Advisor marketing and engagement strategies, like many things in financial services today, are becoming transformative. As a defining example, White Glove, a Michigan-based financial advisor marketing firm, characterizes itself as specializing in turnkey client acquisition and engagement services. The firm’s inception was driven by a dynamic trio of advisors and entrepreneurs – Dean and Michael Thurman of InvestWise Financial, joined by their dedicated business partner, Jeff Grail. Mike and Dean distinguished themselves and their firm by successfully building their book of business through hosting educational workshops. This foundation paved the way for the evolution of their approach into a finely honed, comprehensive, and effective community engagement strategy, turning workshops into a lead generation system and closing process.
Their recent 8th annual Host University in Detroit was a masterclass on positioning advisors in a new light with their community audience. What really resonated with me was the depth and range of the topics covered that illustrated how to combine technology with the art of human connection and transform that all into a comprehensive attract – connect – engage – close – retention business-building process with ROI squarely in mind.
The predominantly peer-to-peer education at Host U was reinforced with expert financial solutions providers that provided key tactical approaches and powerful informational content at every stage of a masterfully designed end-to-end, prospect attraction through client retention roadmap. The overall emphasis though was not just on the patented tools, educational resources, and the development of new skill sets, but on the sleek, authentic delivery of the advisor’s value proposition.
Host University is clearly the cornerstone of White Glove’s advisor educational offerings, where they cover topics at every step and stage of their advisor roadmap, not leaving anything to chance and building it into a rock-solid, repeatable process and a shining tribute to the concept of ROI.
These are highlights from each of the sessions outlining the sequential steps of their community engagement process:
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Attracting an Audience – White Glove has mastered the science of using the internet and social media tools to find high quality, prospective investors actively searching online for guidance on financial topics. Advisors just need to give them zip codes of areas they want to engage; either key local neighborhoods or areas they want to virtually engage through online educational webinars. Through studying search patterns, White Glove has learned how to attract various learner demographics with the right core topics and has developed engaging educational workshop presentations and invitations to topics including Taxes in Retirement, Estate Planning, College Planning, Social Security, and Medicare.
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Workshop Power Moves – Master presenter and White Glove Coach, Frank Maselli of the Maselli Group, illustrated how to nail your power openings and closings at each workshop with his top recommended techniques to easily double your appointment rates.
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Building Trust - Diana Cabrices of Wealthtender emphasized that studies have proven that 70% of decisions are based on emotions and offered 3 key ways financial advisors can improve communications and engage HNW prospects to build trust: 1.) build digital “street credibility” with easy to be found and easy to consume information about and by you since they will search the internet to research you before they consent to come to your session; 2.) use trust-building language which basically is jargonless, simplified, in terms that they can relate to; 3.) the fortune is in the follow-up as 80% of advisors give up after the fourth try so use an automated, consistent, engaging follow-up system to nurture every lead beyond what other advisors are doing.
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Creating Effective Calls to Action – While providing your audience with quality information and answering some of their most common questions, your goal in hosting workshops is to connect with your audience and get the attendees to book a meeting with you. The most effective calls to action that drive attendees to sign up were shared by leading advisor workshop hosts.
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After the Event Extreme Follow-up – The workshop you host is the tip of the iceberg. Some attendees will set appointments, some will show up for the appointment, and some will become clients. But each and every registrant and attendee scenario needs to have a follow-up system executed by the advisor to maximize a return on investment on those prospects: How can you get clients from people who did not even show up to your workshop or online webinar? How often do you email your registrants and attendees? How many calls? Texts? And what should you say? How do you keep in touch with your leads and prospects and, over time, compel them to book an appointment without being too salesy? Many advisors shared how developing and adhering to follow-up systems resulted in winning some of their biggest clients a year or two after their events by continuing to provide value through strategic content marketing and waiting till the HNW prospects were ready to make a move.
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Mastering the Pivot from Educator to Advisor – After you have given your time to your community, providing extremely valuable education on complex financial topics through your workshops, let’s say you got half the room to sign up to meet with you one-on-one. How then, do you close on your value proposition? This was a very insightful discussion by the most successful advisor hosts at the session on the best way they have been able to pivot from being the subject matter expert of a workshop to the person who is best suited to manage a prospect’s wealth.
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Converting a Prospect into a Client – Multiple sessions explored how to address high-net-worth prospects that today are demanding more from their advisors than being able to beat the S&P:
Neil Wilding of Stonewood Financial emphasized developing specialized knowledge in intensely relevant topics to HNW investors, like the rising tax risks in retirement due to “legislative” risk. The key is to learn how to clarify and simplify these complex financial topics with the aid of “conversion tools” like software, visuals, guides, educational programs, and a “Total Tax Burden Analysis” tool he has built for advisors. Incorporating these topics in an educational way into your follow-up meetings and many other touchpoints like drip emails builds connection and increases conversion rates.
