5 best practices to brand your process & win more busines

Most investment advisors still use product and price to compete for new business. Unfortunately, neither of these is enough to win the clients you want. In my experience, clients who come aboard based on product and price are generally lower-tier clients who drag on your business.

The most effective way to compete in this commoditized industry is to brand your business process – to create and refine, then artfully articulate who you are, what you do, and what your clients can expect.

Tell clients visually what you do

As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words, and creating a concise, professionally branded graphic helps potential clients quickly understand and remember the value you provide. 

Your graphic should tell clients that you:

• Follow a disciplined, professional approach to wealth management;
• Focus on their well-being and interests;
• Are up-front and honest about what they can expect from you in the coming weeks, months, and years;
• Are a proactive investment advisor with discipline to back up your promises; and
• Implement business systems and processes that make it easy for everyone who does business with you to achieve success

You change how you are evaluated and judged by introducing the graphical overview of your process at your initial meeting with a prospect. You are no longer competing on product, price, or investment returns that are largely out of your control. You become a professional who competes using processes and systems. Your business process is proof that you have a unique way of transforming your 'clients' present situation into a better future. That's a highly persuasive argument for doing business with you.

5 best practices for creating a powerful graphic for your business process.

You can design your business process in many ways, but the fundamental rule is to distill and simplify a complex process into something visual and easy to comprehend. A step-by-step "roadmap" structure can explain your business process and show the prospect what you will do for them.

1. Keep the illustration as simple as possible. Your goal is to communicate quickly and clearly. 
2. Use geometric shapes. Circles, squares, and pyramids work best. 
3. Show motion or progress toward a goal. A ladder, a pyramid, a series of steps, or a rotating wheel are all easy-to-understand images that suggest advancement or evolution toward a target or goal.
4. Keep copy to a minimum. How detailed should you be when describing your business process? It's a fine line. You'll want it thorough enough to communicate what clients can expect accurately yet simple enough to be easily understood. I advise simplifying your process as much as possible, then creating your graphic overview and showing it to someone else, preferably someone outside the business. If they give you a puzzled look or ask you to explain what it all means, chances are it's still too complicated.
5. Hire a professional. Hire a professional to create a printable copy of your graphic overview unless you're an artist. Given a rough sketch of what 'you're looking for, an excellent graphic designer or illustrator can craft a professional-looking graphic relatively quickly for much less than expected. Chances are, it will look a lot better than anything you could produce on your own.

Bottom line

By distilling your process into a simple diagram, you can leverage it to tell your story and demonstrate your professional discipline simultaneously. This gives the prospect confidence to choose you over a competitor.

Articulating your value to your prospects and clients is the core of capturing the most significant opportunities in your market. 

Jeff Thorsteinson is a partner in Advisor Practice Management, an organization that helps financial advisors build world-class practices through innovative concepts, tools, and systems. Their website can be found at www.apm.coach.