Prospecting is essential for identifying and reaching out to potential clients who could benefit from your services. Having a comprehensive strategy for finding and attracting prospects can help you find the right clients to work with and target them with messaging that’s designed to help convert them. Let’s look at how to create a financial advisor prospecting plan.

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Financial Advisor Prospecting Plan: 6 Tips for Success

What is a prospecting plan? At its core, a prospecting plan defines your goals and outlines the various strategies you’ll use to find leads for your advisory business. Taking time to develop a financial advisor prospecting plan allows you to focus your efforts on qualified leads so you can close more sales.

Here’s how to create your plan, step by step.

1. Set Goals

Prospecting without clear goals can end up being a wasted effort. So ask yourself what you realistically hope to accomplish.

Be as specific as possible. For instance, instead of setting a goal to increase revenues, set a specific goal of increasing revenues by 10% year over year. Or rather than saying you want to grow your book of business, set a goal to add two new clients to your roster each month.

The key to financial advisor goal setting is to choose objectives that are specific, measurable and actionable.

2. Know Who You’re Targeting

Successful advisors understand the value of choosing a niche. Your niche reflects who you serve and the problems you help them solve.

Creating an ideal client profile is a key step in forming a prospecting plan. When you know who you want to target, you can avoid wasting time on prospects whose needs or goals don’t align with your services.

Here are some questions that can help you flesh out your ideal client profile:

How old are they?
Where do they live?
What do they do for a living?
Are they married? Do they have kids?
How much are they likely to have in assets, based on their age and life stage?
What are their biggest pain points and what challenges can you help them overcome?

This kind of questioning can help you drill down to who you want to target

3. Define What Makes Your Business Stand Out

Knowing who you plan to target can help you fine-tune your messaging. There are two considerations here: your unique value proposition and your brand statement.

Unique value proposition refers to what makes your business different from the competitors. It telegraphs a message about why a client should choose you over another advisor.
A brand statement defines your firm’s mission and goals, and what your brand represents.

Prospecting becomes easier when you have no trouble explaining to potential clients what it is that makes your firm the right choice for their needs.

4. Decide How to Generate Leads

Financial advisors have multiple avenues to choose from when it comes to finding new leads. What you have to decide is which ones make the most sense for your business.

Tried and true methods for generating leads include:

Building spheres of influence with accountants, attorneys and other professionals who may be able to send referrals your way.
Collaborating with other advisors or financial influencers to gain exposure to a broader audience.
Relying on digital marketing methods, such as email marketing or social media, to connect with prospective clients.
Investing in digital ads or local advertising.
Using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find suitable prospects to reach out to.
Driving traffic to your website using SEO and growing your email list with valuable lead magnets.
Participating in community events or hosting an event of your own, such as a seminar that dives into a topic your ideal client is most interested in.
Asking your current clients for referrals.
Buying leads from reputable sources.
Working with an advisor marketing platform to connect with leads that align with your ideal client profile.

For each lead generation method, consider the time and cost involved. Then compare that to the expected return on investment.

Think in terms of what you can measure. For example, if you’re considering spending $5,000 on a digital ads campaign, what is your expected cost per lead? Your cost per acquisition? What is your anticipated return on ad spend and what kind of customer lifetime value can you expect from the leads you generate if you’re able to convert them to clients?

Thinking in terms of trackable key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you assess which prospecting avenues are likely to yield the best results.

5. Engage

Engaging with prospects can help you build trust and develop an ongoing conversation that could eventually lead to a conversion. The more engaged you are, the more opportunities you have to demonstrate your value to a potential client.

Here are some ideas for how to engage prospects:

Personalize your communications. If you’re sending out a newsletter to your email list, use the prospect’s name instead of a generic greeting. Make your content relatable and valuable, and close with a CTA that encourages prospects to get in touch.
Interact on social media. Social media can be an advisor’s best friend for marketing and prospecting, but only if you’re taking the time to cultivate an engaged audience. You can do that by posing questions to your followers, responding to their comments, asking them to participate in a survey or poll, and sharing personal stories that are designed to get a discussion going.
Host events. Events are a terrific opportunity to connect with prospects and demonstrate your value. Seminars and workshops, for example, can bring you together with prospective clients who are looking for the kind of solutions you’re equipped to provide.

6. Follow Up

Prospecting isn’t one-and-done; you may need to follow up with a potential client multiple times to close the deal. As you draft your prospecting plan, consider:

How long it’s appropriate to wait between your first contact with a prospect and the first follow-up.
Which methods you’ll use to follow up (e.g., phone calls, text, email, etc.).
How many times you’ll follow up before putting a prospect into your cold file.
Which metrics you’ll use to track your follow-up efforts and results.

It’s also helpful to develop some scripts you can use to overcome objections. For example, if a prospect tells you they already have an advisor, you need to know how to counter that. Scripts help you prepare to address these kinds of objections smoothly.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How Do Financial Advisors Prospect?

Financial advisor prospecting is not just one thing, it’s a range of strategies that are designed to help you find potential clients who could benefit from your services. Some of the most common advisor prospecting strategies include cold calling, direct mail, email marketing and lead generation services.

Do Advisors Need a Prospecting Plan?

Advisors don’t need to create a prospecting plan, but there are good reasons to do so. Your plan can help you get from Point A to Point B in your business if you know who you want to share your messaging with and how you’ll go about finding them. A prospecting plan can fit into your overall advisor marketing strategy.

What to Include in a Financial Advisor Prospecting Plan?

There are several principal elements to add to your prospecting plan, including:

An ideal client profile
Strategies for lead generation
Distinct goals you hope to accomplish
Strategies for following up

Remember, your plan should reflect your business’s goals. As those goals change, you may want to adjust your prospecting plan to ensure that it’s still meeting your needs.

Bottom Line

A financial advisor satisfied with her prospecting plan.

Having a financial advisor prospecting plan in place can keep you from wasting time in your business, which could delay growth. The tips included here can help you establish a framework for developing a prospecting plan that fits where your business is right now.

Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business

If marketing is one of your pain points, consider what you can do to simplify it. AI and automation tools, for instance, can make it easier to create marketing content for social media or email newsletters and schedule updates to post or send at specific times. You could also consider partnering with an advisor marketing platform. SmartAsset AMP (Advisor Marketing Platform) is a holistic marketing service that financial advisors can use for client lead generation and automated marketing. Sign up for a free demo to explore how SmartAsset AMP can help you expand your practice’s marketing operation. Get started today.
As you put your prospecting plan into action, consider how compliance fits in. The SEC’s marketing rule, for instance, requires registered investment advisors to adhere to certain rules when communicating with prospective or existing clients and promoting their businesses. Reviewing applicable guidelines can help ensure that your marketing efforts are aligned with compliance rules.

Photo credit: ©iStock.com/Antonio_Diaz, ©iStock.com/Extreme Media, ©iStock.com/SDI Productions

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