Dennis Moseley-Williams: Turn Client Meetings Into Unique Experiences

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Hello and welcome to Barron's The Way Forward. I'm Greg Bartellis, and my guest today is Dennis Mosley-Williams, founder of DMW Strategic Consulting, a client experience marketing and strategic sales company focused on helping financial advisors, the financial services industry, and related professionals. Today, Dennis will be discussing a number of things, but chief amongst them, 5 ways That advisors can shift from merely being an advisor to an advocate. Welcome to the podcast, Dennis.

Thanks, Greg. Delighted to be here.

Excellent. So there are a lot of what you talk about is the importance of advisors being able to offer clients a unique and memorable experience. Tell me why that is so important.

Well, I think it begins with understanding the difference between service and experience. Service is fundamentally intended to save people time and money. Everybody needs a service, but experiences are different. They engage with us in a uniquely personal way. They're relevant to us. They're deeply personal. They're memorable. They're emotional, and they register forever as a memory. And we know, you know, as I look at this cup of coffee, Even when you go get a cup of coffee, Starbucks figured out that if you feel seen as an individual, the transaction will matter more to you.

And so much of just offering good service is really table stakes, and it's not memorable in any way. So tell me more about what kind of experiences. Give me examples of that.

Okay, well, as you said, service is, when done brilliantly, is invisible. The customer is literally in and out The transaction happens and to make you laugh a little, it's almost like you're standing in the parking lot wondering, how did I just get this in my hand? Like I don't even recall. Whereas experience, the first thing that we consider is how we want the client to feel. So if you think about something as fundamental to the relationship a financial advisor has with their client, the review meeting, do you want the review meeting to be efficient or do you want it to be meaningful? Memorable, engaging, emotional, deeply personal, and ultimately transformational. So an example, you know, that I love to ask my clients is, what does it feel like when someone just enters the lobby of your building? When they come in from out of the street inside, does it feel like they're attending a professional meeting? Or does it feel like they're attending an event where everybody is waiting for them, prepared and ready, and there's something important and profound that is going to happen here.

Excellent. How about another example? I mean, in terms of once the environment, the trappings, if you will, make that impression on an interpersonal face-to-face level, what else needs to happen? Because that's obviously important, but merely a starting point.

Well, I would say that another difference between service and experience is that services are delivered with an emphasis on efficiency. Whereas experiences are staged, and I use that word intentionally, all work is theater, every business is a stage. So client, you know, what is an experience? It's instead of thinking of it as a thing, such as a review meeting or onboarding or a check-in call or a client event, a client dinner, I use all of these as examples because I want them to be familiar to the people that are listening. But rather than think of it as an event, think of experience as time, time well designed. So much so, in fact, that when you think about the difference between, say, an event and a meeting, an event is something that you look forward to. When it's happening, you're nowhere else. You are completely engaged. And when it's over, you talk about it. Whereas a meeting is something that increasingly, as we joke, that meeting could have been an email. Or in the post-pandemic world we're living in, just recently I saw a statistic, 70% of investors prefer Zoom meetings. Oh, that's dangerous. What we say in experience design is people like to save time so they can spend time doing things they actually like. Nobody should want to miss a meeting with their advisor. That makes no sense to me. None.

Now tell me, depending on what your firm is, you could be a solo practitioner or have a big firm, et cetera. Tell me about differences in how advisors should approach the experience, you know, creation, if you will. Dos, don'ts, or ways to approach it, if you have any broad pieces of advice.

Yeah, it begins with understanding what business you're actually in. Do you sell investments? Do you deliver advice? Or do you stage experiences that lead clients to a guided transformation? That's such a big thing to say. You know, I go on about this evolution from advisor to advocate. So let's, let's maybe start there. And it doesn't matter where, what channel you work in, how big your practice is, or where you're at. It all starts here. An advisor is a person who's an expert in a specific field, and for a fee, they'll tell you what to do. That's what an advisor does, and there's all kinds of them. Lots of financial experts, lots of construction experts, all kinds. An advocate is a person who publicly supports or champions a cause or a policy, okay? They, they create something that people buy into versus just buying from. So regardless of who you are, this is where the shift begins. What business are you actually in? What are you trying to help clients do? And I will point out, selling commoditized investments and services is not enough. You have to, in my opinion, stage experiences that lead clients to a guided transformation that That guided transformation is simply this: you must create within the client at least the opportunity for them to revisit their beliefs and/or their behavior. There's so much more, as we all know, to measuring what is a successful life. What is it? And depending on who you ask, obviously 25 years ago in the financial service industry It was a number. Our responsibility was to get the client to a number. But we know it's like, well, relationships, your sense of yourself, the connections you have with your family and your friends, your purpose, contributing to your community, to something bigger than you, like all of this is part of a successful life. And up until now, recently now, let's say, what we have done is we've remained comfortable telling ourselves, well, all that aspirational stuff, while important, that's not really my job. I'm going to stick to my knitting. And I'm just saying, no, you can't do that. So the shift begins in really tapping into this idea you have, this secret you want to share that all of your clients need to know that's going to help them not just get a better return on their investments,, but return on time, their best life ever is what I'll call that.

