What is Brand Leak?
For the marketplace to understand how you're different, you have to first diagnose what's draining your current brand impression.

The very heart of what draws us to entrepreneurship in the first place can become our leading enemy. Many of us hung out our own shingle fueled by the fire of independence, a natural ability to innovate and a deep desire to serve: the raw materials of a firm that would evolve and morph many times over many decades.

Yet over the years – and so slowly you can't even measure it – Brand Leak creeps in. It moves into your office, your conversations and your opportunities. It takes a seat at your conference room table during presentations and rides home in the car with your prospects and clients. It's the elephant in the room that has become your silent partner – so silent, you're not even sure what it's saying. It impacts the mindset of your marketplace and the message your best relationships tell your ideal prospects.

If you're a seasoned advisor, the firm you own today has likely matured and evolved dramatically. If you're newer to the business, the firm you're creating as you read this may metamorphous many times. Innovation fuels success. However, it can simultaneously dilute your brand and confuse your marketplace.

What is Brand Leak and why does it matter?
Brand Leak is a situation in which your value proposition – your Unique StoryTM as we call it – isn't reaching the marketplace and it begins to limit your opportunities. Perhaps you started in the business 20 years ago selling life insurance and today you've built a true planning firm. New clients understand your value proposition yet some of your strongest and longest-standing relationships still describe you as the advisor or firm you were 20 years ago. You'd like to begin charging planning fees but your clients are accustomed to receiving your value for free. Or, perhaps you have centers of influence that refer $1M cases weekly but $10M or $100M cases rarely. These referral sources lack a deep understanding of your capabilities in the advanced markets or the breadth of solutions you bring to bear. When referrals call, their impression mirrors that of the referring source.

Brand Leak is a suffocating blanket of outdated perceptions and the market's inability to differentiate you from so many others who claim to do what you do.  Brand Leak matters because it affects your ability to move up market, cross-sell into existing relationships and extract the best referrals from your best sources. Many highly successful advisors tell me they feel like a best-kept secret. The people that know them love them, yet it seems like there's a whole world of opportunity out there that doesn't even know they exist. When you eliminate Brand Leak, your Unique Story – the very essence of your firm's brand – gathers clarity, reach and momentum. Finally, when people are out in the community talking about your firm, they won't just say you're great; they'll have an ability to articulate why you're better than the next guy. The first step in eliminating Brand Leak is to diagnose its sources.

Diagnosing Brand Leak
We encourage you to look at your brand as a physical package that's sent out to the marketplace. If it's something you can literally stuff in an overnight envelope, it becomes more tangible, less ethereal. When it's tangible, you can begin to see how you impact your brand on a daily basis with or without intention.

First consider The couriers of your brand (see diagram): you, your partners, your staff and possibly your spouse. Clients and centers of influence are key couriers because they're carrying your brand to market; they're telling your Unique Story while you're not there to influence the storyline.

Next is the Package itself: it's all the obvious items such as logo, stationery, brochures, website, newsletters and the look and feel of your presentations and reports. However, verbal communication is also a key part of your brand Package. Consider a fact I've observed over the past 15 years: very few professionals in our industry take the time to be strategic in their verbal communication. Most advisors don't have a consistent Elevator Talk they love to deliver. Firms with multiple partners or rainmakers aren't sure what their fellow brand-couriers are communicating on the golf course, at board meetings or eyeball to eyeball with a new prospect or potential referral source.

Beyond marketing materials and verbal communication, consider every other touch point that occurs between your firm and your marketplace. If a call is put on hold, what does the caller hear? When a prospect sits in your office, what magazines are on the table? Separate from being tastefully appointed, how does your office perpetuate your Unique Story? When you hold client events, what brand experience is present beyond logo merchandise? How does the quality of your marketing materials or presentations compare to the quality that you personally bring to the table? These are all elements of your brand. Individually, one could be off kilter or lack power, and it might not limit your opportunities. Collectively, they can begin to tell a conflicting, confusing or outdated story.