Dean Thurman of White Glove discussed another intensely relevant topic that attracts and converts HNW individuals - estate planning. He explained how they developed their educational presentation on the topic with the advisor in the role of an overall strategist, being mindful of financial planning techniques and approaches that apply versus the estate planning attorney’s role that is in charge of the documents and legal structures.
While many advisors were initially leery of presenting on this topic for fear of not having the knowledge and being asked questions they could not answer, the slides have been mapped out to easily share the facts and approaches that really represent the financial planning process and strategies that can be delivered by any advisor once they had all the facts and presentation materials to share with prospects. He mentioned that advisors who have been using their Estate Planning educational workshops, both in person or virtually, have been having their best success in attendance and conversion rates.
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The Lifetime Value of a Client – This session addressed questions like: How can you make sure you are getting the best value for the marketing dollars you spend? A top advisor shared his work on determining the lifetime value of a client. He covered how to track your performance metrics, prioritize lead sources, get more referrals, and leverage “the butterfly effect.” This puts some serious context on learning what to expect from the leads you convert to clients.
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The Referral Blueprint – Encore performance by Frank Masselli that addressed how getting referrals is probably the biggest skill gap in the industry as it relies on basic techniques developed 75 years ago under the “Willy Loman playbook”. He walked through 10 new strategies based on client psychology and the subject of his book, Referrals the Professional Way.
As mentioned previously, Host University also strategically brought in carefully chosen financial solutions providers as industry partners for advisors that provide essential tools, processes, and services at different touch points throughout this prospect/client and advisor journey above. Through two panels - New Ideas to Deepen the Relationship in Client Meetings and From Conversations to Conversions: Partner Panel - they shared ideas and hacks to help advisors move from “nice to meet you” to “nice doing business with you” and reported on what they are seeing that advisors are having the most success with. They covered conversations around taxes in retirement, demonstrating thought leadership, the effectiveness of offering visual financial planning engagement, remaining top of mind with your prospects and clients, financial simplicity through “bucket planning”, and other most effective topics, tools, and techniques for building and expanding relationships.
White Glove’s Resource Partners at Host U and their value-add to advisors included:
Asset-Map – advisor-client advice visualization and engagement platform that proactively identifies and communicates potential financial planning disruptions.
Clarity2Prosperity – a holistic wealth and retirement planning advisor training and coaching firm and authors of the book, The Bucket Plan.
NAIFA – National Trade Association for insurance and financial advisors supporting a wide range of complex areas of financial wellness and social programs around estate planning, retirement planning, special needs, addiction, health care, seniors, and employee benefits.
Nitrogen – a comprehensive client engagement platform for wealth management firms supporting lead generation, risk tolerance, and proposal engine for reframing client expectations.
Proudmouth – a done-with-you podcasting service provider and leading advisor influence accelerator.
ReminderMedia – a relationship marketing and nurturing specialist providing high-quality advisor-branded magazines and community engagement strategies.
Stonewood Financial – provides advisors with sophisticated life insurance solutions through marketing programs, coaching, and software to grow their practice.
Three Crowns – providing custom advisor websites and branding support.
Wealthtender – Industry’s first SEC-compliant online reviews website and testimonial marketing platform for advisors.
Key Takeaway: White Glove’s Host University put a spotlight on many of the critical skill sets and purposeful business strategies needed to thrive in the hyper-competitive and rapidly changing financial services landscape. Make no mistake that the quest for becoming a true “trusted advisor” and a recognized beacon of financial and family wellness advice for your greater community requires more than relying on one’s sparkling personality and serendipity. It should be looked at as a distinct business model that requires purposeful construction and a determined mindset to actualize it.
This business model requires a well-thought-out community engagement strategy, becoming conscious and deliberate on how and what you communicate, the discipline of being rooted in process and systems, and having a keen empathetic awareness of client psychology and emotions.
What impressed me the most about Host U is that it was driven from a sincere place of serving your clients and the greater community that you serve, of learning how to live your value proposition, of driving your personal and professional development towards always learning and honing how to best connect, engage, and bring value to your community.
I see it as a further indication of the growing maturity of the financial services industry into a welcomed, trusted profession. One that is morphing from a sales industry to a singular profession with a unique, comprehensive set of skills that delivers an extremely competitive, immeasurably consequential, and intensely relevant client value proposition.
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