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PUT
THE PRO IN PROFESSIONAL
by John
H. Melchinger
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Opportunity If you
don't want to read any farther, here's my message:
Don't try to read
the handwriting on the wall. Put your own handwriting on our own wall. As for life
in general,
"The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on. Nor all your piety nor
wit can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of
it."
You cannot change the wind, but you can adjust your sails and course.
Has the world changed?
Of course. More than we can measure. Faster than we can keep pace. These arenas-the
world, globalizing economies, local economies and financial services-all provide
constantly changing realities you may or may not need or want to deal with.
The Real Question
The most important question for examining any situation is, "What's the real
question?" Let's begin here. Forget the turn of the page on the calendar. In
January, we will know the extent of Y2K on business and finances; the parties will
be over; we will all be breathing regularly again; the hold that we put on normalcy
somewhere in the last quarter of 1999 will end. Like time, reality will begin creeping
in its petty pace just as the Bard of Avon observed so many centuries ago.
What is the real question? This is where to begin. It leads to the questions you
must answer for yourself and your practice.
Who do you serve?
Who comprise your book of business? Who has a right to ask for service from you?
Who do you really want as clients, to clone and acquire more like them? Can you clearly
define your target client in terms readily understood by others when you tell them?
What value do you offer and provide?
What is it that clients receive from you, and how do they benefit? I don't mean promises
made and not kept. This occurs too often. I don't mean your perspective on this,
either. The proof is in the pudding. What is your clientsí take on the value they
get from you, your good counsel and advice? What would they tell me if I surveyed
them about you?
What do you do?
I've heard some of the best salespeople step on their tongues trying to answer this
one. It's so important to master, let's examine it closely.
At a gathering, someone asks a stranger they've just met, "What do you do?"
"I'm a doctor," s/he replies.
What's next?
The inquirer asks, "What's your specialty" or "What kind of doctor
are you?"
Same scenario, version 2:
"What do you do?"
"I'm a lawyer," s/he replies.
The inquirer asks, "What's your specialty" or "What kind of lawyer
are you?"
In both cases the inquirer knows enough common knowledge about the stated profession
that a clarifying question is natural. In version 3: "What do you do?"
"I'm a financial planner" or "I'm an estate planner" you reply.
The inquirer states, "You're a stock broker" or "You're in insurance,
right?" or "Are you a lawyer?" or "Are you an accountant?"
However professional you and your peers may claim to be, the people you most need
to achieve clarity about what you do are the least informed and the most imaginative
about it because they have a preconceived notion that is invariably inaccurate.
You say this phenomenon doesn't really matter for you because all your new business
comes from direct referrals and they all know what you do? Okay. With all the new
commercials by heavily capitalized competitors defining what "real" planners
do and do not do, can you really leave to chance the very definition of what you
do? No. Can you slide around the question glibly when someone you meet asks you?
No. Not successfully, anyway. don't delude yourself about your extraordinary sales
skills.
The question was "What do you do?" The answer begs for verbs, not titles.
"Financial Planner" is not what you do. It is what you think you are or
strive to be to your clients.
What's the real question? If someone asks you what you do, the real question is in
there somewhere, asking perhaps "What do you do that might benefit me?"
or "What kind of business are you in and what role do you play in it?"
or hopefully "What do you do for people and might it interest me enough to find
a way to further satisfy my curiosity about you and what you do by asking another
question or telling you something about me to see if it's an opening for more conversation?"
Your answer to the question "What do you do?" is your first best opportunity
to engage people. Prepare to answer it well.
3 BEs
There are three things to be in marketing. Be First; Be Best; Be Different in an
appealing way.
To Be First
means to innovate; to offer something as, or as if, it were new.
Be Best. People like to know and believe they are working with the best. You
need to employ effective ways to say you are among the very best and most suitable
professionals the prospect could wish for.
Be Different-in an appealing way. This means that you must key your messages
on something that will make you heard above the din of the crowdÖor the crowd will
pass you by.
As a professional,
you must differentiate yourself or you are just another one of whatever people think
you are. Answer for yourself what distinguishes you? What unique skills, talents,
interests, characteristics make you different in an appealing way? Ask your clients
and friends. They know. listen to them. Find out from them the best ways they think
you can tell or show strangers these truths about you. Your power derives from your
clients. The proof is in the pudding-and your clients are your pudding.
3 Judgments of Professionals
People initially judge professionals by three criteria: resume, process and the way
you engage people.
Resume: Your
resume has two effects to produce. Your credentials demonstrate your ability. Face
it, someone with degrees and legitimate professional designations have a leading
edge over those without. Associations, types of clients and reputation comprise your
credibility. Practitioners without a track record and impressive associations that
say "I'm smart enough not to claim to do everything myself" must borrow
credibility from something bigger than themselves.
