Build, Measure, Refine, Repeat: How to Maximize Advisor Engagement

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Have you Calibrated Metrics-Driven Advisor Engagement?

To engage advisors, you are using various communications tools/media channels roughly based on their ability to help you target your audience, but you may not have a good feel for their effectiveness.  And perhaps there isn’t a cadence to your ‘touches’, that is, a systematic communications plan with some frequency to maximize impact.  Further, you may not have a feel for your Revenue Funnel and budgets.

This is an indication that you have not:

  • Evaluated available communications tools / media based on their ability to help you target your audience, deliver cogent messages, control costs, and provide the highest yield potential.
  • Planned programs that emphasize frequency to maximize impact of systematic communications and touch individuals, at their moment of readiness when they’re ready and able to volunteer themselves as prospective buyers
  • Connected revenues and budgets

Metrics-Driven Methodology

To build a metrics-driven advisor engagement strategy, the first step is to connect your business model / budgets with your goals.  The next step is to build a good understanding of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or measurable values that will show the progress of your business goals.  Examples include:

  • Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
  • MQL conversion % to  Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
  • SQL conversion % to new clients
  • Client Lifetime Value

Second, create a high-impact, results-focused marketing plan, choosing tools and media channels in the context of:

  • Target Audience Reach (how many)
  • Frequency of Reach (how often)
  • Impact (engagement/response potential)
  • Intimacy (relevance, resonance & personalization)

It’s advisable to test and recalibrate your plan and media mix over time. Testing will help to determine the optimal number of impressions or touch points that should be factored into your plan before you begin to see significantly diminishing returns. Testing is also essential to understanding what tactics, messages, content, formats and media are most effective AND cost-efficient.

Start small by using a few key metrics that are easy to track using your marketing automation / CRM; then build from there, ultimately incorporating predictive and other data-driven business intelligence.

Revenue Funnel Metrics

To give your plan a real litmus test, consider reverse engineering your Revenue Funnel and do the “funnel math”: From impressions and leads created at the top-of-funnel all the way through to revenue and ROI at the bottom-of-funnel.

At a high level, there are three steps:

  1. Establish an effective understanding of the engagement potential for each of your funnel segments and channels  
  2. Tie it back into your hierarchy of metrics (see related post)revenue funnel
  3. Then model your revenue architecture, that is, the channels and target spend based on top-down market budget and goals.

Taking the Revenue Funnel Metrics approach further, consider the alignment and integration of your Marketing and Sales teams in a ‘closed-loop’ revenue architecture (See related post.) Optimally marketing / sales will:

  • Work together to orchestrate the customer experience end-to-end and generate leads, nurture opportunities in the pipeline and ultimately convert sales and
  • Track / measure this end-to-end so marketing and sales can attribute revenue to marketing programs and campaigns and see what is working and not working. We call this a ‘closed-loop revenue architecture’.

Bottom line: a closed-loop revenue architecture and metrics-driven methodology will help you measure and optimize a high performance advisor engagement strategy. 

Download a copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

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Revenue Growth Architecture

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Accelerated, predictable and sustainable revenue growth requires alignment around an architecture for marketing and sales and a commitment from the senior team. Coordination for buyer engagement across the full-funnel is vital.  A realistic evaluation of capabilities and alignment on revenue strategies is the first step in building a revenue organization to capture customer value.

A $10M B2B tech company is looking to get to the next level of accelerated, predictable and sustainable revenue growth.  The company has been in business for over 10 years, offering a variety of managed services, support services and applications to support IT Infrastructure requirements.  They have about 350 active clients that contribute to the companies ARR revenue base. The customer base is loyal with low attrition and there remains good demand for additional services resulting in a continuous pipeline for “up-sell”.

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Knowing Is Growing: Identifying Your Ideal Target Advisors and Influencers

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Effective advisor engagement begins with an understanding of the ideal advisors and influencers for your investment products and offerings.

Your marketing success will depend on strategies and programs that rely on accurate identification and targeting of market segments. Depending on your business model, you will target a variety of different advisor audiences. You might consider the top-level groups like Wirehouse FAs, Independent BD firms, and independent/Fee-Only RIAs and Hybrids. However, these groupings do not go far enough to properly tailor your advisor engagement strategy. Engagement strategies will vary significantly across these groups and even further within each group. There are a wide range of advisor types and styles that you must consider when crafting an engagement strategy.

