Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Michelle Hoskin
Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: I think what it takes is it takes effort. It takes somebody or a group of people to sit down and say what is it like being a client of ours? That takes effort and it takes time, but it takes real desire. I did a workshop two days ago and every single person around the room from five different firms were there for one reason and one reason only: because they want to make the effort to WOWW, not just do enough or just be good. They want to literally blow the socks off their clients. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: We recently introduced WOWW cards so that when we, as just everyday people, are out and about and we see somebody that goes above the call of duty or literally is WOWW and has WOWW, they write a little card out and give it to them. I gave one WOWW card to a security guard at Ottawa Airport last October. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: I’m on radar all of the time, so WOWW experiences and WOWW offices and WOWW staff and lots of other things. I was in Vancouver in June and I walk into the Pan Pacific Hotel. I was hot. I was late. I was hungry. I was tired and I was thirsty. All of the wrong combination of everything. This guy welcomed me at the desk and he said I can see you’re in a rush. Don’t worry; we’ll take extra special care of you. Let me take you to your seat. Instantly he almost wrapped me up in bubble wrap to make sure that everything that I needed I got and everything I wanted I got. He made me feel like I was the only diner in that restaurant. He sat me down at the table. He deliberately put me near the air conditioning and he checked that that was okay. He said to me are you in a rush? Where do you need to be? He literally pandered to my every need. Now, wait a minute. I’m just a person just visiting the restaurant. The next thing I know I’ve got the manager there and they were going to allocate a specific chef in the kitchen to my lunch because it’s a bit busy and they wanted to make sure that I got what I needed so that I could get out of the restaurant in time. At this point I’m sitting there going this is amazing. I feel like the center of the universe. They understood what I was going through. They didn’t know what I was going through, but they switched on and off to read the signs, I guess. The guy came over and he said I’ll be your chef. Is there anything that you particularly would like and I’ll make it for you? May I suggest, because you’re in a rush, the tuna salad? I was like I’ll do it. I’ll eat whatever you tell me because you’re going to make it for me specifically in the kitchen. Off he goes and out comes my tuna salad. The guy brought me fresh water, very attentive, but there were two killer moments. He’s like are you from the UK? You can tell I was quite stressed waiting for this meeting. I said I’m a little bit busy; I’m a bit under pressure. He said you’re from the UK. I understand that you English quite like a cup of tea to calm you down. Would you like me to bring you an English breakfast tea? I was like I love you. Yes, please. Then, as I was drinking my tea, he said Ms. Hoskin; I’ve taken the liberty of arranging a car for you with our concierge to take you to your meeting. You have an extra ten to 15 minutes because you don’t have to walk. It’s on the house; I’ve arranged it with the concierge. All you have to do is walk down the steps and it can be ready for you. It’s one of our hotel chauffeurs. I could have thrown my arms around this guy and gave him the biggest kiss in the world. He totally blew me out of the water. I asked for nothing and I swear to you, Julie, I only spent about 30 Canadian dollars on a salad and a drink. That was it. I told every single person that story that I’ve spoken to or presented to since June. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: I think it’s just where their focus is. Are they focusing on amazing client experiences and delivering them consistently to the level clients have come to look to and expect? Are they focusing on just getting over the compliance hurdle to process business? When the focus switches, the magic just starts to happen. That’s the switch. It’s not meeting a client at reception with an umbrella in case it’s raining or a plaque with their name on it in the car park. It’s a massive cultural focus as a business and that comes from the top. I’ve found that when you’ve got advisors running businesses you travel first class and have a chauffeur. They live their lives wanting WOWW, but businesses do it by default. Those advisors who are just living in a just get by kind of way, that shows itself in their business too. I think that’s the difference. