Episode 2 – Michelle Hoskin on Creating a WOW Experience

Steve Wershing:
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.

Julie Littlechild:
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.

Steve Wershing:
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.

Julie Littlechild:
With that, let’s go to our conversation with Michelle.  Michelle, welcome.  Thanks so much for joining us today.

Michelle Hoskin:
My pleasure.

Julie Littlechild:
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.

Michelle Hoskin:
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.

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.

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