As a financial advisor, you must focus on serving and communicating with clients.
However, it’s challenging to do this manually. Especially when you’re covering all sorts of tasks:
- Bespoke financial planning: personalized financial advice that’s oriented around five specific focus areas. (1.) where they are now, (2.) what they have to work with, (3.) what they need, (4.) where they want to go, and (5.) who they need to get there.
- Wealth building: helping clients or prospective clients increase their wealth consistently over time. If they’re like most people, they expect you to beat the market, producing above-average returns.
- Wealth preservation: clients want you to follow rule one—don’t lose money. They expect you to have the depth of knowledge needed to manage and grow an investment portfolio while also minimizing risk.
- Tax planning and optimization: if you let them, the tax office will take as much as they can from your clients. Your clients want to see that you have lots of options available to minimize their tax basis legally.
- Estate planning: what happens when it’s time for your clients to transfer their wealth to their family members? Your clients want to maximize contributions to family and minimize contributions to the government.
- Comprehensive financial services: clients may need detailed and personalized advice across a variety of services, including—insurance, retirement, charitable and philanthropic endeavors, and family governance.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to nurturing current clients and prospecting new ones, you can lean on lead management tools. Here’s a short list of the key lead management solutions to help generate, nurture, and close leads.
- CRM software
- Landing page builder
- Email marketing tool
- Social media tool
- Webinar tool
1. Pipeline: Best CRM Software for Professional Services — Financial Advisors
Pipeline CRM is designed with financial advisors in mind. The tool enables account customization, such as adding unique properties to contacts, changing deal step names, creating multiple sales pipelines, and automating admin.
Features
- Custom deal stages to match the unique workflow of your financial services practice
- Complete A to Z sales pipeline management software
- Commissions, payouts, and incentive tracking for the unique mix of financial products you offer in your practice
- Create, track, and manage your email (broadcast and autoresponder) campaigns via your account
- Seamless integration with the applications and tools you’re already using in your practice
- Automation to automate next steps, activities, reminders, updates, etc.
- A complete record of the relationship lifecycle
- Smart agendas automatically build themselves as your team works, so everyone in your firm knows what needs to be done for each client or deal
- SuperShare sends data to clients privately and securely
- Open-source APIs to integrate with anything and everything you’re already using
- Native integration with tools like Zapier to customize integrations without developer or IT assistance
Why CRM Software for Professional Services is a Must
Use your CRM software to collect everything—all the data and resources your customers need to make informed decisions. Use this tool to feed relevant information back to clients when it’s contextually appropriate.
With CRM software, you get:
- A centralized location for client data
- An ongoing record of the relationship, including client interactions, research, reports, and results
- Conversion data—why clients avoid or choose your financial services
- Clear guidance from clients on their desires, goals, fears, frustrations, and expectations
- Actionable intel when mistakes are made, i.e., your client is angry that they can’t transfer assets without losing a considerable amount to taxes
- Sales, task, and workflow automation, focusing your advisors on high conversion activities (e.g., meetings, webinars, events, etc.)
- The Intel you need to increase leads, sales, and commissions year-over-year. Know which parts of your marketing are working and why
Customer Reviews
- 4.4/5 star rating on G2 (928 reviews total)
- 4.4/5 star rating on Capterra (621 reviews total)
- 9.8/10 score via TrustRadius (18 total)
- 4.3/5 star rating via Gartner (41 reviews total)
Pricing
- Start plan: $29 per user per month
- Develop plan: $39 per user per month
- Grow plan: $59 per user per month
2. Marcom Robot Page Pro: Best Landing Page Builder for Financial Services
Do you really need a landing page builder? Absolutely. If you’re looking to maximize lead quality for your financial services firm, you’ll need a landing page builder that provides you with answers to the questions you need.
What sort of questions?
- Who’s your ideal client?
- What channel produces the highest quality leads? The most profit?
- Which channel generates the greatest volume of leads at the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA)?
- Paid advertising or organic search: which one produces the most profit?
- Where do our most unpleasant clients, the people we want to avoid, come from?
- Which offers increase sales, commissions, and conversions?
- What do your clients need to know to accept your offer?
- Which RICE (reward, ideology, coercion, ego) motivator is most effective?
- Which financial products lead to more upselling, downselling, or cross-selling opportunities?
- Which offers repel clients?
To add, it eliminates bureaucracy and dependence on IT when you have a landing page builder.