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: The other part to that is the way that–I recommend every advisor who’s listening to this podcast do this exercise. That is the next opportunity that they get to sit down with all of their team, they do this exercise. That is they ask their team when I say the word WOWW what word springs to mind? Instantly? What’s that word that jumps out of them that they can say diamonds or extraordinary or whatever it is? That advisor has to make sure that every single person on that team has words that are similar. You imagine your word is amazing, but your PA their WOWW word is compliant and standard and process. You don’t have a myth, as a business the first place you have to start is you have to understand what your version of WOWW looks like for the business. Steve Wershing: Michelle Hoskin: It could be anything. It could be a small, tiny, little thing. They have to image they’re starting it from scratch because the only way you can design WOWW is if you imagine you have a blank sheet of paper and a blank calendar. The second that business starts to imagine they’ve got clients, they’ll start to talk themselves out of it. I’ll give you an example. One of the things that I say, it’s not even a WOWW necessarily, but it’s like have a name plaque where the client can park in your car park. Welcome Mr. and Mrs. Jones. If you imagine you’re starting your business from scratch, you might factor that step in. However, if you’ve got clients currently and they would think that was a little bit overkill or a little bit much or a little bit pretentious you wouldn’t write that in your process. You’re designing WOWW around your existing clients and that’s a bad place to start. You almost have to start imaging you have no clients, but you are about to serve your favorite type of client. It works every time, works every time. It’s easy to roll in. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Let me give you an example. I did an exercise with a firm once. They were talking about how to market and get more sales. This was one of the big topics they were discussing with me. I said to them who’s your ideal client? They gave me the standard high net worth business owner, entrepreneur, blah, blah, blah. I was bored already. I said to them tell me really about your ideal client. Tell me what car they drive today. They said Jaguar, Audi, Mercedes, BMW. I said tell me what car they would love to drive, like they would give their right arm to drive or to own. Like you say Aston Martin Tesla, straight out. No hesitation in his voice. I said okay, this is what you do. The next client event you do, you’re going to do it at Aston Martin car garage down the road. You’re going to have cocktails, wine, and cheese nibbles and you’re going to ask them to bring a friend. He invited 40 clients and every single one of them came. The Aston Martin garage gave up an Aston Martin for a weekend to a winner during the event and 40 clients brought 40 prospects. He converted 22 prospects into clients out of 40 because he targeted them beautifully and it had nothing to do with they were bankers or they were this or they were high net worth. He had a full house because he understood that client not now, but their wishes and their desires. It worked beautifully. It couldn’t have worked any better. He WOWWed every single one of those people, those clients and prospects, because he understood the clients as well as they understood themselves if not better. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: You, first of all, just talk through what the client journey is. The engagement piece. Then you would maybe go to the first meeting. I think there’s a team, you’re just talking this through. You move down into the dabble and the detour, all the interactions through the advice process. Then the follow up stage. Then the implementation stage. Then the closing stage and the on-going review. You’re breaking the client journey down into five or six sections. That document then needs typing up and then you review again on a different day with a fresh perspective. You’ve got it up on the board and you say what can we do between that step and that step that makes it WOWW? It will benchmark for WOWW is the word you just created or come up with which is your company word. Let’s imagine the firm’s word is extraordinary. I was listening to a firm from step one to step two, how do we make step one and step two and everything in between extraordinary? It’s bizarre because it’s actually quite easy for the team to start working together on coming up with some great ideas. There’s not a magic bullet that’s going to inject inspiration into a team, but when you break it down into bitesize pieces it’s amazing what they’re able to inject into a process. All you do is they just write it on the board or you can get post-it notes, map it all out on the board and say actually, if we send out a summary audio message as well as a written letter after our first meeting we think that would be WOWW. In the meeting, why don’t we ask if they would like a copy of this letter being sent to a trustee, a beneficiary, a daughter, or a son? It’s very easy for the team to start adding in sparkly bits, the bits they don’t do at the moment because of time and it’s not a regulator requirement. When you remove all of those barriers, the juices start to flow almost instantly because I’ve seen it happen. There’s just one caveat to that, WOWW will only work if you have the right people sitting around the table, if you have the right team. If you have a team around you that’s half amazing and half I can’t really be bothered to work here or I could be working in a store or I could be working in another office, not bothered about WOWW, it will never work. Every single person at that table has to be the perfect person for that business and what that business wants to deliver, otherwise it won’t work. