How to get clients as a financial advisor

How to get clients as a financial advisor who leads with advice

If you’re a Financial Advisor, independent or not, it’s your responsibility to get more clients by marketing your services. You need the best Sales Training for Financial Advisors.

So, where on earth do you start when it comes to selling your products and services? This is a question I am asked a lot by other advisors as they try to figure out how to best acquire & serve new clients in the digital age we live in while leading with advice.

After many years of learning the tricks of the trade and even launching my own Financial Advisor training program – Conneqtor – I have amassed some insights to share with you when it comes to effective sales techniques.

Let me start off with the best advice I can offer you regarding sales techniques: Your focus should be around the core idea of leading with advice versus selling products. Additionally, product sales should be a by-product of great advice.

What does this mean, you ask? It means that, before you start selling anything, your focus should be on providing exceptional advice to your clients and always putting their needs first. This is absolutely KEY to your success as our industry & profession move forward to answer the call of the consumer.

With that said, let’s unpack some sales techniques you need to know as a Financial Advisor.

Start with a great website to get clients

When it comes to digital marketing for Financial Advisors, one of your first your priorities should be your website. This is one of the first things I tell advisors when they ask me how to market their financial advisory practice.  Your website is your digital storefront, the place people will go to check you out, learn more about what you do and for who, and is part of the decision-making process a consumer goes through before working with you.  Oh, it’s also open and working for you 24/7.

There’s no point in paying for lead generation activities if you don’t have a decent website to drive traffic to.

A good website can generate some serious ROI when it comes to prospecting. Having a well-designed website in place establishes trust and credibility with prospective clients and showcases your professionalism and expertise.

Here are my top tips for building a website that drives sales:

• Ensure that your copy (the text on your website) is clear and compelling.
• Your website needs to be easy to navigate. Otherwise, visitors will leave.
• Add your phone number and email address to the “contact us” section of your site.
• Include an “about us” page that informs users about you and your practice.
• Make your philosophy and your approach as a Financial Advisor clear.
• List your prices!  People want to know what it’s going to cost them to work with you.
• Keep the entire site simple, clean, and with minimal copy.
• Use pictures & video.
• Have a couple of strong CTAs (calls to action) for visitors to contact you, book a meeting, get their free Asset Map, get their free Riskalyze Risk Number, or even download one of your eBooks.

Once you have your website up and running, ensure you connect Google Analytics (GA) to your site so that you can monitor your traffic and determine where your visitors are coming from.

Using GA and Google Search Console are great ways to also track any marketing campaigns you may run.

Ditch the hard sell, lead with advice

Don’t you ever get tired of sales calls and advertising that is super direct and “in your face”? It’s likely that your prospective clients – and even your current clients – feel the same way.

The worst way to sell financial products is to hard sell. Instead, take a consultative approach to selling financial services.

Most people would prefer to work with a Financial Advisor who looks out for their best interests rather than be sold to.  People want to be educated and led to make a good decision, they don’t want to be forced into buying something and then end up with buyer’s remorse.

You can build rapport and trust with your clients by taking a consultative approach – which means taking time to listen to & understand their needs, presenting various customised solutions to meet their requirements, and then when they’re ready (and educated & empowered) they will actually ask you how to implement the advice you’ve given.  Wouldn’t you rather have clients asking to buy from you instead of pushing a hard sale?

Identify the problem you help to solve

Marketing is far more effective when the person selling makes it clear how their product or service solves a specific problem. When you target the specific pain points that your ideal client would likely be facing – and you present how your solution solves their problems – you’ll simply be more successful.

I’ve spoken before about how important it is to develop an ideal client profile. If you know who your ideal client is, you know what kinds of challenges they’re up against. And, because you’re an expert in your field, you can apply your knowledge to advice & solutions that speak directly to their problem.

Take time to note down exactly what problems your ideal client may be having, and then answer each issue with a solution that you offer.

This should be the foundation of all your marketing and sales activities.  Educate by showing you understand the problem and that you know how to fix it.  More importantly, SHOW them how to solve their problem.  Wait, show them?  But then they will just do it themselves, right?  Well, no, most of the time people want an expert to help them implement solutions.  If someone is a DIY’er then they aren’t a good client for you anyways.  Everyone else will appreciate you showing them how to solve their problems and then come to you as a thought leader and expert to help them solve their problem.

The power of email marketing for lead nurturing

Email marketing is not dead.

Did you know that the ROI on email marketing can be as high as 4400%? When used to its full potential, email marketing is a highly-effective sales tool.

So, where about in the sales journey should email marketing come in? My advice is to use this tool to follow up on and nurture warm leads.

A warm lead is a prospective client who has shown interest in your business.  Their information should also have been captured in your lead generation system. This allows you to start gently nudging your warm leads through your marketing-to-sales funnel.  This is also known as nurturing your leads.

Your follow-up emails can include helpful content like articles, videos, and even podcasts. By doing this, you provide them with value and establish yourself as an expert.

My top tip here is to automate your email marketing using a tool like ActiveCampaign. Trying to do email marketing manually can take up hours of your time and can result in human error. Automating your email marketing is the best way to make the most of this tactic.

Use a good CRM to manage your prospects

It’s impossible to keep track of all your prospects using only your memory. And spreadsheets are limited in their capability to manage leads.

My advice is to invest in a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to keep track of all your prospects and lead generation activities.  I actually use ActiveCampaign for this too, but there are plenty of great tools out there like Redtail, Wealthbox, etc. This streamlines your prospecting process and stores all the necessary information in one central place.

A CRM will help you manage whom you’ve contacted, whom you need to follow up with, and when you need to do both.

Leading with advice to drive sales at the end of the day is a philosophical shift for advisors.  Easier said than done given the product-centric sales environment our industry has been in for a long time.

Once you shift your mindset to leading with advice it has been my experience that the work we do gets easier and more enjoyable for us and our clients.  It still will take work on your part but is well worth it.

Use this mindset shift to drive all of your marketing (prospecting) efforts but also your sales process.  The last thing you want to do is lead people to think you are advice driven only to bait-and-switch to a quick product sale.  By following these tips you should be able to answer the question on how to get clients as a financial advisor and realize the growth you are looking for.

As part of my Conneqtor online training, I dive deep into my proven sales (leading with advice) sales process.  We also spend a lot of time training on how to get to most out of your digital marketing efforts. Visit my website to learn more about Conneqtor.

If you’re a newer advisor, check out more articles on my blog, where I share top tips and advice for Financial Advisors.

Lastly, if you’re big on podcasts, tune into the Rethink podcast for Financial Advisors that I host with my fellow FinTech founder, Adam Holt.

Cheers for now,

Derek Notman