Financial advisors tend to have quite a lot on their plates: not only must you provide excellent investment management and financial planning to your existing clients, you need to constantly scour the globe for new clients to ensure you're able to stay in business in the long run.
If you work for a large advising firm, it's possible that you have a team to help you keep up with all of the varied tasks required to ensure you continue to enjoy success as a financial advisor.
Independent advisors, on the other hand, may find themselves trying to wear a few too many hats, and both their business and their personal life might suffer as a result.
While you won't be outsourcing investment management anytime soon (that is your main job as a financial advisor after all), there are many aspects of running a financial advising business that can be delegated to third parties.
Keep reading for a breakdown of all the tasks financial advisors might want to consider outsourcing in order to free time for the things that matter: providing the best financial advice to your clients without burning yourself out.
Marketing
If you have a professional-level understanding of the vast complexities of the current global financial system such that you are able to advise investment solutions that not only earn you the business of new clients, but help you keep your existing ones, it's unlikely that you also know the ins and outs of successful marketing.
And that's okay.
People spend their entire undergraduate career earning bachelor's degrees in marketing. Many move on and get advanced degrees on the subject.
So, if you try to do all of your own marketing, not only are you going to use up quite a lot of your time (basically your most valuable asset), but you probably won't do as good of a job as someone who's entire professional existence is dedicated to expertise in this subject specifically.
What's more, marketing experts can probably recommend strategies to boost your business' visibility you may not even be aware of. Here are a few marketing-specific tasks you might consider outsourcing in order to not only free up your own time, but help you reach more potential clients.
Prospecting
If your goal as an advisor is to help as many clients as possible understand the financial resources at their disposal so they can meet their investment objectives and retire on time (or even if you're just trying to run a successful business), you're going to need to find more clients somewhere.
For many advisors, this is the most frustrating and time consuming aspect of their business, requiring them to make dozens of phone calls per day, many of which end with their being hung up on.
If you've been an advisor for any amount of time, you've probably bought lead lists and then enjoyed hours of frustration and agony as you waded through the sickening bog of cold calling.
Outsourcing the task of acquiring new clients will not only save you an unbelievable amount of time, but it will eliminate one of the most soul-crushing aspects of financial advisors' business.
If you shed a tear at the mere mention of the phrase "lead lists" you should consider giving Planswell a shot. Our subscription service offers a prospecting solution like you've never seen before. Here's how it works:
- A household goes to our website to build a free financial plan (which our software does for them after they answer 40 questions about their financial situation and retirement goals).
- The household SMS validates their phone number in order to get access to their plan.
- As soon as their SMS validation is complete, we send their info, including their answers to our discovery questionnaire and their complete financial plan, to a Planswell expert advisor. (Each household is sent to ONE advisor only — no need to rush to the phones to be the first one of dozens to call.)
- The advisor calls their household with one of the best opening lines available: "I was taking a look at the plan you just built and can see a few opportunities to help you retire sooner with more money in the bank. Want to chat about it?"
Sound too good to be true? It's not. Just take a look at what some of our expert advisors have said about what Planswell did for their business.
Drip campaigns
A drip campaign is a series of emails sent to current or potential clients designed to nurture relationships and increase their engagement with — in the case of the financial advising world — the process of investment management of financial planning.
Developing and testing a successful drip campaign requires not only expert-level knowledge of the specific audience you're targeting and the marketing techniques likely to find success with that group, but also quite a lot of time.
While many drip campaigns are a series of emails sent to clients in a particular cadance regardless of client actions, truly excellent marketing email management involves drip campaigns that look more like trees: depending on how a potential client responds to an initial email with a specific call to action, one of several second emails are sent.
For example, an initial email might encourage clients to log back into their portal to check on the financial plan you built them. Two weeks later, those who logged in get a congratulatory email that then prompts them on opportunities to purchase additional products based on their specific situation (for example, “hey, we noticed you might be underinsured. Here are some products you should consider.”). Those who did not log back into the platform instead get a second email offering further encouragement to engage in the process of securing their financial future. And so on.