Features
- Create landing pages on domains you control to maintain ad scent, improve trust, and boost conversion rates
- Use heatmaps to see which images, headlines, content, and offers make the biggest impact on prospects
- Use page load optimization to test your landing page load speeds and performance before increasing ad spend
- Add essential scripts—Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Adobe Analytics, and other scripts to landing pages without developer or IT assistance
- Launch A/B split tests in a few clicks. Monitor the page and offer performance in real-time so you can identify winning patterns
- Team collaborations on landing pages that are governed by user rights, roles, and permissions
Why You Need Landing Page Builders
- Sales and marketing speed: your team can conceive and create offers in minutes. Address changes in the market instantly. Create and promote offers that capitalize on major and minor shifts in the market or generational trends (i.e., retirees, divorces, recessions, etc.)
- Build professional, highly effective landing pages without coding knowledge
- Instantly verify lead data (i.e., email addresses) via contact validation and lead enrichment
- Immediate integration with the essential tools you’re already using via direct integration or third-party platforms like Zapier
- Centralized data management: your CRM, email, landing page, social media, lead nurturing, and presentation tools all share and sync your data. This eliminates double-entry and data-entry mistakes
- Test, optimize, and update offers based on results from previous experiments
Customer Reviews
- 4.7/5 star rating on AppSumo (22 reviews total)
- 5/5 star rating on G2 (10 reviews total)
- 5/5 star rating on Product Hunt (8 reviews total)
Pricing
- Free forever plan
- Essential: $29 per month
- Standard: $69 per month
- Professional: $99 per month
3. Mailchimp: Best Email Marketing Sales Automation Tool for Independent Financial Advisors
Financial services are built on relationships.
With Mailchimp, you’re able to build strong, stable, and profitable relationships with your clients at scale. You can create a two-way conversation with prospects who are interested but not yet ready to buy. You can warm these prospects up, nurturing each lead so you’re ready to close when they’re ready to buy.
Features
- SMS marketing enables you to reach your prospects on every device
- Website and landing page builders: design a website easily
- Email builder: create impactful emails
- Customer journey builder: automate your campaigns
- Dynamic content: automatically personalize emails
- Generative AI: instantly create unique copy
- Email templates: design emails in less time
- Predictive demographics: Build personalized campaigns
- Tags and customer profiles: sort your audience
- Retargeting ads: instantly retarget visitors
- Transactional emails: respond to customer interactions
- Webhooks: automate using your tools
- Send time optimization: know when to send your emails
Why You Need Email Marketing Sales Automation
Do you remember the 3% rule?
The 3% rule states that 97% of your prospective clients are not ready to buy.
Here’s how this breaks down for clients who are in the market for your financial services
- 3% of these clients are active buyers: your financial advisors should spend most of their time with these prospects. These prospects are interested and ready to move forward. Direct, 1-on-1 engagement with these clients is essential.
- 7% of these clients want to make a change: they’re not quite ready to move forward with your firm. Maybe they’re still in the research phase; they could be working to cut ties with their previous firm. Your financial advisors should nurture these leads; this means automated and semi-automated follow-up until these prospects earn their place on the 3% list.
- 30% of these clients have a need, but they’re not ready to act: these prospects need long-term nurturing. They need consistent content that’s value-driven; as we’ve seen, value is created when problems are resolved. This isn’t the time for sales pitches; your primary focus should be education.
- 60% who don’t have a need or are not interested: these prospects should be added to your do-not-disturb list if they show infrequent engagement or removed from your list if they’re completely disinterested. This list includes mismatched clients or disgruntled clients, competitors, suppliers, and pundits.
Your email sales automation tools should be focused on the 40% of prospects (3%, 7%, 30%) who are interested in the services you have to offer. With email sales automation tools, you can gauge your prospect’s interest level message by message.
Customer Reviews
- 4.3/5 star rating on G2 (12,410 reviews total)
- 4.5/5 star rating on Capterra (16.8k reviews total)
- 4.5/5 star rating on GetApp (16.8k reviews total)
- 9.8/10 score via TrustRadius (2,595 total)
- 4.3/5 star rating via Gartner (1,120 reviews total)
Pricing
- Free forever plan
- Essentials: $13 per month
- Standard: $20 per month
- Premium: $350 per month
4. Sendible: Scalable Social Media Management for Financial Services
Clients want communication on their terms.
This means you’re expected to meet prospects, clients—everyone else where they are.
With Sendible, you can manage scalable social media campaigns in a way that makes sense to your clients.
