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Damon Riscalla:
Hi, I’m Damon Riscalla, here to bring you the Practice Makes Perfect video series. And today I’m joined by Johnny Lee of Enable SE. Johnny, thank you for joining me today.
Johnny Lee:
Appreciate you having me, very excited.
Damon Riscalla:
Can we begin perhaps with you just giving us a bit of a background of yourself, your journey over the years and how you’ve come to set up Enable SE?
Johnny Lee:
Yeah. Well, if we look at what we do now, and people often ask us what does Enable SE do, we work with organizations to help them sell more. So that’s the basic level, but we look at every aspect of the sales value chain. So whether that’s training and coaching of individuals, whether it’s coaching leaders, whether it’s working with portfolio managers on how to better position funds, sometimes we redo entire strategies. We worked with an organization that made a $2 billion acquisition, so how do those two teams integrate? And then we’ve built a digital sales arm on how to most effectively connect with clients using digital, but also how to train teams using digital. So that’s what we do today.
And I started as a salesperson at 17 years old. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you what I was doing, but I was selling alarm systems door to door. And then I built a couple of businesses early, sold them in ’07. And then in ’08, when I looked for what the next thing to do was, I realized I didn’t love running the company. I loved selling, I loved the process, I loved the training of people and mentoring of people. So I thought what better way of doing it is to start a consultancy company. So I spent 12 years as a partner of a firm and then the owner of that and the CEO of that and I had a conversation over a drink and a glass of wine, and we still do that very regularly, and decided that should be my focus, is building full sales enablement. And so that becomes the focus now.
Damon Riscalla:
If we’re talking about financial planners specifically, a financial planner can have the best strategies in the world, it could work wonders for a client, but if the client doesn’t feel compelled to act, there’s a big problem, there’s a disconnect. So what I’d like to ask you and maybe to explore with us is creating an client engagement framework, is there a basic framework that people can take and then maybe tailor it a little bit, but is going to leave them in a more effective position?
Johnny Lee:
Yeah. Look, you’re spot on and it can’t be generic. And so when we talk about positioning anything, whether it be a major pitch or whether it just be your day-to-day speaking to clients, that I’d rather you have the wrong positioning than generic positioning because people don’t value generic. We’ve got this saying, and we call it ROI, we didn’t come up with it, but it’s relevance, originality, and impact. So number one, is it relevant? If it’s not, what do you think happens? Immediately we switch off. So if people are watching this and they say, “This isn’t relevant to me,” you won’t watch the role plays, you won’t watch skill based. Is it original? If you can get it anywhere, you don’t value it. So I’m not putting any money on it. This is my analogy I use and hope this works nationally, but the cheapest coffee I think in Australia is in Sydney, CBD, where the rent is the highest in Australia.
Why? Because you can get a cup of coffee absolutely anywhere. There’s a good coffee shop every 100 meters. So there’s no originality, if that makes sense. The further you get away, the more distance there is between coffee shops, the more you pay. And I paid $6.50 in a region, not regional, just a suburb of Sydney the other day for a cup of coffee, a small cup of coffee as well on a Sunday. But I’m not going to walk 3Ks to go to the next coffee shop.
Damon Riscalla:
Price of scarcity.
Johnny Lee:
100%. So originality is a big piece. And then finally, impact or implication is we need to talk to what is the impact to the client. So when we give advice, they say, “This is my goal, I want to get to here.” And then we straightaway jump to it where we can solve it for you. We need to actually build life into what their goal means for them. What would the impact be? And then we need to connect our solution to that. So I know we’re going to talk more about that idea of questioning and discovery.
Damon Riscalla:
We are.
Johnny Lee:
The second piece is we often describe, and I hope this is sort of more towards what you’re asking, the idea of a client servicing rhythm.
Damon Riscalla:
Absolutely.
Johnny Lee:
I think we’re going to share with you something that you can share with a number of the advisors as well, you’ll learn this from me is I’m really simple, and I think the simpler we keep it, the easier it is to execute. So you’ll never hear me in an MBA class and things like this. So we talk about this idea of just the ABCs or ABCDs, and we just segment our clients based on a number of factors.
And we do this with fund management business. We do this with all organizations. And I’ll admit this, we have very complicated models as well, but this is where I’d start. Your A’s are, put simply, those who give you the most revenue, but also potentially could give you the most referrals or have the highest growth opportunity within that. Whereas often we just work on, you gave me $10,000, so I’ll give you more time, and that doesn’t always work that way. So it’s that idea of you gave me $2,000, but I also know that you know 20-
Damon Riscalla:
Thinking about the future a little bit.
Johnny Lee:
100%. And so that’s a piece there is segmentation. B’s, next level, C’s, next level. And then put down what does a servicing rhythm look like for each of those segments? Now if you add that up, say I want six to eight visits with these people, I want four to six here, one to two here, and it adds up to more meetings than you can have in a year, your business can’t run. Put simply, I had someone come to me, he had a gym and he wanted me to invest in it. He says, “I need capital.” “Why?” “Well, we’ve got no more members we can fit in and we’re losing money.” Said, “Well, shut down. You’re the last business I put down to.” You’ve got to make sure that if you don’t have enough time to be seeing these people effectively and focus on growth and innovation, then you need to find a way to cut that down. So that’s where we explore how does technology, how does systems and processes, just because you’ve always had a one hour, three monthly catch up with them in person, doesn’t mean that’s the best outcome for them.