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: I suggested to an advisor once that he host a client event, it wasn’t special. He did it in the penthouse suite since he could afford it, which is all relative, in an exclusive tower in Vancouver. It wouldn’t matter how much money you had in the world, you wouldn’t be able to get access to the suite because you had to live there on the block. He totally blew his clients away because this is a lovely apartment block that they couldn’t get access to. Yes, the things that you have to do to get them talking about it is the things that (1) they can’t buy themselves because they can’t afford it or (2) they can experience themselves just because they can. Then you get people talking about it. It’s like guess what I did, I went to this restaurant. I’ve never been to this restaurant and it’s super posh. It’s got to be something more than they can do or get themselves. Take me for example, I didn’t know and sometimes I’m WOWWed when I go into these offices. I’m telling you this little snippet because it just doesn’t have to be this amazing penthouse suite. I went into a client’s office and he had a scent machine above the door that spits out a beautiful smell of chamomile, jasmine, and lavender. I was like it smells amazing. I didn’t see the scent machine. I said what smells so lovely in here? He said yeah, it’s our scent machine. He hadn’t just bought jasmine, lavender, and some scent. He had this special blend mixed up, it cost him quite a few pounds, so that it relaxed the clients when they came in. What he then did was at Christmas he had candles made in the same scent and sent them as gifts with their family name engraved on the side of the candle. There’s no way a client’s going to say oh, I know. I’ll buy myself a candle with our family name on it, but he thought about it. It’s got him so much business, Julie, because guess what everyone’s talking about. Over Christmas the amazing smelling candle with their family name around the bottom. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: I’d love to connect with anybody. If anyone sees WOWW and experiences WOWW, then actually they need to tweet me, share it on Facebook. We also put the hashtag #WOWWAward and we can share these great, amazing ideas that are being implemented in firms. Julie Littlechild: Michelle Hoskin: Julie Littlechild: Steve Wershing: END OF RECORDING
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing of The Client Driven Practice.
I’m Julie Littlechild, president of AbsoluteEngagement.com. In this episode it’s all about the WOWW. We’re talking to Michelle Hoskin a/k/a Little Miss WOWW! Michelle’s an author, speaker, and coach. She’s based in England, but works with advisors around the world. Her focus is on intentionally designing a business that delivers a WOWW experience. What’s really interesting about what Michelle does is that she starts with what’s most important which is really understanding your own purpose.
In this episode you’ll learn things including how developing an acronym can be the first step in redesigning your practice from a blank sheet of paper that will be irresistible to your target market. You’ll learn the value of mapping out the five parts of your client journey and how one advisor locked up a year’s worth of clients by giving away an Aston Martin for a weekend.
With that, let’s go to our conversation with Michelle. Michelle, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us today.
My pleasure.
Look, you know that the focus of the podcast is really becoming referable. That’s a pretty big topic, but as the name suggests we’re interested in what it takes to make an advisor referable. We’re also then, of course, interested in how they can take action to increase business as well. Let me just start, perhaps, at a very high level and ask you what you think it takes to make a business referable.
I think the most important place to start is the huge amount of talk around the fact that we are an experienced economy. There are tons of books and information out there about why we’re moving into this era and what it takes to be successful in this age of our need and demand as consumers and clients to have an amazing experience. I think I’ve almost taken it to another level and I think in truth we’re actually in I would call it the WOWW economy. We don’t want just an experience, we want a WOWW experience. I think this is testament to the success of things like Facebook. We’re all posting things that we’re doing in amazing places and great service. What it actually takes to serve and to deliver WOWW is it’s just military. You go into amazing hotels and amazing restaurants and you can almost see military action in process. People in organizations have really thought about what it’s like to be a client, what it’s like to be a customer and they’ve thought through that whole journey. They’ve packed WOWW into it.
Right.
I think it takes desire and it takes a huge amount of effort, but the rewards are in abundance.
Absolutely. It’s interesting that you mention other industries. Do you find that advisors are looking outside our industry being less insular? Are you encouraging them to do that, to create this WOWW experience?
