Learn the Sales Tips Financial Advisors Need to Grow Their Firms
Generating leads is a huge challenge for financial advisors. You might be a wiz at understanding markets and giving sound financial advice to clients, but getting new business is a different ballgame.
Skillsets aside, many financial advisors struggle with lead generation because they use old-fashioned methods like cold-calling and relying on random referrals to grow their clientbase.
Figuring out how to reach potential clients can be difficult. How do I get meaningful facetime with individuals looking for financial management? How do I build trust with my target audience?
The ultimate question is how to get hot leads for your firm, people interested in your services and feel comfortable discussing their goals with you as they consider a new financial advisor!
But building a pipeline of hot leads takes lots of warm leads first, prospects you need to get your foot in the door with.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to leverage financial advisor prospecting techniques into sales ideas to help turn warm prospects into valuable clients.
Financial Advisor Sales Techniques: How to Grow Your Firm
There are many ways to market yourself as a financial advisor to get more leads and increase revenue.
You could write articles, make YouTube videos or utilize social media to create content that shows off your experience as a financial advisor.
But it’s easier said than done to diversify your tactics. What can you do to get the ball rolling on a select few ideas to start winning new clients?
Modern strategies like reputation marketing and AI-based tools to optimize best practices for sales outreach help financial advisors close more leads. So building an online presence, embracing technology and not fearing the thought of marketing yourself are essential to tackling sales advice at scale.
5 Sales Tips for Financial Advisors
Not sure how to get more clients for your business? Here are the five best ways to generate more leads for your financial advisory business.
- Build a High-Quality Website
- Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
- Build a Reputation
- Get Selling With Social Media Marketing
- Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator
1. Build a High-Quality Website
Looking through your website is how most potential clients first engage with your business. That’s why it’s important your website educates visitors about your services and delights them with your expertise & trustworthiness.
Having a strong website goes a long way in building trust. Website visitors can understand your past work, current clients and prices. If you successfully helped a client during a recession or if you helped them beat the market, mention it on your website!
What are website tips for financial advisors to increase sales? Here’s how you can build trust and impress potential clients using your website:
- Include information about who you are, your area of expertise and your educational qualifications. Images help build trust, so feature pictures of yourself or a video talking about your experience as a financial advisor. If you represent a large organization, show off your team to leverage your firm’s professional reputation and demonstrate to website visitors how your firm works.
- Explain the types of financial services you offer to clients. Break down the different ways you help manage your clients’ money and what they can expect from you.
- Include sufficient information about the types of clients you typically work for so potential customers can see if you will be a good fit. For example, do you work best with individuals of a certain type of profession? Position yourself as an expert for people in that field on your website and to boost your sales pipeline.
- Lastly, mention how much your financial services cost. This isn’t very common on a lot of financial advisor websites, but there are good reasons to include a “fees” page, like making a strong first impression or helping to encourage referrals.
2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
A LinkedIn profile is one of the most valuable professional tools to connect with potential clients.
As a networking website, LinkedIn enables you to outreach to people who might benefit from your services. But to use LinkedIn effectively, your profile needs to showcase your expertise so you can leverage your reputation.
Simple tips you’d find in a LinkedIn lead-generation guide include strategic header images, pinning featured posts to add a portfolio to LinkedIn and learning best practices about LinkedIn headlines for financial advisors.
At the very least, complete your profile by filling in information about your professional life, such as:
- Education
- Work experience
- Accomplishments
- Professional profile picture
You should also post content on LinkedIn to show that you are an active user who regularly shares views on relevant topics like the stock market, economic policies and trending financial news. This will solidify your reputation so you can close more leads and increase sales.
3. Build a Reputation
Most financial advisors rely heavily on referrals from existing clients. In fact, around 26% of visitors to financial services websites come from direct traffic (people who visit a website from their browser’s URL bar or a browser bookmark).
That indicates the impact of word-of-mouth publicity and recommendations from existing clients as promising ways for you to bring in new sales.
To inspire your clientbase to brag about you to their friends, you need to deliver top-notch service. It’s known as reputation marketing—when you provide 11- instead of five-star service, you can leverage your professional reputation via your clients to market your firm to new leads.
And then to dig deeper you can reinforce your reputation as a financial advisor by sharing valuable insights and creating a strong presence on social media.
Your reputation can be a huge factor in winning over new clients and convincing them to trust you with their money.
4. Get Selling With Social Media Marketing
So you can build your reputation as a selling point to encourage referrals, but how do you go about it when creating and distributing marketing collateral?
Is it really as simple as sharing posts about your thoughts on finance? You might do that occasionally already and get no traction, so why bother?
The key to scaling this activity is through social selling; social media marketing for financial advisors is great at nurturing relationships, a hallmark of social selling.
Social selling is about proactively using social media to share not only posts but also to build your brand and engage with others to help get your name or your firm’s name on people’s minds.
In other words, you don’t have to write boring essays about the finance sector. You can share quick insights, participate in LinkedIn groups, answer people’s questions and respond to other people’s posts with your expertise.
Great LinkedIn social selling examples for financial advisors can include sharing tips for stock management by commenting on posts or giving away free content (like ebooks) on your portfolio.
This last idea is extolled by YouTube influencer for financial advisors Josh Olfert, who advises to “give away as much value as free as possible”; think about it, clients want to pay for results, not for information in ebooks about what you can do for them.
Content marketing campaigns on social media educate your audience on topics within the financial space and familiarize them with your brand. Your ideas and knowledge can go a long way in developing new contacts online and turning virtual connections into clients.
5. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a tool that helps sales professionals identify their target audience faster when prospecting for leads and to connect & engage with prospects effectively and efficiently.
That’s because buyers of financial services, like corporate executives and high net-worth individuals, are typical LinkedIn users, so leveraging LinkedIn’s sales tool makes sense for financial advisors.
You could create custom criteria for refining your prospecting techniques and increase the odds of targeting relevant individuals when launching outreach campaigns.
For financial advisors looking to reach a larger audience and generate more leads, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is excellent for prospecting high-priority leads. LinkedIn’s vast amount of data and insights helps you identify potential clients and message them in memorable ways.
Boost Your Revenue With Sales Outreach and LinkedIn for Financial Advisors
Financial advisor sales techniques can be wide-ranging, from website marketing and profile optimization to social selling with your reputation and using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
But the last thing you want is diving in with financial advisor sales tips and becoming overwhelmed with your already busy schedule. Creating great marketing material and promoting yourself online are necessary for more sales, but you need a strategy to scale up efficiently.
What matters is having meaningful conversations with prospects and closing the deal. And outreach campaigns on LinkedIn can be time-consuming and burdensome without effective support from smart sales tools.
Leveraging artificial intelligence with LinkedIn outreach is an effective way to take full advantage of lead generation for financial advisors. You can send outreach messages with confidence knowing which leads are likely to respond, auto-defining the likelihood of success in following up with specific leads or personalizing messages at scale with customized people insights.
With professional quality AI lead generation and outreach, you can convert more leads into sales and boost your revenue.
