The lifeline of all businesses, entrepreneurs, sales teams and for the financial services sector is the ability of developing leads. Financial services are facing increased rules and legislation making it difficult to market their services. On top of this is even more policies implemented by the firms compliance teams. If you end up breaking these rules, there are the potential for fines, constant talking to by management and lastly, termination.
Time is our greatest asset and when not developing leads properly, will result in a dimmer future and pipeline.
The scope of GREAT data and information real-time is what will separate you from your competitors and open up new lead opportunities. This means you have to invest in tools to leverage your time and prospecting efforts in order to make the most of your time.
If you take no action on improving your sales skill set, invest in new tools and continually look to improve on your process, this will automatically make you worse than you were the day before. Your peers and competitors will outperform you and will begin to back you into a corner. Remember that what works today may not work tomorrow. The tools you use now can be better and help you get to more opportunities.
You should have a process for everything in your life. It is the key to success in every aspect of life. Marketing for business is particularity more difficult as it can come with a roller coaster of wins and losses. The majority of people will become reactive instead of proactive when prospecting for business. Blocking time and using it to put those tools to work will shift your mindset into a proactive mode. Read this article to start developing and sharpening your daily process.
What information are you using to develop leads more effectively? How much time does that take you to research and enter into a CRM?
More importantly, what COULD you have been doing to grow your business or at the least, service some of your existing clientele?
Take note of every time you put together data of individuals and opportunities you gather. Some still use good old Excel or CRM’s to track prospect activity. The biggest issue with this is that these individuals situations change frequently, meaning you have to manually input changes into your system.
This also works with high net worth clients you have. You have 2 choices when it comes to keeping up on your prospects and clients.
- You are proactive by receiving information about the client or prospect you can use to initiate or strengthen relationships or
- You wait and allow the client to tell you what changes have occurred, making you react to the changes in situation.
According to IBM, the big data analytics market is set to reach $103 billion by 2023. Your habits, purchases, preferences, locations you visit and everything in between is lucrative information for companies across the globe.
With data being a great way to know about your market, it is no wonder why it is bought and sold across every industry in the United States.
By the time it gets into your hands, it is probably outdated or not been properly qualified or updated with current information.
The industry of selling financial advisors “lead lists” is one that has wasted millions of dollars from the financial advisors perspective. The individuals selling these lists sell them to tens if not hundreds of advisors. The information becomes diluted and does not update when the leads make situational changes.
There is tremendous value in being able to know what data works for your lead generation process. Knowing what type of data, how you incorporate it into your developing leads process and how you proactively service your clients
These systems can be one of your best friends or just another painful tool to implement into your practice. Managers and compliance will check these notes for accuracy and depth to cover any potential liability against the firm.
The larger CRM’s of the world consistently add on layers of “features and benefit’s” that end up serving as an anchor to the growth of your advisory practice.
Determine how tied down you and your team are to your CRM. How much time is spent documenting data, findings, information, follow ups and team coordination?
Chances are your firm paid a lot of money to implement such a CRM. If it is preventing you from developing leads and ultimately growing your advisory practice, you know what you have to do to fix it.