And I might finally touch on, we did a think tank in a couple of states, I got sort of asked to do this, and I facilitated with a dozen advisors across three states. And I’ll tell you what, the challenges that advisors have had to face in the last five years, when you throw COVID into regulation. And what they’re being asked to do is exceptionally challenging to run a business. But I would then double down on this is why it’s more and more critical to get that client servicing rhythm right, why it’s core critical to get an operating rhythm where growth and innovation becomes just part of your day-to-day and starting to look, how will my business look three years from now? How do we be as effective as possible?
So we’ll share that around, but I think that idea of ensuring that the contact with your clients matches the outcome you’re going to be able to get. And I say this to even investment advisors who say, “Oh, I don’t want a small client.” Well, a small client who fits into a really good model, that’s really happy to be seen once a year, is a really high hourly rate. Your mid-client that you’re seeing eight times a year or 12 times a year, that’s the unprofitable one. So you’ve got to find a way to sort of streamline that. So that’s something I really encourage advisors to look at.
Damon Riscalla:
And this is something that can be done with baby steps too. I mean, for, as you say, a more simplistic way of doing it, often that can be the starting point and you can ramp it up from there.
Johnny Lee:
Of course. And there’s so much technology now, we run so much of our internal, to all our users and subscribers on our platform, that’s all run now through digital marketing software. So we’ll send them a nudge, have you seen a negotiation and a 30-second clip, and we know who’s opened, who hasn’t. And those that haven’t opened, they get a second nudge towards something else, where those who’ve opened and done no action, they get a different nudge. Those who’ve opened and taken an action, they get a different nudge, like a recognition nudge. And so that can be just set-up, we don’t have to touch it again. So it’s a day of work, which no one has a spare day, but put a day aside and build it, and then you don’t have to do anything for six more months. And I think that’s the piece where we really encourage you to focus on innovation, focus on how you can leverage tech.
Probably going to a bit too far into this, but I’ll finish with this, is often we facilitate strategies often for big organizations, whole organizations, but also the small business, which you said, with two staff. And they say, “This year we’re going to be more strategic.” “Great. So show me in you’re operating rhythm and where you’re putting time aside for strategy.” “Oh, we don’t have time.” “Cool. So rule out being more strategic.” “We’re going to be more innovative.” “Show me your innovation time.” “Oh, we haven’t had any time.” “Cool. Let’s rule out innovation.” And it’s that piece of what gets measured gets done, and we need to prioritize these things in our business. So we look in a year from now how we want the business to look.
Damon Riscalla:
Look, I don’t think anyone can argue with that, and certainly putting aside time for those types of things is invaluable. If I look at, one of the first steps for any advisor in terms of client interaction, is the first meeting, the initial meeting. So can we maybe just talk about prepping for an initial meeting? Do you walk in and hope for the best, or is there some stuff that we can do, Johnny, to make it a little bit better for us?
Johnny Lee:
I think tongue in cheek there, I think you know the answer to that one, as a practice development manager as well, who runs that for [inaudible 00:09:00] shares. Obviously the prep needs to go in, but we’re also talking to, as advisors and planners, quite often very strategic technical people. So whilst we want you to prepare, I don’t want you over preparing because often if you’re putting three hours of prep in for a client in advance, you can get so caught up in what you want to get out of it. That first meeting is actually all about them. The second thing is we get so focused on the technical aspect and almost because we’re so busy, we want to qualify them. Are they serious? Do they have enough money? All these things.
Damon Riscalla:
We see that all the time here.
Johnny Lee:
And we’re overqualified. We’re actually pushing people away by doing this, as opposed to that first meeting, whether it’s 30 minutes, 45 or an hour, you’re spending the same amount of time, whether you’re doing hard qualification or just getting to know them. And I promise you, getting to know them, you’ll find out whether they’re qualified, but you have a higher likelihood of them actually being open to you. So that’s sort of the first thing. The second thing is, if I give you the cheat method, it’s called do, think, feel. Before walking in, and we talk about this, it’s the elevator prep that you do. What do you want them to do, what do you want them to think and what do you want them to feel as a result of this interaction? So do could be, I want them to consider a proposal. I want them to proceed straight away. I want them to come back and give me an idea of their assets and what their goals are. Think is the rational element. I want them to think that this is worthwhile. I want them to think that there’s value in this process.
And what do I want them to feel? Safe, excited by goals, no longer have to fear what I was worried about in the first place. And so if you get that idea of do, think, feel, and we can share a bit of a template beyond, a more detailed template. It’s still a one pager, but we look at areas of who are the key stakeholders, not just the person in the room, who are the key stakeholders? Is it parents? Is it children? Is it an accountant?
Damon Riscalla:
Yeah, because quite often it can be others that have got a key stake in things.
Johnny Lee:
100%. I’m working on a pretty big deal at the moment, almost a JV, and before I put anything forward, I called my best mate who’s a lawyer, and he’s a very good lawyer and he’s under the belief of do the stuff now so it doesn’t bite you later, and so he’s conservative, but I just run it by him. He doesn’t make a decision. But imagine if I said, “Oh, have you heard of this firm?” And he didn’t like it, that would put me on the back foot. So just always look at stakeholders, look at is there any predisposition? Have they had any contact before? What was it like? Have an idea of what do I want out of it. So do think, feel. What are my key messages that I want to get across, and what are the key outcomes? What’s the purpose of the meeting?
And to be clear, mostly the purpose isn’t to win them as a client. The purpose is better understanding of what they need and sell them enough on why they should progress further to another conversation and then set up that progression. That is better than them deciding yes or no. We want that yes or no to happen when they’re comfortable and ready, and that’s when people have a really high conversion rate. So I think that’s the prep piece there, is just be really clear on the purpose of the meeting. Prep on not just the rational but the emotional element too, and then be just clear on how we’re going to go about getting there, and then there’s that discovery element, which I know we’ll touch on.
