.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. Maybe some of it not just what kind of an experience the client wants to experience, but what kind of experience you want to provide. The kinds of things you would have fun doing, providing to clients.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. What are you going to feel good about? What’s going to get you jumping out of bed in the morning, as they say?

Steve Wershing:
Sure. Let’s bring this back around to the theme of the podcast. We’ve talked about getting clients better engaged and how that can help the advisors engagement. How does all of this have an effect on referrals?

Julie Littlechild:
I think this is where the work that certainly we’ve done together has demonstrated that we need to help clients to understand the problems that we solve and we need to give them something to talk about. I think that if you can think about the client journey in that context, that becomes the connection. If it’s intentionally designed, it creates the stories that people will tell others. It creates sharable content, and it’s tightly focused on the message that you want to deliver, which is not that it’s for everyone, but it’s very much for a defined group. It should sound right to the target client, and this is the kind of stuff that we want our clients sharing with others. I think there’s a very strong connection between getting this right and then leveraging the client journey to attract more referrals.

Steve Wershing:
Okay. That makes total sense to me. I think that sounds great. As we said before, some of these things that you’re working on here, what we’ve been talking about today, are part of your Engagement Edge program. How can people find out more about that?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely. The Engagement Edge is really our program for advisors who want to go deep into creating an engaging client experience, and we take them through a very detailed six-step process to get there. There’s information on our website at absoluteengagement.com. You can click on the work we do and go to the Edge section, and you will see everything there.

Steve Wershing:
Well, that sounds cool. It’s kind of fun just to have the two of us talking every once in a while. So, thank you for bringing your ideas, because I know you’ve been doing a lot of development work on this. I know that all of this is going to be really helpful for the audience as well. So, thanks very much for spending this episode with me, just telling me about this project you’re working on.

Julie Littlechild:
Appreciate it. Take care of yourself.

Steve Wershing:
You, too. We’ll talk to you soon. Hey, folks. Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve 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. Until next time, so long.

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