Behind every successful firm is a successful system—a way of doing things that sets the team up for success. A set framework to build on is a major cornerstone of growing firms. Look at the success of the Traction system in the financial world—advisors clearly desire a proven structure they can implement.
One of the biggest ways advisory firms can set up their team to reliably achieve on a higher level is by mapping out your client journey from first touch through onboarding. Mapping out your journey will create an optimal environment for successful advisor-client relationships and set you up to have a better chance of attracting and retaining the best advisors.
After all, the best advisors will see the difference in your firm and the value you add to their ability to do their job by setting them up with the best systems.
Today, we want to look at four ways you can improve the prospecting and onboarding journey at your firm.
1. Prospect Personalization
CRMs are more or less table stakes when it comes to the modern advisor tech stack. How each firm uses their CRM, on the other hand, varies wildly from basically just a more expensive Rolodex to an over-automated web of confusing workflows and messages triggered by every little change.
You want to aim somewhere in between the two extremes. To avoid over-engineering your CRM, think about your desired end goal and only create processes that build on each other to drive scale and simplicity.
Leveraging the workflows and automations available in your CRM can help standardize prospecting and onboarding processes across all of your advisors and help standardize the experience new clients have when joining your firm.
But standardization should never be the end goal—if you can’t make the client and advisor experience better by digitization and automation, then you shouldn’t do it.
Analyze your processes, consult with your top advisors—find out what works best, and then build your workflows accordingly.
2. High-level Views
As an executive or manager, it’s easy to assume that everyone needs the same high-level view. But remember that your advisors are down in the trenches and often struggle to see anything beyond the task they are currently facing.
That’s not to say that they need a high-level view from your vantage point. They need an at-a-glance dashboard view that will easily measure business performance and stay on top of their prospect lists.
Simply put, they need easy, consistent access to more than their daily agenda.
3. Digital Account Opening
Much like CRMs, digital new account opening is pretty much a given when working with 21st-century custodians. But, again, the spectrum of implementation is broad and inconsistent from firm to firm.
If your custodian supports digital account opening, but your firm’s technology doesn’t, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to make your advisors’ lives easier and clients’ experience better.
For advisors, this frustration is ongoing. Every time they open a new account manually, they are reminded that other firms have better processes.
The right technology should allow new account opening—and much more than just that. These first three pain points were major contributing factors to the development of SkienceONE, our comprehensive wealth management platform.
4. Data Aggregation
Gone are the days of just managing an investment or retirement account. Modern clients want their entire financial life in one place, which is great news for your firm and your advisors—if you can provide the right tools.
Your advisors (and their clients) want data aggregation tools that give them an authoritative, single source of truth. With the right solution, you can give your advisors a unified view—across custodians and utilities—of every account they manage.
And there you have it—a proven recipe for success that removes the mystery and gives you a framework for turning your firm into a sensation. In the end, implementing systems like these will help you attract and retain the best advisors because they know there’s something different about your firm.
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