Articulating Your Value Proposition | Summer School Lesson 2

Download the worksheet here.

Video transcription:

Welcome back to episode two of Summer School.

Today, we are moving on from talking about perfect client personas and we are casting the focus on you.

This is how to articulate what makes you special. And make no mistake, every one of you is special. This is your daily affirmation.

Let’s get into it.

Today, we’re talking about what is your unique value proposition? Now, some people call this a unique selling proposition.

I think it matters whether you say value or whether you say selling.

And here’s why.

The words that we say put our mindset in different places.

So, when I use the term value, to me, that casts our vision very clearly on our clients and what we are doing for them, as opposed to when I use the word selling and just everything that goes around that contextually and historically, how that word has been used and seen.

To me, that puts the onus on me and what am I doing.

So, it’s very intentional that we’re going to say unique value proposition in today’s video and not unique selling proposition. Now, you might use either of those.

I’m not saying that either one of those is bad, but I think it’s important to establish the mindset that we want to approach marketing from and it’s always, always, always going to be client first.

Your unique value proposition is an explainer of the differentiator, the unique thing that you do for people that you work with, that other people don’t do.

Now, you might think this is kind of hard because all advisors kind of provide the same services, but here’s the thing.

No one provides the same services.

Yeah, you all might do financial planning or do some level of retirement income planning, but no two advisory firms really do it in exactly the same way.

Your people are different. Your processes are different. And that’s where I want your focus to be on and understanding how your people and how your process can be used to communicate how what you do is different than everybody else.

Today, we’re going to get into three questions to ask yourself to help clarify a statement that illustrates your unique value proposition.

Question One

The first question you want to ask yourself is “Why is the work that I do valuable?”

I want to caution you not to lean heavily on the word fiduciary here. This has kind of become like a little bit of a fallback option for some advisers to say, well, we’re different because we are fiduciaries.

Now, that can be a critically important distinction if you are an RIA who is selling against the values in a warehouse still. But it really quickly falls away if somebody is comparing RIA to RIA.

And it just may not have as much of an impact as it does to you because you’re steeped in it every single day as it does to the average consumer.

So, while that can be an element of what makes you special, I would say don’t lean on that for 100% of this.

Question Two

You want to ask yourself, “What’s special about me personally?”

All of us have very unique personalities, and the more that you can put your personality into your communications and into the way that you interact with people, I think the better off you’re going to be.

So, it can even tie into the specific value that you bring to people.

If you’ve gone through the work of creating personas and have developed a niche – like let’s say that you are somebody who grew up in SoCal and you love surfing, and now one of your your target audiences is going to be pro surfers.

You understand extremely well their lifestyle, insider language, and everything that they’re going through because it’s something that you’ve lived through.

Your example might not be that extreme, but all of your personality differences can play a role in how you interact with and deliver good service to your clients.

So, do an examination of yourself.

Question Three

Go through this checklist and identify a few ways that your firm provides things that are different from what your peers are doing. Here’s a checklist.

4 Things:

1. Communications

2. Technology

3. Services

4. Fee Models

Let’s go through each one of those separately.

Communications.

Everybody is doing email. Most people are doing social media. But maybe you’re doing something a little bit differently in any one of those. Maybe you’re super heavy into YouTube, which most people still aren’t doing effectively.

So, look at ways that you’re communicating with people that other people might not be.

Technology.

On your technology, it could be similar. Do you do you maximize your client portal a lot more effectively than most of the advisory firms that you see doing around you? You can talk about that.

You can make that part of the process that you speak to.

Services & Fee Model.

Your services and your fee model can both be slightly different than what other people are doing. So, what all of this really has to do with is understanding what other firms around you and like you might be doing now.

I don’t want you to get caught up looking at other firms. This is more of a glancing type of analysis.

It’s not setting aside what you’re doing and improving yourself inside your business because that’s going to get you off track.

If you start looking outside your firm too much, you’re going to get caught up in seeing what others are doing and invariably feeling like they’re doing it better than you. And that is a recipe for disaster.

Just briefly pick out 2-4 firms around you or firms you know and respect. Take a look at what they’re doing and then look at what you’re doing differently or better than them and start to put your focus on those things.

Ultimately, we want to arrive at kind of a simple formula. “I help these types of people do these types of things.”

If you can boil down your unique value prop into that type of statement, you’re going to be really well on your way to understanding how you can communicate how and why you’re different than other people who could initially be seen as providing the same or similar types of services as you.

Again, just like last week, we’ve got a worksheet. Answer these questions for yourself.

See if you can boil it down to a 30-second elevator pitch that you can memorize and know really, really well so that when someone asks you, “What do you do?” you’re able to answer that question and speak value into their experience instead of just saying, “I run an advisory firm.”

Hit up that worksheet, and we’ll see you again next week for another session of summer school.

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