And I guess to really dig deep and get a true sense of that, I mean, it's quite a, it can be deeply personal. There has to be trust. And I guess you have to be sufficiently inquisitive to not just ask one question, but to go deeper in a constructive way and to really get more, I'd imagine the more specific you can get, the better for all involved, right?

Amen. And it's hard. It's really hard. If there's a beating heart of this whole idea I have, it would be authenticity, which is another word like experience that gets thrown around, and it's not doing everybody a lot of good. Authenticity is simply this. I'm true to myself, and I am true with how I represent myself to others. And the second little bit then would be generosity, a desire to share with you What I know, which leads us right to the scariest part of all of it. And I start— it was in my opening comment, I think I said, well, everybody needs services. Everybody. I'm going to use the word bank. Everybody needs the bank. Everybody needs to save money, but not everybody wants your experience. So the most frightening aspect of all of this for an advisor, and I've been doing this for close to 30 years, is, which is shocking to say out loud, by the way, which is you have to abandon these comfortable lies that we tell ourselves. For instance, pick your state, pick your city. You tell yourself, well, my niche is small business owners. Okay, you say, oh good. So you can tell yourself this lie. Do you know how many small business owners there are in my city, my state, my area? And you can roll over at night and say, if I just got 1% of those, I'd be the biggest financial planning team, you know, in the state. Okay, that's for services, which are all competing on price, commoditized. That's how important it is. Tap into that truth you have, that secret you know that you tell all your best friends, you gotta live this way, Greg. Trust me, man, you gotta save money 'cause not having any is very inconvenient. But your body, you got to work on that. Your brains, you got to work on that. How you think about yourself and others, your family, your children, your connections, all that. Da da da da da da da. If I then roll over and say, now how many small business owners are there in my area that are also driven by this idea of spending more time working on themselves, becoming the best version of themselves? Like, how many of them really wanna hear that from me? And here's the honest answer. Way more than you realize, but far less than is in that other column of illusion. There's 10,000 small business owners in here. No, no, no. When you make something, make it for people who care, people out on the periphery. So I would say that's probably the most challenging part of the whole shift.

Tell me about the role of emotion, because clearly to get there, which is difficult for so many who I guess just go on inertia or deluding themselves. Tell me the role of emotion in terms of changing these people from clients to essentially evangelists or to buy in.

Yeah, amen. Okay, so here it is. Well, emotion's everything. It's where it starts. I'm gonna use, I've mentioned Starbucks. I'm gonna mention Dunkin' Donuts. I can't name the CEO, but I read an article with him and he's one of my heroes because he knows what business he's in, okay? He's in the service business. He said, I don't wanna be an experience. I want people to come in and out and get out in a second. That's brilliant. He knows what business he's in. I sell coffee fast. That's what I do. Whereas when you stage an experience, you think about emotion first before you think about what you want the client to do. You think about how you want the client to feel before you get them to— and as I said earlier, experience is time well designed. So people who are fixated on service and selling things, they focus sort of on the engaging phase of the entire experience. When the client buys, when they're there at the cash register, when they're at the desk sitting across. But for experienced stagers, we realize, well, the experience begins way before the meeting—days, weeks. The experience begins way before the conference—days, weeks, months—when they broadcast some messages to you and build some anticipation. Experienced designers look at 5 phases of experience. We think about emotion first. We think about how we can slow everything down. Creating a sense of almost surprise, wonder, suspense, and tension truly through the entire experience. Personalizing. So I want you to have one emotion daydreaming about the meeting 2 weeks out. I want you to have a totally different emotion when you've crossed the threshold, and yet another emotion when you're sitting in front of me.

And another one after they leave and talk to their friends about it.

And then one when you're reflecting on it, exactly. And that last phase, which is extending, this is where that advocating advocacy comes from, from you as the advisor. The extending phase isn't, and here's the notes that I promised I would send, and here's a reminder that our next meeting is in X number of months at this time. That's just service stuff. The extending is when you really get into the guts of it. Like, how committed are you to helping Greg be successful? Greg told you spending time with his family is everything. So how are you gonna help him? That's the extending phase. Books to read, blogs to read, podcasts to listen to, films, movies, whatever. Like, you gotta really step up. Truly.

Let me ask you, in terms of the importance of experience, I'm just wondering and spitballing here, tell me if you think there's anything to this, but we've heard so much amongst younger people, to generalize, whatever, however you want to define younger people, that they put a big premium on experience, you know, be it travel, things, less material things and more things that are memorable. Do you think, is it too much of a stretch to wonder if that may resonate more for them as they get older and pick up advisors? Or is that, I guess, would be equally respected or enjoyed by everyone regardless? I mean, I figure it couldn't hurt. I don't know if on any level that would actually be an added benefit for maybe millennials, et cetera.

