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Written by: Annie Button
When you’re in financial services, building a sustainable client acquisition system is pivotal to success. While traditional networking and referrals no doubt secure you valuable leads, it becomes difficult to balance this alongside scaling your practice and trying to grow as a company.
It’s the dream of any financial advisor to grow their business while having a steady stream of prospects and viable leads coming in. There also needs to be established processes and routines to attract, nurture and convert them into clients. But if you’re tied up in ongoing client or customer work, managing your staff, marketing your products and services and developing new growth strategies, rethinking your sales channel regularly falls further down the priority list.
The solution lies in creating a well-designed funnel that consistently fills your sales pipeline with qualified, warm leads.
What Makes a Good Financial Advisor Funnel?
A typical sales funnel for financial advisors is rarely cut from the same cloth as those tailored for other industries. The prospects you are targeting often seek specific services and advice, given that they need someone to trust with their financial future. These kinds of decisions aren’t made overnight; they require you to cultivate trust and build a sustainable, beneficial relationship with them. As expected, these kinds of relationships take time to build.
This warrants a specific approach where you can address the unique pain points of your clients from the early stages, and guide them gracefully down a specific route that solidifies, in their minds, that your financial advisory firm has the expertise, knowledge, and approach that meets their needs.
An example of a financial advisor sales funnel would typically follow five key stages (in order: awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, and decision). However, depending on your assets, products or services, yours might look different to your competitors. The aim is to provide genuine value progressively throughout each stage, while gradually building the credibility and trust needed for these kinds of customers. Your sales funnel isn’t going to mirror one that belongs to a leading e-commerce brand, where customers pass through the stages from discovery to completion, often in a matter of minutes. Rather, it must nurture prospects through elongated periods which can occur at any stage.
That said, consider the following guidance, agnostic of products or services offered, to give you a funnel that keeps your sales pipeline ticking over.
Stage One: Awareness
The top of your funnel is where the competition is most rife. You’ll no doubt be competing with other brands in your sector, local area, or niche, and thus it proves exceptionally challenging to capture your audience’s attention and establish your expertise.
Using your assets like your website, Google Business Profile, social media channels, and other platforms, you should focus on making sure that they are optimized and can support your content strategy. Content is vital, especially at this stage.
The types of content to create should encompass written articles, guides and blog posts on popular topics, for example, “5 Common Pension Mistakes” or “How Rising Interest Rates Can Affect Your Property Investment Strategy”, along with real-world case studies of clients you’ve helped. Other types of content include digitized, branded brochures that have been converted from print (though we’re not suggesting print should be ignored), infographics that explain complex services or processes, and video content, which is particularly useful for the modern prospect.
As highlighted by industry experts, thoughtfully created video content captures audiences’ attention from the outset. Short, educational videos that address popular pain points and topical financial issues can help you attract your audience’s attention and foster engagement. Creating professional looking videos can be a challenge, but MPB’s video content creation guide is an excellent resource to help you get started, and is a key factor in determining whether people will watch your content for more than a few seconds.
Stage Two: Interest
Once you've captured their attention, the next crucial step is to qualify them as part of your target audience. This means offering them something of substantial value in exchange for their contact information, such as their email address, phone number, or profile details. This then adds them to your marketing contact list and means you can begin the process of nurturing.
The challenge is then creating viable lead magnets that convince people to complete your desired call-to-action (CTA). This could be signing up to your mailing list, filling in an enquiry form or requesting a call back. Lead capture forms allow you to make a personalized follow-up while helping you prioritize leads based on potential value.
These valuable assets help prospects find out more about you and, more importantly, what they want to discover. This can range from long-format evergreen guides that demonstrate your expertise to personalized quotations and a more comprehensive set of resources that demonstrate what you offer, and how it could look for your prospect.
Stage Three: Consideration
This stage of the funnel is all about building relationships and educating your prospect. They could sit at this stage for some time, perusing whether to act now or make a decision later, or receive alternative quotes, scour markets, and so on. There could be a wealth of factors at play.
The best thing you can do here is to maintain a rapport with your prospects, sending polite emails, providing them with valuable additional resources, or booking follow-up consultations while respecting their time and workloads. Recent research suggests that advisors who provide valuable, educational content see higher conversion rates than those who exclusively promote their services.
Whatever you send your prospect, the trick is to reinforce your expertise while gently encouraging them to engage deeper.
Stage Four: Evaluation and Conversion
As prospects move deeper beyond your funnel, personalization becomes more important. The goal shifts from delivering as much relevant, valuable educational information as possible to identifying specific problems and solutions. If a prospect is at this stage, they’ll be forthcoming about their intention to progress but perhaps highlight some obstacles, and it’s up to you to help them overcome these.
Instead of making this stage entirely focused on closing the sale, collaborate with your prospect and ensure there is a mutual level of understanding between you both. There should be clear expectations and action points following this stage, where you can really make a valuable impact on whether they choose to partner with you or not. Use this time to make feasible agreements and goals that, if your prospect chooses to become a client, you can both achieve.
Use this time to reinforce your planning process, communication style, fee structure, expected outcomes, and aspirations. If necessary, provide more case studies of similar clients, together with further proposals to emphasize how you will help them achieve their financial objectives.
Measuring Funnel Performance
While the above gives you a reliable framework on which to build, your funnel will only be as successful as you make it. It’s important to establish key metrics that you can use to benchmark what is deemed ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ about your funnel and so you can refine it accordingly.
Consider the metrics below for measurement:
- Conversion rates
- Number of calls, meetings or emails
- Deals created vs won
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Lifetime client value
- Average time to close
Consider leveraging user-friendly and sophisticated CRM systems and project management software to help you progress and manage leads while automating many of the routine, arduous follow-up administration involved. Consider also conducting regular funnel audits to identify bottlenecks and improvement opportunities. For instance, if conversion rates drop substantially between stages, review the content and processes at those transition points.
Remember that there is no such thing as a perfect sales funnel; it requires consistent attention and refinement, and no prospect will ever follow it as you would expect. Start by creating a funnel that’s easy to stick to, before expanding it with additional variations and stages. Tweak your processes and messaging accordingly based on what’s worked and establish a steady stream of conversions before attempting to scale.
Client needs always change, market conditions are always evolving, and new opportunities always emerge, and the most successful advisors will be ones who are willing to change and adapt while maintaining the core values and qualities of what they offer.
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