Advisors expect a personalized approach to help them feel connected and sure that their clients will transition to their new firm with minimal hassle and disruption to their portfolio. Onboarding journeys can start with a welcome note and take the advisor on a one-to-one guided tour based on live data, which pushes them into desired selling behaviors.
It takes a significant amount of time, effort, and resources to secure and onboard an advisor before they sell anything. Many wealth management firms have had experiences in which a highly-recruited advisor joins the firm and then underperforms. How can you avoid this loss of ROI? And how can a wealth firm take an advisor to the next level to become (and stay) productive?
How to improve financial advisor productivity
Salesforce can help provide the kind of sales incentives that make advisors’ jobs easier — and bring you more business. Here are five ways Salesforce can help improve financial advisor productivity:
1. Gamification: create incentives to motivate the behaviors you want
Tap into competitive nature. Create leaderboards, badges, and point systems that are displayed to the entire group to invoke competition across your producers. Sales performance (SPIF) programs and contests with monetary and tangible prizes — including exclusive clubs, circles, etc. that provide awards, include prizes of various values, company-sponsored travel, or even creative experiential awards — can incentivize your top producers.
2. Support advisors with relevant, targeted content for customers
Make content and tools available to your advisors that help educate their clients about products as well as target messaging to overcome investor objections and even create emotional connections. Many investors don’t understand the difference between products, so providing streamlined, interactive options for advisors to use when modeling products and options to customers helps the selling experience.
Help your advisors overcome objections through relevant, targeted content that connects your product on a personal level to the customer. For instance, a video that shows how a life insurance policy benefits the family when a family member passes. Without the policy, they would not have the funds to pay bills, pay for funeral arrangements, or have death benefits to ensure family is taken care of after the person passes.
Making your products more relevant to your customer and providing tools for producers to connect that messaging during the sales process benefits everyone.
3. Push just-in-time information
Features like Einstein Analytics can be used to find contacts and policyholders that share similar attributes. Using those results, you can push new sourced opportunities, such as from web traffic, to the right advisor who is most likely to connect with the prospect and close the deal. You can also set marketing automation to help nurture leads and opportunities on behalf of the advisor. Pushing a message to the advisor, on the desktop or mobile, so they know when a prospect has engaged with messaging enables a more efficient sales process, and improved financial advisor productivity.
4. Get insight into sales and recruitment needs
If your advisors are also using Salesforce in your current implementation, Einstein can also be leveraged to provide insight into which products are not converting well for your current advisors (by state, region, or other attributes). This information can help guide ATS/recruitment teams to recruit advisors that specialize in those products or are based in territories where additional support may be needed. Depending on the data stored in Salesforce, you could also assign a “value index” (using Einstein) that compares product profitability and advisor production to more heavily weigh recruitment for advisors that are licensed or specialize in certain products.
5. Use Trailhead.me for company training on unique products and tools available to advisors
Salesforce has seen strong adoption of their Trailhead learning platform for a reason — users love the gamification and ease of use. Creating learning paths (i.e., trails) that take onboarding advisors through product types, tools available to them, and your unique company culture and guidelines gives them an easy, fun way to learn while also being tracked in Salesforce. The flexibility within the tool itself lets your firm create bite-sized training for specific products, use cases, or processes that advisors can consume as needed.
Onboard wealth advisors successfully with Salesforce and Silverline
Successfully identifying, attracting, onboarding, engaging, and retaining advisors takes a careful combination of the right processes and technology. Because hiring and developing talented advisors is a consistent challenge for wealth management firms, it’s important to have a competitive advantage like Salesforce as both an engagement platform and a single source of truth for secure, accessible data.
At Silverline, we partner with wealth firms to incorporate effective recruiting and onboarding best practices into the Salesforce platform to maximize the potential for success — and the long-term ROI on advisors. Download our free ebook to learn more.