Yeah, I purposely look outside of financial services for my own benefit and also to share that insight with clients. Generally I think advisors are very insular, that’s why there’s lots of think tanks and mastermind groups within their organizations and with their own networks. They talk about what does best looks like and what does WOWW look like. I really massively encourage them to talk about and almost capture what expenses go out on airlines, in hotels, and in restaurants and to literally be on WOWW watch. I call it WOWW watch.
You may be the first who’s ever done that.
I think he probably thought I was hitting on him. I handed over this little card with a little note on it, but his face was–because he was the most amazing security guard I’ve ever come across in my whole time of travel. He deserved a WOWW card. When you look at it and see it’s from other industries, it’s almost really obvious that that is an act of wow. Then you can bring it back into your own businesses.
When you talk about this WOWW experience clearly designed, are you able to boil it down to the specific things that make a client experience extraordinary? Are there certain characteristics of that that you’ve seen?
Yeah, let me tell you a very brief story. I think it will highlight the point beautifully. I tell this story to advisors in presentations. Just so we’re really clear, the WOWW that I refer to is w-o-w-w. It actually stands for Ways of Wowing the World, that’s what it actually stands for.
What’s interesting to me is you’ve got this incredible experience. Clearly he connected or everybody connected on a different level, it wasn’t just about what they did it was that they understood what you needed in some way. When you try to unpack that a little and think about how does that hotel or that restaurant and then how does an advisor think about creating some process and structure around that so that they can do the same kind of things?
I think it’s how they’re ruled. What I mean by that is if you think about most financial services firms they run and they operate, therefore they deliver service in a way that meets compliance and regulatory requirements. In a hospitality industry like hotels, yes there’s health and safety, but I don’t think we’ve made it such a big deal but we’ve made compliance. I think advisors go into delivering services, they’re exhausted before I’ve even started because there are so many boxes to pick and so much drudgery around we’ve got to now do this and we have to fill this form out. They’re just only managing to just do enough. I say to advisors that if you put the focus on the client truly and not just service, not just a servicing way, but serving way, you will swallow what’s the regulatory requirements in your path.
Is this something that you see almost as innate in certain advisors or is it something that I might see this glimmer, I might hear you talk about that restaurant and think that is what I want to deliver to my clients. I want that for them. If I have that thought, where do you have me start to really begin to then craft the experience that is going to be that WOWW experience?
A couple of things just to point out, yes it is in them and it’s straight from the top. The reason they want to deliver WOWW for their clients, it’s because they want service providers to give them WOWW. They understand what WOWW looks like. There’s almost a caveat. There are almost two really, really important points. I was talking to an advisor a while back. He travels well and he goes on lovely holidays. He eats at the best restaurants, but what he realized through our conversations was that none of his staff have ever eaten in a Michelin star restaurant. They’ve never travelled anything above standard class. They’ve never experienced real exclusive service. When he was expecting his team to deliver this fabulous service, they’d never received it if that makes sense. They didn’t even know what it looked like.
You know, Michelle, one of the things that I’ve observed about advisors is they might see that kind of experience, they might have that kind of experience, but then they have a challenge in translating that into what they do for clients. Is there anything you can recommend to help an advisor get a perspective of what the client experience is like and translate some of those WOWWs from other industries into what they do for clients?
Yes. If they ask their team what does WOWW look like and they come up with maybe an acronym like amazing, extraordinary, and go with an acronym that WOWW means for their business; the next thing they have to do is they need to imagine that they have no clients, they have no staff, they have no office, they have no business, and they have no service. Start designing it from scratch. You imagine a financial advisor business sits around with their team and says imagine we’re starting this business from scratch and we’re about to serve our ideal client. We’ll have no regulator. We have no compliance. How would we deliver that service? You design it totally from scratch. You talk about amazing experiences that they’ve had. It might be that somebody said I went onto an airplane and the host actually remembered my name.
You were just talking about your favorite clients there and I’d love to ask you, we’ve been talking to a lot of folks about niche markets particularly as it relates to referrals; the need to have a niche and your ability to serve effectively when you’ve got a more targeted audience. How does that concept of target client or niche play into designing this kind of experience?
