February 5, 2019

3 Steps for Financial Advisors to Scale Beyond 100!

Shailendra Kumar

Co-founder - FinAtoZ.com

3 Steps for Financial Advisors to Scale Beyond 100!

We often see that, even with the best of staff and the best of processes in place, scaling beyond 100 customers may be a challenging task. This is so, because, your resources will be scattered to find the solutions for all possible financial problems of all types of customers. Hence it is imperative to restrict your focus. This can be achieved by: –

1) Creating well cut out segments: Segment is a set of customers having similar needs. One can segment the market in several ways. Some of them are listed below.

a. Based on Family life cycle: – Just started working, recently married, middle age, near retirement / retired.

b. Exceptional scenarios: US/UK returned, having a child with special needs, recently divorced, Having ESOPs of good value, NRIs etc.

c. Based on the profession: Army people, IT Professionals, Doctors, Business people etc.

2) Choosing a viable segment:

a. Track your lead source: From where you are getting these customers. (Online, Offline, Referrals). Decide based on the cost of acquisition of customer on each lead source.

b. Analyse your patterns of conversion ratios: Conversion ratio = (Total customers) / (Total Leads). Use this in combination with lead source.

c. Which customers perceive greater value in your advice: This can be gauged by several factors. I) The quality of interactions in customer review meetings, II) The number of referrals they give to you, III) The number of customers connect events they attend.

d. Which is the type of customers you want to serve: Obviously they should be profitable for you. Secondly, I personally feel stick to those, who religiously follow your advice. And put their trust in you rather than those, who always need the push to act on your advice.

3) Projecting your core value to the chosen segment:

a. Your website is crucial which should psycho-graphically speak to your customer and he/she should be able to identify with the problems and the solutions that you have showcased.

b. Arrange your IAPs (investor awareness programmes) in apartments and offices where you already have your customers. This helps you to win the trust of your leads easily. For eg: – Stating Mr. Ashok of A2-504 of your apartment is already our customer, puts you into more credible space.

c. Configure your CRM to send automated mailers which are tailor-made for this audience.

d. Have both textual and video testimonials of your clients on your site. Do ensure that the testimonials cover the exact benefit which your customers have experienced when they engaged with your services.

e. Post your blogs and other relevant curated content on LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. Use IFTTT tool to automatically tweet and do Facebook post, if you post something on your LinkedIn.

To sum up become a brand in the chosen segment and don’t worry if you think you are in a very niche space. You can always replicate these strategies on a higher level as per your comfort and can tweak them to suit your target segment. Consistent low-cost acquisition of the new client within the chosen segment is the key to make it big.