gears automation

Financial advisors are an amazingly difficult prospect to engage. They are incredibly busy and already have a wealth of resources available to them; in fact, it may be fair to ask if they even need to engage with wholesalers? That’s why we say the best way to convert financial advisors to customers is to build your marketing automation program around them.

Lead generation starts with effective segmentation

Before focusing on key strategies, Sales and Marketing must have defined a set of engagement personas and customer segments. Marketing has worked with personas for at least a decade, but only since the advent of marketing automation software have engagement personas become empowered and brought to life.

Defining financial advisor segments for lead generation

Creating clarity with Sales is a two-step process:
  1. Lead scoring – a measure of how active a financial advisor is on your digital properties
  2. Lead grading – a measure of how profitable the financial advisor is likely to be

Advisor Marketing Focus

While it may take several iterations to get lead scoring and grading optimized, the process should be fruitful for Sales and Marketing. It crystallizes Marketing and Sales perspectives around which advisors are most profitable and which digital behaviors are believed to be most relevant to a sale. Some marketing automation vendors have one score that represents profitability and interest. However, being able to separate advisor behaviors from profitability factors simplifies discussions by clarifying customer segments by profitability as seen in the above graphic. As an example, Pardot applies a numerical value for an advisor’s lead score and a letter grade (A-F) for an advisor’s expected profitability.

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Professional Selling

Professional Selling

A go-to-market model is based on your business model and your target audience of personas. It helps you envision the best ways to access your ideal clients. Yet, in addition to understanding how you might best access your particular target client segment, you should consider what is best for you and your firm. For example, what volumes do you need? How comfortable are you with outbound prospecting? To what degree are you comfortable using social media or digital marketing?

Begin by determining how to access your ideal clients.

A. Determine your territories or market focus as a team – who will focus on which prospects or segments.

B. Identify referral partners (asset management relationships, custodians, referral networks, COIs, etc.)

C. Identify marketplaces or communities that may be relevant (e.g., FeeOnlyNetwork, Investopedia, NAPFA, FPA Planner, Zoe Financial, SmartAsset, and others)

D. Identify touch points should might based on the audience, e.g. inbound and outbound marketing, PR/media outreach, advertising, re-marketing, high-value content, and thought leadership, webinars.

E. Identify social and other media channels you might use to reach prospective clients (Google or Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn Sponsored posts, etc., radio, print), media/PR, content/thought leadership publishing/syndication, speaking, charitable activity, e-mail, apps such as a retirement readiness quiz, webinars).

F. Consider what capabilities you will need to support your go-to-market strategy, including web channels, collateral, technologies, processes, skills, and measurement/monitoring.

G. Align your team around the go-to-market model and high-level campaign strategies, ensuring buy-in and supporting execution commitment.

Target selectively:

  • Be selective about which clients to target. That is, which clients have the potential to be profitable, and the willingness to form long-term relationships.
  • Manage the others – losing unwanted customers efficiently without loss of focus.
  • An A-B-C Client Model is a handy tool to segment your client base and manage your portfolio.
  • Long-term success will rely on a go-to-market strategy and plan that reaches your target clients and positions your firm with a competitive advantage.

Explore all 9 strategies for growth by downloading the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™.

Collaborative Qualification

Collaborative Qualification

Post originally published in 2014

We have written a few articles about collaborative qualification and how to select and apply the right sales qualification tools  – including SCOTSMAN and BANT. These tools are quite familiar to B2B sales and teams that focused on a considered sale.  Yet, we see some challenges:

  • As clients are self-selling on websites, they will pre-qualify (assuming they find buying content on the website). This changes the role of sales-led qualification.
  • BANT is a proven model, but  the focus is on qualification from the seller perspective, it works better to qualify OUT the opportunity rather than qualify IN the opportunity.  It does not help build a collaborative relationship with the client. It is confrontational.
  • SCOTSMAN is another great model as it offers a  nuanced approach, but it is hard to remember each of the elements in the mnemonic on the fly. Sales reps may need to pull out a cheat sheet which can be difficult in the heat of the moment. ( See our other post on BANT and Scotsman to learn more. )

So what is the right approach to sales qualification? We suggest a collaborative approach using FACT.

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