Effective Prospecting Strategies for Financial Advisors
What is Financial Prospecting?
As a service-based business, choosing the right kind of clients is essential for a financial advisory firm.
You might have satisfied clients right now, but they might not stay with you forever. New business is always necessary if you want to grow your practice as a business.
This is where prospecting comes in.
Prospecting is the process you use to find potential clients, form a relationship, and eventually guide them down your sales funnel. The main goal here is to convert prospects into leads and, eventually, paying customers.
A good example of financial advisor prospecting would be cold calling. Although it may no longer be the most effective prospecting method, cold calling is a type of outreach strategy that involves finding customers, building a relationship, and getting the sale, all through an initial phone call and a few follow-ups.
Another prospecting technique that you might be familiar with is referrals, where past or current clients recommend new prospects to your business. Referrals are a great way to expand your client base; it’s highly likely that you’ll get introduced to ideal clients since existing clients already know your specialty.
In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of prospecting and some of the top strategies you can try to grow your client base.
Why Prospecting is Significant
Besides bringing in new business to the firm, prospecting also helps you be more selective with who you want to take on as clients.
In the beginning, you might need to do all of this manually. However, as you do it more often, you’ll begin to form a process you can use to do prospecting at scale. Automating your prospecting and systems can help you bring in new, qualified leads on autopilot.
Work with vetted prospects — the ones who have the problems you can solve or have aligned values. As you grow your financial advisory firm, you might notice that there are certain types of clients you love to work with. Prospecting ensures that you continue working with these types of clients, leading to a more productive time together.
Bring in new business on autopilot. As you get better with prospecting, the process becomes more familiar — to the point where you can create templates and automate most of the hard work. Having a solid system means that you don’t have to set out to look for new clients and build the relationship from scratch every single time.
Get to know your prospects so you can position yourself as an expert who understands their problems. By communicating with actual prospects, you’re getting to know their actual concerns. Honing in on this and empathizing with it can help you form a better understanding of where they’re coming from. You can use this new information to improve every single interaction that you have with clients.
Compelling Prospecting Strategies for Financial Advisors
Form a strategy before you start prospecting. Rather than blindly looking for clients and sliding into their LinkedIn DMs (direct messages), a strategy helps guide your effort so you can focus on the most impactful parts of prospecting. Here are some prospecting ideas worth trying.
Know Your Target Clientele
Knowing your target clientele helps you focus your prospecting efforts in the right direction. You might be able to discover things such as their current concerns, the types of strategies they respond best to, or how they describe their problems.
Furthermore, having more insight into who your target clientele is will also help you hone your client experience to cater to the right kind of people.
Don’t know who your target clientele is? If you’ve worked with a few clients, you can figure it out by asking some of these questions:
Is there a commonality between your clients? Demographics? Profession? Or maybe a value that they’re deeply passionate about?
Where do they spend their time online?
What type of pain points did they come to you with?
What steps did they take to attempt to solve that problem before coming to you?
What made them choose you over all the other advisory firms?
Looking for patterns across your clientele can help you narrow down who you want to work with.
Even if you have limited experience, you can still use this method. It’s highly likely that your preferences will change, and you’ll pivot in time. However, having a starting point is important.
Create a Memorable Brand
A memorable brand isn’t just your logo or the name of your advisory firm.
Sure, having a logo, a memorable name, and certain visuals are part of building a brand. But at its core, creating a memorable brand starts from who you are as a service provider.
Ultimately, a brand is how you want people to perceive your business.
Figuring out who you are as a brand takes a lot of internal analysis, especially if you still need to figure out your value proposition. Here are a few questions that might help you figure out the reason why you do what you do:
What excites you most about coming to work every day?
What is the bigger purpose you’re trying to achieve?
Are there certain words you often hear others use when talking about you as a professional?
What do you want to feel most proud of from your practice?
If you already have a list of clients who love you, you can also ask a few questions to figure out if you already have a brand to start with, such as:
How has your firm changed how they feel about the service they come to you about (financial planning, retirement planning, estate planning, wealth management, etc.)?
If you stop your practice, what would they miss most about working with you?
After you have the answers to this value, make sure that you’re being consistent in your efforts. Consistent branding helps others recognize you in the wild. This includes things like your brand colors, logo, language, or personality when talking about certain things.
Connect via Social Media
According to DataReportal, more than 59% of the world’s population uses social media.
Social media is a great place to connect with your target market and build your authority.
However, tackling it without a strategy often turns it into a time suck instead of a helpful channel.
For starters, you’ll want to pick a social media platform that you know your target audience is using.
There are a lot of platforms to pick from — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are just a few of the most popular ones. Rather than trying to use and master all of them, focus on one or two platforms when you first start.
Additionally, use content that’s easy to digest. Most people don’t come to social media for in-depth lessons. They come in expecting a quick distraction and takeaways, so bite-sized content that captures attention in an instant is perfect for most platforms.
Finally, the strongest element of a social media platform is the social interaction you get out of it. Instead of just posting your content, make it a habit to interact with your followers and boost others’ posts as well.
Aim to build strong relationships with your following instead of ‘blowing up’ through one of your posts.
Level Up Your Email Marketing
Having a newsletter helps you connect with people who want to know more about your services but aren’t ready to take the leap just yet. Through your newsletter, you can build a community of people who trust you.
Aside from keeping in touch with prospective clients, a newsletter has many other functions.
You can help people who aren’t ready for your services DIY their way to better financial situations.
You can build trust with your subscribers so they’ll keep you top of mind when they finally need your services.
And you can prepare your subscribers so they’ll be the type of clients you love to work with once they finally take the leap.
Access to your reader’s inbox should always be seen as a privilege. Figure out what kind of content they would want to hear from you and try to tailor what you send according to their preferences.
Ideally, you should also have different subscriber segments to help you do this better.
Host Networking Events
Networking events are a great way for people with similar interests to meet each other.
While you can host networking events for prospective clients, this would have more impact if you do this with fellow service providers who might be able to benefit as well. Financial professionals in the industry might be able to refer one another to businesses that offer services they don’t.
You can also network with prospective clients through virtual webinars, in-person seminars, or regular office hours so they can see how it feels to work with you and the type of financial advice you give.
Seamlessly Track Prospects with Asset-Map
Prospecting ties in very well with your advisor marketing efforts. Your prospecting strategy should always take your marketing strategy into account, seeing as there will be a lot of overlap between both.
Make it a habit to talk about your financial services, whether by posting articles, guesting on podcasts, or hosting events for people in your industry.
A strategy is nothing without results to show for it.
Use Asset-Map to track where your prospects are at and where to push them next. Simplify your client interactions to impress new clients. Create a better client experience for every client without sacrificing your limited hours.
Book a demo here, and we’ll show you how Asset-Map can help you do all of these from one platform.