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As part of our firm’s continued mission to generate predictable leads for independent financial advisory firms, we spend a lot of my time consulting with potential new clients. Whether we begin a relationship or not, we always try to help advisors win the customers they deserve – allowing them to work "smarter, not harder," as it were.
Just the other day, I was speaking with a financial advisor and we touched upon a unifying topic: the process. Someone comes to your site and fills out your "Contact Us" form. They give you basic information, but not enough to qualify them as a good lead. But you enter this information into your database or CRM anyway, in the hopes that this one may be more than it appears.
However, so much time lapses from when the prospect fills out the form and your opportunity to respond that this person keeps searching around for other financial advisors. By the time you realize that you were looking at a qualified lead, they've already gone with someone else.
Few things are as painful as missing opportunities like those.
It's something that I've seen happen time and again over the last 10 years. This advisor was looking to break free of the grind of manual entry, disorganized leads, impersonal responses and time wasted. They were looking for an opportunity to embrace sales automation to optimize their approach to lead generation and nurturing, but just weren't sure where to begin.
I said what I always do: "Let’s take a look at your software."
There are many products for financial advisors to choose from depending on their needs, but at the same time there is truly no "one size fits all" approach to making a selection. Every business is a bit different, so you need to find the solution that works for you and you alone. Over the course of this series of articles, I'm going to review a few of those options that may very well be your ticket to finally getting your leads into one organized pipeline.
We're going to begin with Harbor Plan – a product developed by financial advisors, for financial advisors.
Personalized lead generation has never been easier
Maybe the hallmark feature of the Harbor Plan solution from Harbor Financial has to do with its lead automation, which is a robust offering that facilitates lead nurturing across multiple channels (more channels than most, in fact).
The main limitation, however, is that it will only nurture leads from either one of its quizzes, or from third-party lead pay services like Wiser Advisor. Of course, you can always manually insert a lead into the pipeline.
The quizzes
Harbor Plan offers two different types of quizzes for you to choose from depending on your needs: the Financial Health Quiz and the Investor Personality Quiz. Each is geared towards a different targeted market, thus giving you information to screen the prospect as soon as possible.
- The Financial Health Quiz will reveal your prospect's financial situation, priorities and goals.
- The Investor Personality Quiz will give you that, plus important information about the whether he or she is a confident or timid investor, interested in high-risk or low-risk, diligent or impulsive, reserved or tumultuous.
Depending on the quiz the potential lead chooses, the answers provided give you enough to qualify them as a good potential client as opposed to simply working with basic information like a first and last name and email from a contact form.
Once a quiz has been completed, a one-to-one email campaign begins with that prospect. But again, this isn't an impersonal email blast – this is an intelligent conversation that is personalized and targeted based on their answers to those very specific questions.
The multi-channel nurturing platform
Another major benefit of Harbor Plan is that it's a true multi-channel lead-generation platform, meaning that it can also send text, voicemails and even phone calls in addition to emails. This is all done through a dedicated number within your area code.
The advantage of this approach is that it gives you multiple options for different touch points across the sales cycle, which can allow for another layer of personalization based on your preference and the sales context.
Likewise, the campaign you're running can be automatically paused if the prospect responds through any media, allowing you to avoid bombarding the lead with unnecessary messages. If at any time the lead stops responding, the campaign can begin again.
Limitations and other important considerations
Although Harbor Plan does offer the flexibility of nurturing leads through different channels, its primary limitation is also a significant one: It cannot link to landing pages like Instapage or Unbounce via an API. Instapage and Unbounce are two leading landing-page software platforms that have easy-to-use interfaces that build stand-alone pages that achieve higher conversion rates. Integrating with Unbounce, for example, requires you to contact their support team directly. The process also relies on email as the point of connection.
Despite this limitation, Harbor Plan's campaigns are solid on their own and you can send traffic to the quiz landing pages using Google AdWords. This increases the lead flow with the right kind of ads almost immediately.
Likewise, Harbor Plan is the beginning of a much larger story. Harbor Plan focuses on one pipeline through its two different quiz-based lead-generation campaigns – this is not going to be your only pipeline. For example, if you want to run some Facebook ads to generate registrations to a seminar, you're still going to need Unbounce and Active Campaign.
For the advisory firms who are my clients, we run Active Campaign alongside Harbor Plan quite regularly. We let Harbor Plan effectively nurture the leads that it generates through its quiz campaigns and let Active Campaign handle the other campaigns that the clients want to do. Regardless, it's a quality entry into a robust sales funnel – particularly an improvement if you're using a basic "Contact Us" form. If you set it up and send traffic to it, you will love seeing the qualified leads and additional introductory calls in your calendar.
Christopher P. Wendt is president of Midstream Marketing, a digital agency that generates predictable leads for independent financial advisory firms. Over the last 10 years, he’s spent hundreds of hours applying the LeadGen Formula™, a proven method helping financial advisors generate more leads. You can reach him at [email protected].
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.