While many wealth management firms are using technology solutions and standard processes to manage their prospecting and proposal generation functions; many gaps still cause firms to lose new business. Closing these gaps by enabling technology to track business development activities; monitor prospect attrition; and engage audiences through marketing automation would drive significant revenue increases for these firms. Below are four trends that came out of F2 Strategy’s recent research with more than 30 firms on this topic.
TREND 1
75% of Firms Have Standard Prospecting Process in Place
Insights and Actionable Intel
- A standard process/centralized marketing and business development team removes variances
- Often it is the executive team that requests automation
- For many firms without a standard process, advisors’ strong opposition to business development processes or support is the main reason
- Take Action: Standard processes can be helpful for understanding where a prospect falls off, but in some firm cultures, standardization does not fit in
TREND 2
Only 65% of Firms Track Business Development Activities in CRM
Insights and Actionable Intel
- More than a third of firms are not tracking their pipeline activities
- More than half (52%) of wealth management firms don’t know their lead-to-close rate
- Nearly half (48%) of wealth management firms don’t know how long it takes them to move a lead to a client
- Take Action: Tracking is an opportunity to accelerate sales growth. Metrics are useful to make improvements and use technology better.
TREND 3
Firms Find Tracking Prospect Attrition Highly Challenging
Insights and Actionable Intel
- Non-Client Conversion Ratio - percentage of individuals that receive paperwork and don’t complete it and don’t become clients
- Client Process Abandonment Ratio - percentage of individuals that open accounts and do not fund them within 12 months
- Client Transfer Viscosity Ratio - percentage of firms that open and fund accounts, but with lower than 75% of the expected/committed assets
- Many wealth management firms say this data is hard to mine because it is held within free-form fields or they would need to cross reference multiple systems
- Take Action: Measuring prospect attrition is an industry priority because understanding it and slowing the asset leak can mean big potential gains. For example, if an average $1B firm with a 20% growth rate doesn’t have 2% of 200M doesn’t come in, closing that gap can result in significant growth in annual fee revenue.
TREND 4
Over Half of Firms Don’t Use Marketing Automation Tools
Insights and Actionable Intel
- Firm size does not play a role in adoption of marketing automation tools
- The fastest growing firms are using wealth management SEO to a significant advantage
- Take Action: Focusing on marketing automation is likely to lead to significant revenue improvement
Survey Information: The data in this report is pulled from a survey conducted by F2 Strategy in March 2022. The survey includes responses from 30 leading RIA, Wealth Management and Broker/Dealer firms representing $4 trillion in assets.
