The Key to Differentiating Your Team’s Messaging

Being intentional with your team involves more than defining roles, responsibilities, accountabilities and processes. Consider these two questions:

• What makes your team special?
• How do you articulate your edge?

One of the most fruitful exercises for teams to resolve these questions is to develop isms—a team’s core beliefs on what clients need to fundamentally embrace to be successful in their financial lives. Here are four steps to help guide the exercise:

1. Start with “we believe” instead of “we do.” Reframe your thinking from “what we do” to “what we believe.” Isms aren’t a value proposition or a mission statement. For example, “we practice active asset allocation and tactical rebalancing” isn’t an ism—it’s what you do.
2. Apply the four best practices. Isms are timeless regardless of market conditions. They should be pithy and intriguing sound bites that are easy to remember; they should have some originality. Isms should connect the dots between your financial beliefs and the advice you deliver to clients.
3. Develop isms for each of your practice areas. An ism shouldn’t be a tagline for your business—although it may lead you to one. Isms should be specific to what you believe about investment strategy, tax management, financial planning, estate planning and other areas of your practice.
4. Put them into practice. Once you’ve developed your isms, identify ways to incorporate them into all dimensions of conversations:
   • An existing client: When a client is reluctant to diversify a concentrated position, using the ism, “there’s no need to be all right or all wrong,” can help ease their anxiety over diversification and inspire partial action.
   • A first encounter: When asked for your thoughts on the markets, pique interest in a follow-up conversation by responding with an ism, such as, “noise is often confused with signals.”
   • A follow-up phone call: Create a curiosity gap using the ism, “missing the upside is the same as participating in the downside,” to turn first calls into first meetings.
   • A first meeting: Every first meeting with a prospective client has a pivotal “why us?” moment after you’ve asked thoughtful discovery questions. An ism, such as “too many investors look for corrections in all the same places,” could help inspire them to overcome their status quo bias and choose you as their advisor.
   • A referable moment: When clients talk about big market memes with others and your client recites one of your isms, people are likely to ask where your client heard it. They might respond, “My advisor. They have really helped me navigate these turbulent markets.”

Importantly, isms will help differentiate your brand by getting past "holistic" and "comprehensive." Your set of evergreen beliefs is often far more interesting than your description of what you do for your clients.

Bottom line: Now is the perfect time to galvanize your team messaging by developing isms that will resonate with your ideal clients.