The better your reputation, the cheaper (and easier) it is to generate leads.
Features
- Plan and schedule multi-image posts, Stories, Reels, and regular videos to Facebook Pages and Groups
- Add alt text to images to improve accessibility
- Geotag locations and add first comments with hashtags to increase discoverability
- Monitor and respond to comments and get insights into your best posts
Schedule engaging updates to personal profiles and company pages with hashtags and mentions to further your reach - Plan ahead and schedule tweets with links, photos, and videos, complete with hashtags, to increase your impressions.
- Improve discoverability by sharing/posting content at the best time
- Draft or directly schedule videos to your YouTube channel as well as YouTube Shorts
- Schedule regular updates on what’s new with the best CTA to generate more interest for the brands you represent
- Automatically schedule and publish videos to TikTok Business and Personal accounts
- Respond to comments on your videos and get quick insights into audience behavior with average view duration, new views, and new subscribers
Why You Need Social Media Management
Whether you’re an independent offering financial services, a small boutique, or a large conglomerate, social media is an integral part of generating leads. Take a look at how social media impacts your lead-generation strategies.
- Responding positively to negative reviews limits the damage done to your online reputation
- Negative responses to negative reviews amplify the damage
- Reviews, testimonials, and feedback can be used to amplify leads generated
- Support teams responding favorably to unhappy customers improve the revenue your company will earn
- Negative sentiment increases your cost per acquisition (CPA), decreasing the leads you generate
- Positive sentiment decreases CPA, reducing the overall cost of your marketing and increasing the number of leads you’re able to generate over time
- Carefully curated content can generate leads for your financial services firm, but it can also help you close the sale
Customer Reviews
- 4.5/5 star rating on G2 (864 reviews total)
- 4.6/5 star rating on Capterra (130 reviews total)
- 4.5/5 star rating on GetApp (130 reviews total)
- 9.2/10 score via TrustRadius (2,595 total)
Pricing
- Creator: $29 per month
- Traction: $89 per month
- White label: $399 per month
- White label+: $750 per month
5. WebinarKit: Best Webinar Tool for Small-to-Medium Financial Service Providers
As a financial advisor, hosting webinars is a great way to share value. You put your knowledge, experience, and expertise to work. It’s your chance to show prospects how to solve the issues, keeping them up at night.
- Will my nest egg be safe?
- I recently started investing; is it too late to reach my financial goals?
- Can my investments outpace inflation?
- What will happen to my business, investments, and cash reserves if the economy goes belly up?
- How can I transfer my wealth without losing most of it to taxes?
- How do I go about earning above-average returns on my investment year-over-year?
- How do I adjust to market volatility?
- How can I prepare for unforeseen events like job loss, illness, or divorce?
- How can I avoid being misled by financial advisors?
- I’m losing my hard-earned money. How can I stop the bleeding and ensure I have enough for retirement?
With WebinarKit, you have an on-demand platform you can use to attract, manage, and close leads. The best part about each of these tools? WebinarKit integrates with every other lead management tool I’ve mentioned so far.
Features
- One-click registrations
- Webinar funnel builder
- Customize each part of the webinar funnel
- Unlimited webinars, attendees, and registrants
- Create automated, evergreen, just-in-time webinars
- All pages hosted on WebinarKit’s servers
- Browser based in HD quality
- Schedule your webinar for a specific time and date
- Password protect events
- Advanced remarketing segmentation
- Run multi-day events with a webinar series
- Lifetime pricing via a one-time payment
Why You Need a Webinar Tool for Lead Management
- Lead generation: you can use webinars to trade education for contact information
- Lead qualification: you can use a variety of methods to qualify leads during the webinar, including (name, engagement, questions asked, and interest
- Nurture leads: you can segment and follow up with prospects after the webinar. A separate bucket for those who are interested in your offer and the leads that need to be nurtured
- Webinar analytics: WebinarKit is web-based; this means it’s easier to track attendees, monitor engagement, and refine your product offers
Customer Reviews
- 4.8/5 star rating on G2 (211 reviews total)
Pricing
- $49 per month
- $197 annually
- $397 One-time/lifetime payment
Show Clients the Value of Your Professional Services
As we’ve seen, lead management is all about showing clients the value of your professional service. Educate your clients; focus your attention on providing them with the knowledge, data, and support they need to make informed decisions. This is challenging to do manually, so use these lead management tools to meet and exceed expectations.
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