Lastly, we look at the Recipients of your brand package: clients, centers of influence and the media. When diagnosing Brand Leak, it's important to separate new client impressions from those of longstanding clients. With new clients, you can tell whatever story you wish as long as it's true. With longstanding clients, eliminating Brand Leak requires transforming their outdated impressions so they see and refer your firm in all its current glory.

Touch Point2 is the solution to Brand Leak. Touch Point2 occurs when you, your staff, your referral sources and the community at large have extreme clarity about what makes your firm unique. The message is so concise, compelling and true that it becomes easy for others to articulate. At this point, your brand experience becomes exponential – greater than the sum of the previous touch points. Your firm becomes a magnet for opportunities that beautifully align with your highest capabilities.

Preventing Brand Leak – tips for emerging advisors

If you're newer to the business, you have the distinct advantage of preventing Brand Leak. The first key is to “sell it forward” buying yourself permission to evolve your capabilities, demographics and fee structure in ways that protect and serve your clients' growing needs. Incorporate innovation into your Unique Story using phrases like: “We commit to a strategy of careful, intentional growth. As our relationship grows, we'll always be looking around the bend to identify services and capabilities that will help you proactively capture opportunities and adapt to changing times. At times, our business model or fee structure will be modified commensurate with these innovations.”

You can also prevent Brand Leak by becoming highly aware of your Package, Couriers and Recipients as your firm grows. If you hire a new assistant or align with a new center of influence, make sure you involve them in your journey and help them understand your current - and potential future - Unique Story.

Further diagnosing Brand Leak – the three most common symptoms
In this article, we focus primarily on diagnosing Brand Leak. In our next article, we will provide deeper tools for eliminating Brand Leak.

Lack of perceived need

Where prospects lack an ability to differentiate you from their current advisors or the next person they meet, they lack a perceived need for your services. They already have a golf buddy, a brother-in-law or a daughter in the business. They aren't quite sure what these people do for a living, but they're convinced you do exactly the same thing. They don't fully understand the planning they've done so they can't discern the missing links.

This My-Guy Syndrome plagues advisors' prospecting efforts. On one hand, prospects hear countless professionals make broad claims about their offerings. On the other hand, the media bombards them with multiple and confusing messages. The consumer holds out a protective shield emblazoned with the proverbial “no thanks, I've got it all done.”

Lack of breadth
Here we return to the Best-Kept-Secret Syndrome. The relationships you have are incredible, yet it seems like there's a whole world of opportunity out there that's not showing up at your door. The awareness of your Unique Story lacks breadth in the marketplace.


Lack of depth
This Brand Leak shows up as referral opportunities that are all over the map. If you're ideal client is worth $20M, lack of depth means that you're referred to $2M prospects one day, $5M the next and hopefully $20M the next. Lack of depth prevents you from staying narrow and deep in your ideal marketplace.

Eliminating Brand Leak
Now that we've thoroughly identified the pain of Brand Leak, you may be wondering what you can do about it. After diagnosing the leaks, the next step is to work hard at getting to the heart of your Unique Story. These are the pearls of wisdom and the nuances in your business model that indeed make you different from all those who claim to do what you do.

In our next article, we'll discuss how to transform longstanding relationships that are currently harboring Brand Leak. We'll also look at how to design new relationships to your ideal, preventing Brand Leak from affecting your new opportunities.


SIDE BAR – EXERCISE:

Exercise: What is My Brand? Click here to complete this exercise


How do you elimate Brank Leak?

In the above article we examined the quandary of Brand LeakTM. Brand Leak occurs when your existing relationships and potential opportunities have an incomplete or outdated impression of your capabilities and unique value. Longstanding clients and centers of influence know that you do great work yet that can't quite articulate how it's better than others who claim to do what you do. In this article we will at look specific strategies and tactics for transforming outdated impressions and designing new impressions to meet your ideal. Click here to keep reading...

Jennifer Summer Tolman
Second Summer Inc.
jennifer@secondsummer.net


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