Elite Office Experience = Buzz, Easier Referrals

Elite Office Experience = Buzz, Easier Referrals

 

What can be done to a simple office environment that can set you apart from your competition very quickly?

What can be done to leave a client:

1.       More impressed with you?

2.       Feeling good about him or herself?

3.       Even to have experienced a memorable event?

 

Three years ago I read the definitive book on the subject: Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy (1999). Last weekend I experienced the definitive office: Jim Crosson’s in River Falls, MA.

 

Jim is a financial advisor in the top 1% (of 11,000) of his nationally-known company. Yet if you believe it truly is the little things that make a big difference, read on. You’ll find many of the things Jim does to be affordable. According to Pine and Gilmore, your goal should be to engage your clients/prospects as much as possible in as many ways as possible – to turn their time with you into an experience, not just an exchange of information. Clearly, theme restaurants, Disney, Vegas, Branson, and Yellowstone make more obvious case studies, but the book cites parking lots, grocery stores, and banks who are moving with this trend too.

 

I will walk you through my experience:

 

 

Dale Carnegie was the one who noted that everyone’s favorite word is their name. Jim has your name on an electronic sign wired to a computer that meets your eyes when you step off the elevator.

 

 

Research suggests that people buy more when classical music plays because of how it makes us feel. Classical music also stimulates the brain to think more (television has been found to do the opposite – I wonder if that’s why there are so many in bars!?). Interestingly, many financial service offices have large TV screens playing the news in the entrance. Yet the news is notoriously almost always a barrage of bad things happening in the world: Unhelpful first impression!

All the senses are appealed to.

 

 

While nobody has an unlimited budget, almost all of these ideas can be started on a lower budget. Some food can be packaged and preserved longer. Artificial flowers might be better than none at all.

               Even a real coffee mug is going to beat a               Styrofoam cup, right?

So often when I’m sitting in waiting rooms I am consistently amazed at the poor selection. They are either all about the industry of the company or are embarrassingly out of date. Jim’s office had a current selection of 8-10 of the country’s top selling magazines from People and Sports Illustrated to National Geographic.

 

Usually, we put things on our walls because they are close to our hearts. I was quite surprised that Jim put up a variety of frames close to his client’s hearts. These covered popular talking points from sports, local hobbies, and historical figures (from politics and the world of business).

 

 

I can’t ignore that Jim’s personal office was also an experience: high quality furniture, round (avoids ‘them and us’ feeling) conference table under a screen that could show a power point or go online, a large aquarium, and a great view of Main Street from his corner office.

 

This looked like what you’d expect at a country club, even with individual hand towels.

 

Everyone who meets Jim gets the full tour. There’s something about meeting the team in the office and seeing how organized everything is, seeing shelves lined with business books, and seeing even the ‘back’ room full of impressive sports memorabilia – when there’s room only in the back for a baseball cap autographed by none other than New England Patriot coach Bill Bellicheck (by the time you read this, you’ll already know whether his team pulled off a perfect season by winning the Super Bowl), you can’t help but connect dots.

 

And that’s just the office experience. It only starts there. Beyond that are all the systems of staying in touch that top producers learn from other people along the way and implement.

That’s really what struck me. I bet you’ve heard of all of these ideas before. I know some are out the budget but all of them can be adapted and can grow with your business. The difference is recognizing that the little things add up, create good word of mouth, more business, more referrals and then taking action on them!