Totally. No, actually, that's a really killer question. That's something I'm going to talk on, I can speak on. And I just want to sort of tell you, it's like, The drawback to the job as the keynote speaker is you get 45 minutes to an hour and that's it. And sometimes I walk off the stage and I feel fraudulent. Truly, it's like, I can't even believe you're all taking a picture of that slide because I talked about it for 4 minutes. But in a workshop, I talk about it for half a day. So what you were just talking about, I spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about it. All outlined in the book, The Experience Economy. This is the central sort of argument to it, the progression of economic value. We've moved from agrarian economy where commodities were the predominant economic offering, to the industrial economy where it was goods, to the service economy where it's actions I take on your behalf, into the experience economy where it's personalized experiences and time well spent You know, that matters to me. Now, I'm going to use this word because you've got it figured out. Status. Status? Well, yeah. In the agrarian economy way back, what was status for a farmer? And I mean, I won't make you think about it, but wouldn't this be neat? It would be you were well thought of in town. You had a big farm. Okay. Industrial economy, status became the stuff you owned. In the service economy, it was the things that you had done for you. In the experience economy, it became the things you've done. Just stick with me. Like, sometimes if I'm keynoting a conference, I'll say, how many people in this room have been to Machu Picchu? And it's amazing how many people put their hand up. It's like, when I was a kid, nobody went there. Now everybody goes there. And we live in Instagram, Facebook-y digital world where we want to share that. Okay, that's experiences, but there's this new evolution. Madonna, we don't want the Material Girl anymore. We embraced minimalism. We let services go. Now status, even more so than experiences, is transformation. Who I became. I've gone and taken this course. I've done this retreat. Even simple things. I did a, what the heck's that thing called? A Tough Mudder. You know, these events that have taken over. Like, what is this? CrossFit gyms versus just a gym. No, no, it's transformation. So jump on that, my friends out there in financial advisor land. What do your clients want to tell themselves and their friends about you? I work with this guy, his name is Greg, He says things to me I have never thought about. I talk to you about it, you're blown away. You got to meet this Greg guy. He has events, meetings, discussions, and I find myself thinking more and more, wow, I've never thought about that before. That's the value you bring.

Let's talk about— I think you had one more point, and that was about the importance of integrating financial solutions to team support, the whole kit and caboodle.

Yep, that's it. Okay, so Okay, Dennis, I'm sold. What do I do? Okay, well, this is what you have to do. There's 3 kinds of work. And again, I could go right back to the progression of economic value outlined by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore in "The Experience Economy," published 1999. The first kind of work you have is functional work. It's financial planning. That's why you met me. I needed one. The next kind of work is social work. And the third kind of work is aspirational. I'll explain. So can I use the example of a gym? Please do. Right on, 'cause if you said no, what was I gonna do, come up with another one? It's like, well, please say yes. That's the one I've got. If a person goes to a gym and they buy a membership, yes, they get access to weights and mirrors and equipment and a sauna and all that stuff, but that's not why they're there. Why they are there is to be transformed. I want to be a better physical version of myself. Sticking with this example, if that client said to the gym owner, I also need a nutritionist and a yoga instructor, and I need some support to keep, to help me out, to keep me on this path, 'cause I don't wanna, I'm trying to transform. I don't wanna be good at this for 6 months and then fall apart. In the gym scenario, that client would most likely be left to their own devices to go find and assemble a team, et cetera. What I'm saying in financial planning is step 1, integrate all financial solutions, become a personal CFO. Number 2, build a team of experts and resources at arm's length that you can call on, that every client will need And number 3, and this is a tough one for all the advisors out there, spend more time with your clients supporting them through third parties, events, client events, etc., etc. I've been having too much fun making fun of client retirement income planning seminars lately. My joke is, I don't need an hour to understand what's going to happen if I run out of money. You know what I mean? And all of the planning and maneuvers and smarts that you are doing in my financial planning, that's all done in your office. And we're going to talk about one-on-one. I'm talking about, you know, the whole world read that book by James Clear, Atomic Habits. Now that's a client event. Now that's support. Have an event on that. You're helping me achieve my aspirations, become exactly who I want. What are you willing to do? How are you willing to step up to bring me resources that I wouldn't expect that will truly benefit my life? That is the advocate. You're creating something that people can buy into and endorse easily. Greg, come be Dennis's client. He's going to change your life. That's a transformation.

I want to thank you for joining today. And I must say, in all candor, this, this podcast was a memorable experience. So you're practicing what you preach. Right on, man. Absolutely. Okay. My guest has been Dennis Mosley-Williams. For more advisor-specific podcasts, please check out Barrons.com/podcast.

For The Way Forward, I'm Greg Bartalus. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.