Professionals have ways to present themselves formally and informally that say, "Here
I am. Here I stand. I should pass the first step of examinationñmy bona fides."
Process: Many reasons demand that professionals unveil and demonstrate their
process for advising clients.
· People expect consistency and objective analysis by professionals, so defining
your process helps meet that expectation. · Assurance that a professional
is fair, even dispassionate, strengthens the professional<>client relationship.
Explaining your process makes you effective communicating your ability to dissociate
and be fair. · Clients are looking for leadership. Show them the process you
will lead them through and assure them you have the way.
Whether they call you coach, advisor, guru, whatever, the sooner they know and understand
the process you use as a professional, they sooner they will be onboard with your
leadership.
Questions: The way you engage people lets them feel how they will or will
not get along with your leadership. Their question is, "Is this the person I
want to lead and advise me through the maze of financial decisions I must make over
the years in order to become financially independent? Can I trust this person as
a professional?"
The secret to successful engagements is usually the questions you ask and how you
ask them. What separates Socrates from all the other philosophers is not that he
is the father of modern philosophy (there are others who were as good at thinking)
or that he martyred himself and drank the hemlock (supposedly on principle); it is
that he asked questions that could not go unanswered. Even today his questions remain
with us, as does the Socratic Method as a thoughtful technique to assure successful
inquisition.
To make my point stronger about questions, forget Socrates and think of the great
questions you've pondered in your life. Do you know the sound of one hand clapping?
Of a tree that falls in the forest when no one is there to hear? See my point? The
good guru always has more questions than answers.
Start Here
A starting place for questions is, "What's the real question?" Substitute
"issue" for "question" anytime you feel like it.
Want to master certain questions of your own? Here's how. First, decide a value you
believe clients want to focus on. Next, develop a question to find out where they
want to go. Finally, pose a question that they will answer and demonstrate to themselves
where they are and that they still have a ways to go. Formula: Desired Outcome
minus Present Situation equals Distance to Travel to Objective.
In plain terms a business decisionmaker can understand and accept: "We operate
on the basis of your answers to four key questions:
1. What do you have?
2. What do you need?
3. What do you want?
4. Can you afford it?"
On the more personal
side, a poignant pair of questions: 1. "Are you in business to make your life
better or in life to make your business better?"
[Everyone gives the same answer!] 2. "If I, as an outside, objective observer,
were to examine the past 12 months of your life, asking your associates,
friends and family about you, could I draw the same conclusion?"
Another of my favorites for older decisionmakers who think they have everything together
and tightly wrapped: "You and I can both easily see what you do to be so successful.
What are you doing to be significant?" If you are an estate planner and get
to the heart of your clientsí dreams, this question is armor piercing and should
be in your arsenal. If you are a salesperson looking for a transaction and you believe
this question is too challenging or provocative, you are wrong in your thinking but
should nevertheless avoid asking it. It will do you more harm than good.
Professional
This article started out with an injunction to put the pro back in professional.
Let me define the term.
pro·fes·sion·al
adjective
1. a. Of, relating
to, engaged in, or suitable for a profession: a professional field such as law; professional
training. b. Conforming to the standards of a
profession: professional ethics.
2. Engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career:
amateur and professional actors.
3. Performed by persons receiving pay: professional football.
4. Having or showing great skill; expert: a thoroughly professional repair
job.
noun Abbr. prof.
1. A person
following a profession, especially a learned profession.
2. One who earns a living in a given or implied occupation: hired a professional
to decorate the house.
3. A skilled practitioner; an expert.
pro·fes·sion·al·ly
adverb
Ethics
There is more, of course, to being professional than simply meeting all or most of
the definition of ethical. Ethical behavior is presumed to be one hallmark, if not
the measure, of truly professional behavior. I think it is a myth because ethics
are confusing today. Society also allows more to slide than
ever before.
Lawyers have their ethics and review procedures, yet are the brunt of jokes that
enumerate their most unsavory and unethical behavior, some of which is considered
so routine it is acceptable. Police are often believed to be routinely unethical,
and doing certain things habitually which are unethical and often criminal. Too harsh
you say? Not applicable to financial services? Okay, think of three characteristics
generally attached to the description of the stereotypical life insurance salesperson.
How many relate to ethics?
Here's my point. No matter what you claim to be, someone can apply a universally
jaded view of it and easily shun youÖwrite you off. don't ever pin a title on your
sleeve or forehead. It let's people think what they will. Tell people what you do
instead! Guide people to your way of thinking.
If you tell and show people what you do, ethics will never be at issue except in
the beginning when you should declare that as a professional, all information about
your client will be held sacred and in complete confidentiality.