An effective advisor engagement strategy requires a deep understanding of how your investment offerings fit with the target groups, subsegments and the size and economics of each sector.

Yet too often, our marketing and communications efforts are not targeted towards the most promising target segments. The benefit of improved segmentation is the ability to drive sales by crafting differentiated communications, deploying customized marketing programs, aligning distribution strategies and improving marketing and sales focus.

So how do we identify our ideal advisors and influencers?

The answer is to segment the market around criteria that matter.

Understand segmentation and the factors in your business model that should determine the ‘ideal advisors’.

  • Segments should have similar preferences within each segment and distinct preferences between segments.
  • Segments should be actionable for purposes of marketing planning and sales execution.
  • Segments should consider a range of factors that matter to your offerings, (e,g.  financial viability in terms of size, scale, margins; investment style, e.g. discretionary vs non-discretionary, etc.)

Go beyond groups (like Wirehouse, Indy, RIA) and consider factors that distinguish advisor’s likely interest, fit and engagement styles. Examples you might consider are:

  • Advisor business model
  • Advisor value proposition (e.g., wealth manager, investment manager, stock picker)
  • End client interaction – proactive vs reactive
  • Portfolio Management Approach: discretionary vs non-discretionary
  • Product/Market Mix – expansive or niche/limited vs full portfolio
  • Current relationship – established vs new
  • Position among peers – opinion leader vs trend follower
  • Stage in career: Ramping up, established, finishing up
  • Organization: Lone wolf, small team, office
  • Specialization within team: relationship vs product leadership
  • Channel preferences: wholesaler vs online/self-directed
  • Communication preferences: email vs letter/newsletter vs brochure
  • Education: direct/wholesaler vs webinar/video/TV
  • Awareness model: advertising vs product search

Identify and focus on the segments that work for you

  • Reviewing existing and/or planned segments in light of your business model
  • Identify and measure Total Addressable Market (TAM) so you can better measure awareness and engagement levels
  • Prioritize your target audience (e.g., by discretionary/non-discretionary, firm size/AUM, shared attributes, etc.)
  • Identify target audience buyer composition (e.g., personas, DMUs (decision-making units) and influencers

 

Download your copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

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Feel Their Pain, Secure Their Business

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Advisor Pains — Urgent, Visible Problems

To understand an advisor’s point-of-view and to engage with them, you must have a deeper understanding of their pain — their urgent, visible problems, even those they may not be aware of. From a high level you might generalize their pains as:  

  • Differentiating themselves from their competitors
  • Justifying their fees and navigating an accelerated shift from commission-based to fee-based accounts
  • Attracting broader demographics and segments
  • Adapting their behavior, digital tools and agenda to their clients’ way of life.

However, this is likely too generalized to your total market. For example what are the comparative pains of indy advisors vs. wirehouse advisors vs. independent advisors/RIAs – as well as for the major segments within each.

Pain Maps – Foundation of Advisor Engagement

There are  four interdependent and sequential elements or building blocks that make up an effective Advisor Engagement Strategy.  It is likely no surprise that pain points are the foundational element. 

Advisor Pain Points

Illustrative

    • Pain Maps™
    • Engagement Personas™
    • Pain Ladders™
    • Message Maps™

 

 

 

 

 

Organizing advisor pain points in Pain Maps™  will enable the ULTIMATE goals of creating Engagement Personas™ and informing the message development process. Engagement Personas™ should represent an excellent buyer-centric perspective and be rich with pain points relative to your solutions.

Further, it is important to organize and prioritize the pain points for each segment (e.g., RIAs, Wire Houses, Indys) in order to connect them to the larger narrative in the context of segment-specific demand engagement initiatives. As you go through this process, you’ll see there’s often overlap between segments/buyer types, thus allowing for the most efficient message, experience and content development processes possible.

For example, an Independent persona’s pain points may contrast as well as overlap with a wirehouse advisor as illustrated below.

Illustrative Pain Points

Independent Advisor 

  • Fund companies that don’t understand me or my business 
  • Need insight and perspective that can be used with clients

Wirehouse advisor

  • Help positioning alternatives and “unconstrained” funds
  • Keeping up on products and the markets

Independent / Wirehouse Advisors

  • Portfolio advice / 2nd opinion
  • Broadening client demographics

Both Pain Maps™ and Engagement Personas™ are created through interviews with key stakeholders, primary and secondary research, surveys and, most importantly, interviews with your target audience.

