SECRETS OF CREDIBILITY MARKETING — PART 1: THREE SIMPLE WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR CREDIBILITY
by Michael Lovas
As Michael Lovas was writing Capitalizing on Credibility, his intent was to teach insurance and financial professionals how to conduct a Credibility Marketing Campaign. As the book grew beyond 200 pages, Lovas realized that he was writing two books. So, he published the strategy and the direct mail techniques and renamed the book Beyond Wave Marketing. What didn’t get published were the specifics of what makes credibility. This series of articles discusses these credibility building concepts.
If it’s true that the success of an insurance or financial business depends on developing loyal clients, how then, can we develop loyal clients when price seems so important?
When you use price as the differentiator, you lose every time. Even if you get the account, your resources and energies will be drained because you won’t be compensated for them adequately enough. You can transcend the price-focused marketplace if you precede the sales conversation with a year of excellent service and communication to do what every prospect wants: prove your credibility. That’s the essence of Credibility Marketing.
In real life, that means you must literally rebuild your business to provide continuous, creative, and relevant communication that offers three key benefits:
1) It builds trust in you. Trust leads to credibility (over time). Credibility brings referrals.
2) It satisfies the client’s 'convincer strategy.' This is a mental filter that measures the number of times a person needs to be exposed to you in order to be convinced to remain your client.
3) It’s your ticket out of Priceville and into the land of the A-Level Game! That’s where the superstars of your industry outperform everyone else.
Because the people who call me and hire me are advisors from throughout the U.S. and Canada, I know that most advisors don’t understand communication. Look at how our industry handled its clients in the past year. Did you lose contact with your clients? If so, you’re in the majority. If you retained all your clients, you’re in the minority. If not, you probably lost them to advisors who understand how to connect with your clients better than you do.
YOU’RE IN LUCK
The fact that most advisors can’t or don’t communicate well opens the door to a huge opportunity for you. Think of it as your way to give more creative service and you can begin to connect with other people in better and more relevant ways. There are hundreds of ways to give your clients excellent service, showing them you’re different and better — another essential of credibility. That’s what this series is all about.
THREE INNOVATIVE WAYS TO GIVE INCREDIBLE SERVICE
1. Listen for a Change
Of course, you listen, right? When people talk, you hear them, don’t you? Or do you? The truth is that when communication breaks down, it’s usually because one of the participants fails to listen. Remember: a bore is an advisor who talks about himself, but a brilliant conversationalist is an advisor who listens while clients talk about themselves. Research proves that most people don’t listen adequately (if at all), for three reasons:
a) While the other person is talking, most people plan what they’re going to say when it’s their turn. It’s a habit that will sabotage your success and ultimately embarrass you. If you want to listen better, you need a strategy — something to focus on or do that connects you to the other person. Here’s the easiest and most rewarding strategy: write all the keywords (called 'Criteria') people say when they talk to you.
b) Most people are visual. You’re probably more stimulated by events that give you an opportunity to see something, rather than to listen to something. Anything that compels you to create a visual becomes your dominant motivator and your prime sensory experience. If have the choice to listen to a one-hour speech or watch a silent film, which one would you choose? If the choice were between an audio tape or a video tape, which would you choose? When the choice is between listening to someone talk about themselves, or visualizing things you enjoy, guess which one wins?
Here’s a skill I teach some of my hypnotherapy clients. If someone’s talking, you can follow the conversation until the person mentions something that causes you to remember or create a visual. These can be innocent, innocuous statements, such as, 'when I saw my wife dressed like a chicken' … 'we were painting our faces' … 'I put it by my book.' Each of these statements could cause you to snap from listening to picturing. You’d see your own wife in costume, visualize painting your own face, or hallucinate your own book. The strategy to improving your listening ability is to get visually involved in what the other person is saying.
c) Many people suffer from weak attention skills. While the other person is talking, they simply drift off and daydream. Often, this is nothing more than poor focusing skills. It’s like having a weak muscle, and is usually just as easy to fix. Many of our hypnotherapy clients take advantage of a special technology called the Interactive Metronome. It’s a simple and logical way to strengthen your ability to focus and concentrate. In addition to the Interactive Metronome sessions, we improve clients’ listening skills through basic hypnotherapy.
A better job of listening is all you have to do. If your default response is to offer another sales pitch, you’ve lost credibility with the client.
2. Share Information
Give prospects and clients information. Not just sales literature, but valid and valuable information from credible third-party sources.
Apply this principle to yourself. What’s the quality of the information you get from other professionals? The chances are that you either don’t get information, or it stinks.
I’ve been writing (and reading) articles about the financial services industry since 1985. During that period, there’s been little change in the quality or the content of these articles. They usually inundate the reader with thoughts about a topic or suggestions on how to think about it, while providing few usable guidelines or strategies. If you’re sending prospects and clients information of that caliber, you’re wasting your time — and theirs.
A friend of mine is a former Olympic skiing champion. He succeeded by doing what other skiers weren’t willing to do. Take a leaf from his book. Do some research. Discover the magazines your clients read, then read relevant articles in these magazines and extract quotes from them. Make sure the quotes are short and to the point — that they teach your clients something of immediate interest to them. Don’t send clients copies of entire articles! First, it’s illegal. Second, no one wants to read an entire article to find out if it has anything of interest.
- Help Clients Understand Their Values
To connect with clients and rise above the price game, give them information they can use. For example, help them develop 'soft skills' that will improve their lives. Give them tools that will help them articulate their values or communicate more effectively.
When we ghostwrite books for our clients, we urge them to include our comprehensive Values List. If you ascribe to the Values-Based Selling concept, you’ll recognize the blank stare you get when you ask people to name their values. But suppose you placed a list of 160 values in front of them and asked them to check 10 of them. This comprehensive list of values will help connect them to your positive intention.
When I was the head marketing writer for JCPenney Financial Services, my job was to discover which gift would cause clients to give us the names of their friends. The program was called 'Do a friend a favor.' After exhaustive research, we concluded that no bribe is good enough for people to give up their friends. However, as soon as you stop asking your clients for something, you open the door for them to place high value on the trinkets you give them.
Credibility is simple to gain, but it’s not necessarily easy. Credibility does not mean your academic credentials or your professional designations. You receive credibility as a gift from other people. The best you can do is to make yourself worthy of it.
YOUR REWARD
Upcoming articles will offer more tips and techniques to help you build your credibility. If you’re inspired to learn more about credibility-focused marketing, just give me a call at (214) 366-0919, and ask for a 30% discount on Beyond Wave Marketing.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
- Beyond Wave Marketing, Michael Lovas
- Face Values, Michael Lovas & Pamela Holloway
- Psychological Persuasion Workshop, Michael Lovas
- Coaching from an NLP Master and Language & Behavior expert
- Macro Strategic Planning, Bruce Wright
Michael Lovas is the president of AboutPeople, a firm that uses Psychological Language Patterns to develop marketing programs. He also teaches advisors how to use common-sense psychology to help them build trust with A-level target markets. He works with professionals in the US, Canada, England, Australia, Holland, and Belgium. Michael is a Master Practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming. A former comic, he’s well known to insurance and financial professionals for his keynotes and seminars. Michael has also written two books on using psychology in marketing and sales: Beyond Wave Marketing and the workbook/disk set Face Values — How To Read People And Motivate Them In 3 Minutes. For more information, call (214) 366-0919, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.aboutpeople.com.