Ethics are merely the rules for the morality your profession chose to adapt. At the
outset of any relationship, the ethics by which you live need no more introduction
than for you to say that you live by them. You don't need to go any farther, and
if you do, it may create an effect you do not want. People who proclaim to be something
they should already be anyway just raise that very doubt.
Ethics are also changing. Example: Agencies recruiting life insurance careerists,
or trying to attract brokers away from one operation to another, lived with the ethic
of not proselytizing. It was often a hot topic, and there were certain rules governing
what was okay and what was not. These were eventually ethics more honored in the
breech than the observance. Now it's a free-for-all.
How many life insurance brokers back off when they speak with a highly desirable
prospect and learn s/he's doing business with another broker? If you think the overriding
ethic is professional courtesy and backing off is best, I counter with the ethic
that it is the client's decision to make, and in the client's best interest to make
an informed decision. It is not who the broker or advisor is that counts; it is how
the client benefits that really matters.
Practice Makes Perfect
My favorite definition of professional is someone who does all the right things right
the first time. How does this come about? What makes anyone able to do this?
Practice, practice, practice. The best at anything practice until even the most difficult,
demanding skills seem easy. Golfers practice swings because of muscle memory; they
know muscles remember grooves and they want their muscles to remember the right grooves
for them. Swimmers practice laps for toning muscles, developing stroke technique
and for getting their breathing timed to perfection; they seek that perfect, winning
groove. Professionals> think about what they know and how it can apply to people
who need their advice; they practice how to communicate it so their clients follow
their thinking and discover their best courses of actions, fully informed.
The age of the advisor is at hand. Anyone can buy a product. Knowing which one to
buy is the key to success.
Can a computer program advise? To a limited degree. Can a salesperson promoting product
advise? Only within the limited scope and bias of the product. Is an advisor objective?
Only to a certain degree, and complete objectivity serves ill. What the client wants
and needs is bias in the client's favor; to know what is really best for me! For
that, professionals need to know the client every bit as well as they know product,
marketplace or economics.
Clients want results. To get them they need to recognize their attainable goals;
accept where they are now on the road to their goals; and desire to make up the difference
between goals and reality with a strategic plan tailored to them. The professional
planner understands this and manages making it work
out right.
Make It So
Picture Number One standing on the bridge when Captain Jean Luc Piccard asks what
can be done to get through an uncharted ion plasma belt and to their objective on
time. Number One offers a course of action that he knows the Captain will understand
and perhaps accept, maybe with some adjustments of his own. The Captain suggests
a slight variation and asks for an opinion. Number One replies that the Captain's
objectives can be reached via that collaborated strategy. The Captain says, "Make
it so."
That's about the way that high end financial planning, estate planning, wealth management,
wealth preservation and all the cutely named alternatives will be done in the next
several years. Collaborative efforts between client and multiple advisors will become
commonplace. Reliance on the goodwill, expertise and professionalism of one advisor
is passé.
There is no doubt that two heads are better than one. Better informed and thought-through
decisions make better results. So here is my wish for the new age of finances-
Associate with other professionals, either in partnerships, joint ventures or closely
knit strategic alliances that market, promote and work together.
Why? Capital is as capital does. The big boys are setting the rules for competing
with their services and advertising that can't be beat. Bigger financial services
providers may not be better for the consumer, but it is the reality for a whileÖat
least until the consumer demands something different.
Will there still be room for professional advisors in sole practices? Yes, but not
without close-knit alliances with other professionals in a consortium that markets
and operates competitively with the big boys. If you think Ma Bell and Microsoft
monopoly issues will never reach financial services, read the news. Citigroup, Ing
and other new giants are already being watched carefully to make sure they do not
create unfair monopolies through illegal practices to squash competition.
When McCarren-Ferguson is repealed and insurance companies are no longer exempt from
anti-trust laws and mutuals go stock, a whole paradigm of paradigms will be erased.
The Zamboni of the financial services rink will more than resurface the playing field.
It will gut it.
I believe that the sole practitioner advisor of today must rapidly become a master
of marketing, the WWW and Internet, manager of efficient and effective systems and
procedures, and expert rather than general practitioner. It's either this or become
lost in the giant winds of financial change as the laws that once divided segments
of the financial world to protect consumers now dissolve to protect consumers. All
the more reason to embrace professionalism, become visibly professional and show
you have the exact right stuff.
Happy Marketing!
John H. Melchinger coaches personal financial services advisors how to market
their professional practice to high income and high net worth affluents. Effective
market
identification, segmentation, selection, penetration and development, with compelling
packaging and promotion, make his clients among the best planners in the business.
His marketing techniques, how-to books, articles and presentations have become classics
in private practice marketing. John donates one day per month to non-profit organizations
that request his support for workshops, seminars and fund-raisers.
John is available via email to: john@melchinger.com.
T. (403) 547-7521 (messages)
F. (403) 547-7524
Web site: www.melchinger.com
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