If you're an independent advisor, you do not have the time (and you probably don't have the knowledge) to design and test a successful email drip campaign. And yet, implementing one is proven to drive client engagement.
So, hiring a third party to create and manage a drip campaign is probably going to be worth every penny you spend doing so.
Want even more good news? With Planswell's Circle Automations, you won't have to hire someone at all. We've developed and tested our own proprietary drip campaign that integrates with our discovery process to keep households engaged, and we give it to all of our advising experts on subscription plans for free.
If you're not already working with Planswell, you might just want to give us a shot.
Content writing
Providing clients with helpful content to check out in their spare time can do a world of good for their engagement with and overall feelings towards your financial advisory firm. It not only demonstrates your investment in their financial literacy, but will drive their interest and investment in the process of achieving their financial goals.
But who has time to be writing a blog on top of all the other work financial advisors do to ensure successful investment management?
A large investment firm may have a dedicated content team whose sole job is to write blogs, produce videos, and engage clients. But you don't want to send your clients to a competitor's website, especially if they have more resources at their disposal.
Hiring a freelancer to write dedicated content for you may be affordable. If not, you can always lean on Planswell for help. We have a consumer-facing blog that publishes helpful content every week, and — even better — it's available for free.
Administrative Tasks
Financial advisors have a lot of paperwork. Lots of it you're going to have to do yourself to remain compliant with laws and regulations, but that doesn't mean you have to run your whole office alone.
Hiring someone to take care of clerical work around the office will not only save you time, but reduce the stress of running your business.
There are plenty of administrative tasks that an office manager would be able to take off your plate, which would free you up to do the important work of managing investments for your clients. Here's just a few of the most time consuming tasks an office manager could take care of for you:
Answer the phones
If you're doing marketing right, the phone in your office is going to be ringing throughout the day. Having to stop whatever you're doing to pick it up interrupts your workflow and wastes time.
Imagine what hours of uninterrupted work time would do for your productivity!
Book your meetings
Since you won't be outsourcing investment management, why not outsource booking meetings? An administrative assistant is perfectly capable of managing your calendar for you, which frees up even more of your time.
Plus, there's an added benefit to having someone else book your meetings for you: potential clients will think you are consistently busy enough that you need the extra help, which makes your services seem all the more desirable.
For financial advisors who can't quite afford a new hire, using an automated meeting-booking service like Calendly does a fairly good impression of having a real-live administrative assistant. You won't get the clout an assistant gives you, but it will take a lot of the organizational stress off your shoulders, and it makes it easier for clients too (which is always a plus).
Follow up with prospective clients
Booking the first meeting with a potential client is all well and good, but you really want to be booking a second meeting and earning their business. But how are you supposed to make calls to all your potential clients and follow up with every client you've had an initial meeting with on top of everything else?
Here's where hiring an administrative assistant can pay dividends in terms of the actual success of your business: a courtesy call from your office after an initial meeting just to check in and see how they're feeling about working with you. Not only will these calls give you valuable information about potential clients' experience, they'll act as an extra touchpoint for you to earn their business.
The Gist
We mentioned before that a financial advisor's most valuable asset is their time. You will always have more work than you can accomplish in your day, and an outsourced solution to an overfull schedule will not only increase the overall success of your business, but reduce your stress, improve your work-life balance, and prevent you from burning out.
If you haven't already, you should consider outsourcing the following aspects of your financial advising business:
- Marketing
- Prospecting
- Drip campaigns
- Content writing
- Administrative tasks
- Answering phones
- Booking meetings
- Following up with clients
At the end of the day, you want to set yourself up for a long and successful career as an advisor. You don't want to burn out or quit due to frustration, and the best way to ensure that doesn't happen is to lighten the load where you can.
Lucky for you, Planswell offers solutions to most of the pain points to do with marketing, client acquisition, and client engagement. (We can't answer your phones for you though...sorry!) We also have a whole slew of other perks our expert advisors can access for free, including our proprietary financial planning software, exclusive coaching opportunities, executive peer groups, and live webinar sessions designed to help you improve your practice.
If you aren't already working with Planswell, it only makes sense to check us out. After all, it's free to try!
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