At a rather unique financial services industry conference I recently attended, I was stricken by the level of discussions and trainings going on around what it meant to truly engage and connect with your clients and prospects. Beyond the typical industry platitudes and internal perceptions of being “client-centered” or “client–focused,” there lies a serious art and science behind client engagement—a level of personal contact that is not left to chance or that relies on bouts of sparkling charm.
The truth was brought out that the very best customer engagement companies carefully think out and journey map the customer’s experience with their firm or events. This includes isolating key touchpoints, specifically designing the experience and consistently orchestrating their client interactions across varied mediums. For financial advisors, developing these client skills and strategies seem to be the answer to their most pressing challenges of achieving differentiated competitive advantage from other financial professionals and answering the perceived disruption from robo-advisors and other pure technology solutions like chatbots and virtual assistants.
Such were the thoughts and feelings that overcame me at White Glove’s most recent annual conference called Host University in Naples, Fla.
White Glove is a digital marketing company that has evolved into a business growth hub where advisors all across the United States and Canada can come to one place for everything they need to grow and thrive. Their unique value proposition offers a 100 percent done-for-you, turn-key, triple guaranteed, logistical community engagement strategy through educational seminars.
White Glove co-founders—financial advisors Mike & Dean Thurman—successfully built their financial services firm by hosting educational seminars. Over time they perfected a strategy using digital marketing as a heat seeking tool to isolate and capture the financial interests of local qualified individuals at the point they are most interested in or needing financial advice—when they are actively searching for financial information on the internet and where you can be the most relevant to their needs. That’s a great example of the science of engagement. What they also developed, through continuous experimentation and trial and error, was how best to position yourself as an expert invested in the community’s wellbeing at that seminar and that, I feel, is truly at the level of an art form.
The bulk of Host University targeted the question: What truly is needed to professionally create and develop customer engagement? Besides the Thurmans’ experiences, many White Glove advisor clients also shared their most effective approaches and techniques in engaging seminar participants, as defined by, what worked most effectively in driving participants to book a follow-up appointment and eventually become clients. Rounding out and elevating those discussions were further techniques and strategies shared by seminar expert and author Frank Maselli on his extensive experience on how to convert seminar participants into lifelong customers.
Some key lessons discussed for an effective seminar strategy included:
• Advisors need to focus in their mind that seminars are strategically about establishing connection, not selling.
• Most effective skills to develop included using the power of stories, finding and developing your natural communication style and knowing when to use various presentation techniques and tips that can increase your emotional impact with participants.
• The winning formula includes having an educator’s heart, being authentic in addressing your audience’s concerns and needs, and not discussing specific products.