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What Business Are You In

Written by: Donald F. Pooley

Article Overview: When I started financial planning it surprised me that what clients wanted far more than my expertise was an information processor. They were ready to pay someone to convert all the statements and other information coming at them from various financial firms into a form that they could understand.

What Business Are You In

When I started financial planning it surprised me that what clients wanted far more than my expertise was an information processor. They were ready to pay someone to convert all the statements and other information coming at them from various financial firms into a form that they could understand.
This shouldn't have surprised me as about half a century ago a marketing analyst wrote about a disease of businesses that he called "Marketing Myopia". It occurs when business owners think they're in a certain business, but their real business is something else.
The example he gave was the U.S. railways, which had fallen on hard times. He felt this was because its managers thought they were in the railroad business, when they were really in the transportation business.
If we buy this marketing idea then maybe we can benefit by taking a wider view of the business that we think we're in.
We could say that we're in the "financial advisory" business, but maybe that's still too narrow a description.
My thought is that we're all in the information business. We collect it, process it, and pass it on to someone else to do something else with.
If you think of yourself as in the information business you get a different, broader view of what you actually do. For example, you realize that your primary purpose in your first meeting with a prospect is to collect information. And part of that process is building a relationship with the prospect to ease your collection of that information.
It's not to sell.
The next step is to process that information to make it more useful to whoever you'll be passing it on to. If it's to go back to the prospect, then you'll process it in one way. If it's to go to a product provider, you'll process it another way. In short, you'll process it to suit the next recipient.
How does this help you in your marketing?
I met an advisor at an MDRT meeting who told me he sent each of his clients a statement of their last-year's assets every year asking them to update and return it with his annual fee.
He was information processing, and getting paid for it.
More than that. He found out what they were doing with their money, which gave him information he could use to arrange a meeting, e.g. "Jack, I see you've got a large block of bonds maturing in the next month, and thought we should meet to discuss the best place to re-invest that money."
Not that difficult to do nowadays, with some good computer programs.
And once you've set it all up you could advertise to your clients, prospects, and centers-of-influence, that you can compile all the data they get from various financial firms into one, easily-understandable statement.
Whether you charge a fee, or not, is up to you.

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