 

 

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Revenue First: Rethinking the Metrics That Matter

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The easiest metrics to measure are not always the most meaningful

When evaluating asset management marketing programs, indicators such as response / registration rate, open / click-through rate may be among the metrics you look for.

In an example of a narrower view, search marketing providers are measuring clicks, page visitation and navigation, length of visit, and the value of a “lead” based on what you paid for it.

Metrics are useful when they’re used for the tasks they’re best suited for, such as:

  • Testing which message/content combinations are working best,
  • Reviewing the types of content that prospects find most appealing,
  • Understanding where a prospect started in buyer journey and how they progressed through each stage to become a new advisor client (organic search, PPC, display ads, site sponsorship, social media, etc.)

These data are important but meaningless in the context of stand-alone metrics, without additional context for what happens next. They are irrelevant if you’re not engaging your ideal accounts or prospective buyers. You may consider them as leading indicators.

How do you re-think metrics, differentiate the best metrics that matter?

Differentiating between individual metrics and the KPIs that Matter.

Consider a revenue-first approach to re-think the metrics that matter, that is, metrics that are predictors of qualified account or sales opportunities and ultimately revenue delivered.

  • Start by defining KPIs or Key Performance indicators, that is, measurable values that show the progress of your business goals for your Asset Management Marketing and Sales
  • Gain a clear understanding of the importance of the KPIs, their hierarchy and how to align efforts to maximize performance in each.

advisor engagement metricsSee illustrative metrics, listed hierarchically from most important to least important

  1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  2. Supporting Metrics
  3. Supporting Metrics

 

Sales Activity Attributable to Marketing.

One of the key challenges is calculating sales activity attributable to marketing.  The Supporting Metrics, e.g., cost-per-sale, cost-per-qualified-lead are often much easier to track and report on than the core KPIs – e.g., sales activity attributable to marketing.

While new software tools are helping to bridge the gap, there’s still a bit of “black magic” to the matter. Let’s consider a this scenario for sales attributable to marketing:

You’ve targeted a prospect through multiple media. What activity do you “credit” for the inquiry if they’ve responded to a direct message via LinkedIn or an e-mail campaign, enter a landing page through paid search, or click on a link in social media—? After all, it may have been the display ad or landing page that did the bulk of the selling, even if the response/registration initialy came through via e-mail. Last click attribution can be quite misleading at times. This suggests the need to measure return-on-marketing spend by (i) individual activity AND (iI) in the aggregate.

In the end, attribution will be an important thing to solve for in establishing a revenue first hierarchy predictors of qualified account or sales opportunities and ultimately revenue delivered.

Download a copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

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It Takes Four: the Foundation of Stronger Advisor Engagement

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Do you have the right foundation for advisor engagement?

We break down the resources and systems that asset management firms need for effective advisor engagement into four categories: 

  1. Brand: Do our firm’s brand positioning, visual communications and branded channels provide a communications platform for advisor engagement?
  2. People: Are our organization and talent prepared to effectively engage advisors across the end-to-end advisor lifecycle?
  3. Processes: Are we executing a closed-loop process to engage advisors across the end-to-end advisor lifecycle?
  4. Technology: Does our solution include the right “stack” of revenue technologies including digital channels, marketing automation, salesforce automation, data management and business intelligence/analytics?

These four resource categories make up what we call a “revenue system”. They form the foundation for advisor engagement and sustainable revenue execution. These resources need to be in place at a sufficient level of maturity to enable revenue teams to attract, nurture, deepen and expand advisor relationships and convert asset management sales.  Yet few asset management firms have the right mix of capabilities across these categories. Brand channels and communications, messaging and voice are often not competitively distinguished and consistently communicated. The organization and talent approach is often siloed, creating disjointed advisor engagement for self-directed advisors and revenue processes are not “closed-loop” where marketing activities and programs are tracked through sales, informing what’s working and how to re-shape program tactics. Finally, technology systems are often not fully integrated, thereby resulting in poor data quality and less-than-ideal automation effectiveness.

Today’s advisor lifecycle experience is fluid and self-directed. Messages and experiences must be consistently delivered across marketing and sales. Leaders recognize that marketing and sales teams come together to manage non-linear advisor journeys. So, what are the resources required for an effective revenue system?

