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How this award-winning broker makes the most of his accolades.
Bernard Desmond may just be the proudest broker in Victoria. A winner of two individual Customer Service of the Year awards at the 2018 and 2020 Australian Broking Awards, Mr Desmond displays these awards at the entryway of his Mt Eliza office, to be viewed by new and existing clients, as well as anyone who walks by the office.
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The awards are a constant reminder of the work Mr Desmond and his team have done over the past five years to build the company from the “ground up”, while remaining true to their customers and their core values.
“It [displaying the awards] reminds me of where I’ve started from. We’ve just stayed true to the cause of doing the right thing by our clients and I think this is just a validation of all the work that we do,” he tells The Adviser.
“It means a lot to our clients and it’s a celebration of what we do together and it’s a validation of that.”
Both of his victories at the prestigious Australian Broking Awards are moments that he considers to be career highlights for numerous reasons, not least because of the standing the award holds among his peers and clients.
“The Australian Broking Awards is one of the most prestigious awards today happening in the broker calendar,” he says. “It really recognises the best of the best. And especially to be in a category such as customer service, which is what your business is based off and is a very highly contested category.
“It has certainly been special and one that certainly resonates with all of our clients. If you win Customer Service Of The Year, that’s talking to every individual client, and I think it certainly has helped my business stand out from the crowd.
“It’s been a good couple of years, and I think the brand has been able to stand up in the market largely because of the acknowledgement we’ve received from The Adviser.”
The Blank Financial broker told The Adviser that winning at the awards also validates his services to both current and prospective clients that they are dealing with “top industry professionals”, a factor that Mr Desmond says he has used as leverage.
“[The award] validates to your customer that they’re dealing with the best. If you’ve got all these awards and the other brokers have no awards, by default you [the customer] are going to gravitate towards the one with more validation,” Mr Desmond says.
“I have leveraged these awards to our advantage. We’ve used them in all our social strategy, talking to our client, our marketing material that we send, in the first appointment we mention it. It has got relevance. It is certainly a big validation tick.”
Top tips for writing a winning award submission
Mr Desmond also credited the awards submission process for positively impacting his business operation, as it constantly requires him to list out and assess everything his business is doing that works, as well as what doesn’t work.
“As a business owner, when I’m doing it [compiling a submission], I make a list of things we are doing and the outcomes that we are creating as we are going,” Mr Desmond states. “It’s hard to remember everything when the awards time comes, so you are building a resource tool.
“What has worked and what hasn’t, customer testimonial and all those wins and then collectively you bring it all out in the submissions.”
Constructing this toolkit, Mr Desmond insists, means his business doesn’t “rest on their laurels”, and it allows for him to “sharpen his axe” and ultimately, results in year-round business improvement.
Mr Desmond concluded by imploring any brokers, new or experienced, who want to achieve victory at the Australian Broking Awards, to work out how they/their business stands out from the rest of the market, as the benefits of winning or becoming a finalist at the awards transcend client experience.
“Winning the awards or being a finalist – you can use that as leverage to tell your community of customers, BDMs, bankers, credit assessors that you work with. Because it’s not just about the clients, it’s also about building credibility with your lenders,” he concludes.
“If everyone’s doing home loans and one person is winning, there has to be something they are doing differently.”
The 2022 Australian Broking awards takes place as a luncheon event at The Star, Sydney on Friday, 19 August 2022.
Click here to visit the website to either start your own submission or nominate a colleague for one of broking’s most prestigious awards.
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