It’s massive. My thought about niche is very specific. I’ll say to advisors what’s your target market? I swear if I hear high net worth business professional one more time I’m going to scream. I’ll say to an advisor it’s so not about how much money they’ve got, it’s so not about the jobs they do. Then you’re trying to WOWW somebody. You’re connecting with them at a much deeper level. I want to know, for example, where they hang out on the weekend? How much they love their children? What do they think about being a parent? What do they think about their relationship with their wife? I want to know the much deeper ideal client for that firm.
Right. Right.
Julie, you have a niche client the same as I do. You’re dealing with a specific type of financial advisor. When you start talking their language and–when I say in presentations things like and I know you feel like that. They’re all shaking head going oh my god, she’s a witch. How does she know this stuff? Because we know them better than they know themselves. That’s when you can WOWW, because you’re thinking of things before they’ve even thought about it. You’re doing things before they’ve even asked about it. That’s WOWW. That’s when you’ll blow the clients out of the water.
Right.
Your competitors stand no chance.
I want to get down to how I might think about this. I’ve got my team together. We’ve talked about what they consider to be an extraordinary experience. How do I think about that client journey or client experience? Do you have a process that you take people through to break the business down or break the client experience down so that they can really begin to put some mean on that and define it a little more clearly?
Yeah, I think one of the things that I suggest they do is literally start with a blank sheet of paper. You get the picture out and almost talk through as a group in a collaborative method, so just open it out, and almost say to the team imagine everything’s possible. Imagine everything is possible, nothing is a problem. Imagine you’ve got all the money in the world, all the time and resources in the world. We can do whatever we want. Then I suggest that they break their business or their client journey down into five main areas. The first one is the engagement piece. From the second that the inquiry comes in we want another client, not a prospect. How are they inquiring? Is it by email? Is it by telephone? Are they being referred in by a professional introducer? You’ve almost got to capture it right from the very first step of connection.
That makes…
It seems massively important.
…so much sense. I want to hear a bit about what you’re up to in a moment, but I was wondering if I could just ask you one question which might involve what we’ve been talking or might just draw on other experience. We’ve been asking this of all of our guests. That is are there two to three things that you think advisors can do to get people talking about them more?
Yes. On the basis that we’re in this WOWW economy as I call it, I think what the people want to talk about, they want to talk about the things they’ve done or that’s happened to them that either hasn’t happened before or they themselves could not make happen. I’ll give you an example. A client is not going to share an amazing story with their friends that their advisor took them to a restaurant, the same restaurant that they took their wife to two weeks ago. That’s normal. That’s normal. However, if, for example, there was an advisor who had a client who was an art dealer or a cheese connoisseur or a wine specialist and there was some sort of gift that was sent or a meal was arranged and you got an hour with the wine expert. It’s almost giving people access and giving them a service that they wouldn’t get themselves and even sometimes money can’t buy.
I love that idea. Look, I know it’s…
It’s crazy, but it works.
We could go on. I can’t believe we’re actually at time already because I could talk to you for hours. Let me just ask you this quickly. If folks are interested in learning about what you’re up to, where can they find you?
Various places. In order to connect proactively and interactively, you can find me on Facebook as Little Miss WOWW, also on Twitter as Little Miss WOWW. The website is www.standardsinternational.co.uk. We’re also on Instagram and we’re always sending out mailers with tips and tricks and ideas. Also on Amazon.co.uk there is my new book which is The Little Book of WOWW. Where that book came from was I met a lady who used to be headhunted by restaurants to become Michelin starred. I got to talking to her one day and she said to be a Michelin starred restaurant you have to x, y, and z. I said you do me a favor and email me the list of every single thing that a Michelin starred restaurant would have to do to maintain its status and she did. Then I turned every single one of those things into what an advisor firm should do and it’s packed full of tips and ideas. It’s the best little book ever and it’s dead simple, these ideas are being implemented all over the place.
Thank you so much. It is a great book, I’d certainly recommend it. I hadn’t fully appreciated that it picked up on the Michelin for some reason, so that is wonderful. Thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, my pleasure, Julie. My pleasure.
Absolutely. Thanks again. Take care.
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.