As we enter a new year, we often take this time to think about our business and what we need to do to achieve success over the next 12 months. A key component of our plans is training and how we uplift the skills of our teams and the capabilities we have available to deliver further growth for the business.
In our latest episode of Into the Lumiverse, Mark Akeroyd and Tom Frisby discuss training and what you need to consider as you transition from delivering services to staging experiences for clients.
Let’s start by recapping the difference between a service and an experience.
A services business is one that delivers services to clients. They state that they deliver great, meaningful, connected services to their clients to help them achieve their financial goals. They are about saving clients time by offering “outsourced” financial services.
Whereas an experience business is one where clients pay for the experience of co-creating their best life with you. They see the experience as time well invested. They would state that through their financial planning experience, clients will be able to define and co-create their best life, with their advisor guiding their transformation to live healthier, wealthier and wiser lives.
If you’re looking to stage extraordinary experiences for clients in 2024, the skills you may need to train your team on could be vastly different from before.
Let me explain: a services business will be looking to train its teams on improving efficiencies and saving time. Things like using A.I. to speed up communications, continuing to gain proficiency in using software to model complex financial scenarios quickly, and educating yourself on the latest assets to quickly choose the best options for clients.
While a business focused on experiences will be looking to define the training based on how they can impact how clients feel about engaging with their business. So, it could be things like being trained to become a better coach, learning how to become a better facilitator or educating themselves on the latest wellbeing trends to support clients in improving their overall wellbeing.
It’s about working out the different roles each member of your team plays in impacting how a client feels as they go through your advice process. So that the client feels their time with you is well invested.
In this episode, Mark and Tom provide you with three tips to up your experiences.
1. Define your business theme
Before you even begin to think about training your team, you need to consider what your business theme is. Tom explains it like this:
“Experience delivery isn’t just about the advisor and it’s not just about how you talk to or treat or greet clients. It has to do with how you make them feel. And people - the entire team - are involved in creating those feelings when a client interacts with your business.
So if we’re training people on experience delivery, we need to actually begin with their theme - their “why,” a deeper purpose.”
Once you have defined your theme, you will have a better understanding of where you need to train your team.
For example, if your business themes are connection, trust and possible, it means you have to train your team to deliver that experience. So that every interaction a client has with the business, he wants them to feel connected to the person they are engaging with, they trust that person to do what’s needed for them and their family, and that everything is possible.
2. Train people to what “role” they need to play in your advice process
How do you do that? Well, it’s time to start thinking of “role” as more than a job description.
What do I mean by that?
In the episode, Tom and Mark discuss how each member of your team has a specific role to play within your staged experience - a bit like actors in a movie.
Let’s take the receptionist or the person who manages the front desk. If their role is to be there to connect, create trust, and convey possibility, then you have to start asking yourself what they need to do.
They certainly need the required administrative, CRM, and interpersonal skills to be able to manage the demands of their job. But. the layered-on skills might be - how would you want them to behave if you wanted to convey connection and trust? Would you want them to follow up more promptly? Would the follow-up be done in multiple ways? Would they need to be able to use the CRM to be able to quickly pull up their background and strike up relevant conversations with them while they wait in the lobby?
For the advisor to go beyond the delivery of service and planning and deliver a connected, trusted, and possible experience, would your time be better spent getting more educated on asset allocations - which really hasn't changed much in the last few decades? Or would it be better to spend your time on a listening or coaching course so you can be a better advisor and trusted guide for the client?
Everyone in your business has a specific role to play. It’s your job to determine what those roles are, how they connect to your business theme and what are the necessary and required skills for that position. And that takes us to tip three.
3. Determining the required and necessary skills
If we’re going to start putting an experience layer on training, we need to not think of things as soft and hard skills. Instead, we should be talking about required skills and necessary skills.
Required skills are the table stakes. They are what are required for you to do your job. This would include things like being able to use your CRM or engagement software to see and understand what matters to your clients. These you can often train for via process and getting hands-on with the pieces of software you need to do your job.
The necessary skills are the ones that people have to learn and get better with in terms of how they are impacting the client experience and the client. They are the ones that often cannot be taught via a step-by-step process.
Let’s use an example - listening skills.
If being connected to your client is part of what you’re trying to achieve in your experience, listening is an absolutely necessary skill. It’s one that is an integral part of having clients feel heard and connected to their advisor.
So, as you think about training, you need to think about what are the required skills and the necessary skills that are required for each role within your advice process that connects back to your business themes. In doing so, you’ll be training your team to be able to deliver extraordinary experiences to clients.
Want to learn more? Why not check out our Academy and our first course - the Lumiant Advice Experience. Not only does this course help train your team on the required skills of using our platform, but it also gives your team the necessary skills needed to deliver an engaging experience for clients.
