Example Ultimate Value Proposition – Hardy Holland
Example UVP, Hardy Holland
One of my favorite value propositions was the value proposition of my friend Hardy Holland. Hardy worked in the Atlanta office of Bank of America and when I went to work there, one of the things that I did was take a lot of the top producers out. Hardy was among the top four or five reps in that particular office.
As we sat down, he said let me tell you a little bit about my business. And in fact, before I do, let me just tell you that if you ever have a situation where you’ve got a problem account that’s just a headache and you’ve got an advisor who’s just kind of given up on it and you’re wondering what to do, look no further. Those are the people that I love to work with.
Which is kind of unusual. You know that’s not normally the type of thing that you would hear from a financial advisor and I asked him, well why do you love working with those people? And he says, because it gives me an opportunity to show the clients that I not only can talk the talk, but I can also walk the walk.
In fact, I tell people what I do is I help untie their financial knots. Now that’s a beautiful example of an audio tag line, a little boiled down bumper sticker to tell people what to do when they ask that very frequently is going to get people to engage. Remember we said one of the things that we have to do is when we tell them what we do they’ve either got to say boy do I need to see you or financial knots? What are financial knots?
And he had taught this to his bankers. In fact he was known as the guy to bring the big problem accounts too. So when these bankers were out having conversations about people’s money and they say oh my god, you know I’m about ready to pull my hair out. It was very easy for the banker to say, hmm, sounds like you have some financial knots. To which, the client would almost always say, financial knots? What are financial knots?
In which case, the bankers would go into Hardy’s value proposition which was, this is the banker talking, you know I don’t know if you’re like a lot of the clients that I deal with who have found the more money that they’ve got, the more problems that come along with it.
They would say, in fact I’ve had a couple of people recently who have said, you know if I could I’d give all of my money away if I knew the problems would go away with it. Problem is of course, give away the money, but you’re still in all likelihood going to own the problems. And if we’re still getting buy-in here, they would say, now I can sense I’m kind of striking a chord in you.
And if that’s the case, let me make a suggestion. I want to introduce you to my investment partner. In fact, he’s not just a single partner, he’s a whole team of people. He’s got five people on his team who will seek to understand exactly where you are, exactly where it is that you want to go, and only then will they begin to untie those financial knots.
And the benefit to you is not only are they very good at solving problems, the next time you hit a pothole in the road, you’ve already got a team in place who knows exactly how to untie these knots. If you’d like, I can pick up the phone and see if there’s a time on his calendar that he can meet with you over the course of the next few days. Would you like me to place the call?
Now Hardy didn’t have any branch relationship. He had grown beyond that and he was looking for something very specific. But he did an excellent job positioning himself as the go-to guy for anybody with problem among a series of bankers, among a whole group of outside centers of influence because that’s the same story that he’s going to tell CPA’s and estate planning attorneys and charitable trust attorneys and all of those guys and me.
We sit down to have lunch and what’s his first thing? He’s selling so that if I’m sitting there as the manager working with a problem account thinking, man I’ve got a headache, who’s the first guy that I’m going to think of? Hardy Holland. Absolutely a brilliant strategy and perfectly executed.
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