We break down resources into a checklist of four systems categories for world-class advisor engagement.

 

Brand

Pervasive experiences, impressions and visual communications that reinforce a differentiated position.

  • Consistent brand identity and visual communications, including logo design, tone and imagery colors embodied in a consistent brand standard
  • Brand enablement of 3rd party distribution and direct channels including digital and direct.
  • The digital presence across web and social media – with consistent copy, content and visual identity

People

Organization and talent that bring a holistic understanding of the integrated front office and teamwork.

  • Revenue-first organization that puts advisor experience first
  • Collaborative culture
  • Innovation focus
  • Technology and digital savvy
  • Recruiting and talent development
  • Metrics and incentives to reinforce the right behaviors

Processes

A continuous closed-loop process that eliminates “marketing” and “sales”  language in favor of a revenue-focused approach and process.

  • A closed-loop process that recognizes the continuous and non-linear engagement of today’s financial advisors, teams and influencer communities
  • Embracing the concepts of equitable exchange and permission marketing to deliver value in exchange for value
  • Orchestration of advisor engagement strategies for high profile/high value accounts
  • Closed-loop tracking and intelligence about what is working and not working across the lifecycle engagement model
  • Enabling content and resources that support real time aadvisor engagement and that addresses true persona needs and pain points.

 

Technology

Marketing and technology stack that includes applications for marketing, sales and data management.

  • Channel Platforms (web, social advertising, PR)
  • Marketing Automation & Tools
  • Sales Force Automation
  • Data Management
  • Business Intelligence Analytics

 

Download a copy of the Buyer Engagement eBook: “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing”

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77% of B2B marketers are NOT making their numbers! Why?

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77 Percent

Many so-called “Revenue Marketers” are writing checks that their companies simply can’t cash! According to a recent study by HubSpot, only 23% of marketers are exceeding their revenue goals. Yet, Revenue Marketing has become a ubiquitous concept and is getting tons of hype in today’s market. And rightfully so. No question – it’s the “holy grail” of today’s senior stakeholders.

Here’s the problem—all the verbiage around it was generated by companies and people deeply invested in its success. These include companies that are predominantly staffed by marketing automation technologists and solutions engineers, who are actually software people, not demand marketers. And all the talk isn’t limited to the marketing operations and automation folks who are making claims. There are also many strategic consulting firms and agencies that do the same, but they don’t have enough experience as practitioners to execute on the very recommendations they are prescribing to clients.

Don’t get me wrong, the modern marketing technology stack forms the most powerful marketing enablement toolkit I’ve witnessed in a nearly 25-year career. But it’s just that…an enablement toolkit. It’s a partial solution. You ALSO need effective buyer engagement strategy and execution or the monetization of your marketing investments won’t even come close to its potential.

Quite simply, revenue marketing can work—when (and only when) it’s driven by a worthy buyer engagement strategy. But the primary challenge, which we address in our new eBook entitled Exposed. The False Promises of Revenue Marketing., is all the confusion, misinterpretation and general lack of understanding that exists around revenue marketing and the buyer engagement strategies that are essential to its success.

These points of confusion include:

  • The fundamental deficit in buyer understanding that is killing marketing performance at most companies
  • What’s wrong with persona development
  • How messaging is largely missing the mark
  • Why most B2B content is lousy as it’s “domain-centric,” not “engagement-focused”
  • How most marketers are focused on all the wrong metrics
  • Why so very few marketers are capable of aligning all the requisite elements of a high-performance buyer engagement strategy

In the eBook we highlight these critical elements (and many more) that are too frequently being ignored, simply misunderstood or not fully embraced, but that are vital for true revenue marketing. In it we address 9 foundational principles that when used as a roadmap for marketing automation and social media propagation are the surest way to develop a sound buyer engagement strategy that transforms you into a true rock star of revenue marketing.

Discover 9 ways to exponentially increase leads, conversion, pipeline velocity, and revenue impact:

 

 

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Go-to-Market Strategy and Plan

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A company needs an effective go-to-market strategy that makes it easy to buy from and sell to. Go-to-market strategies and plans are a blueprint for how the company will reach customers, streamlining and establishing a strong focus on the steps that a company must take to co-create value with customers.

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