When looking to attract financial advisors or acquire a practice, recruiting companies tend to set lofty goals. But to reach those goals, it’s critical to take the necessary preparative steps to ensure you’re ready when an opportunity presents itself. It’s natural to set optimistic goals for your business, but unless the hard work gets done beforehand, things will melt down faster than a snowball on the 4th of July.
Completing these necessary steps before starting conversations with advisors will drastically improve your chances of reaching a successful outcome.
Consider these 7 helpful resources to improve your chances of acquiring a "good-fit" practice or adding more productive advisors to your team.
1. Self Discovery Materials
When an advisor is unhappy in their current situation, what’s the first thing they’ll likely do about it? Spoiler alert, it isn’t picking up the phone to call you. People start searching out new opportunities online and end up filtering through an array of different options. Make sure your practice is easy to find online, and make your website more than just a brochure. Your website should showcase the culture of the practice, the story behind your business, and what you offer advisors that other firms don’t. Lastly, your website should be set up to include a “digital recruiting funnel” – complete with articles, videos, and calls to action specific to the types of advisors you are looking to attract. These marketing assets are invaluable in helping to persuade potential advisors to take a next step.
2. The Right Questions
Before meeting with a prospective advisor interested in joining your team, take the time to determine what you need to know about someone to make an informed decision of whether they’re a good fit for your business. It’s ok to start with small talk, but make sure to hit on important points and topics during your conversations to avoid meeting with someone several times without making any real progress. Equally important is asking the uncomfortable questions to get someone out of their comfort zone and into an open state of mind. For instance:
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- What happens to your business if you’re still in the same spot 5 years from now?
- Are you with the firm you plan to retire from?
- What would you need to hear to get excited about joining a new firm?
Quick Tip
If you struggle to verbalize these questions during a meeting, send your follow up questions electronically for the advisor to complete, and use the answers to build the agenda for your follow-up meeting.
3. Take Home Resources
Coming out of a meeting, what’s the one thing that always comes up later that night? The advisor talks with their loved ones about what they discussed that day during the meeting. This can be a make or break moment where moving forward either receives approval, or fails to happen. If you can provide people with materials about your business, what you can offer them, and why they should join you, then you’re more likely to receive the approval you need to continue pressing forward. Working with the right marketing team can help you put these tactics in place to position your brand how it deserves to be seen. Take a look at our article 8 Steps to Recruit Right Fit Advisors to Join Your Practice.
4. Using The Cloud To Stay Organized
Ask for permission to connect with your prospective advisor online as a way to stay on top of questions and provide timely answers. Oftentimes advisors try to manage the recruiting process using email and text messages. This can result in endless back and forth, the same questions being asked multiple times, and often things get missed. Using the right system will keep your progress on track, improve responsiveness, and allow for easier follow up. If you’re curious about how to implement a digitally organized approach to recruiting contact us to chat. We’re happy to demo the project management software and video communication app that we leverage to stay organized and collaborate internally.5. Design Contracts & Offers Beforehand
Imagine if you went online to research buying a car or purchasing a new home. After consumers narrow in on the make and model of a vehicle, consumers start to look at the characteristics, they design the features of the car, and then a price to purchase displays on screen. Pretty slick. Although this isn’t exactly what prospective advisors seeking to join your team should be able to do, it does raise the question, what features are you looking to offer someone? This is where work needs to be done beforehand, and trust me, very few practices invest time in this before an opportunity presents itself. Guess what happens? Conversations stall because the practice has to do all this work behind the scene, people get distracted, and next steps fail to come to fruition. Here are our favorite partners to help develop contracts and templates to design offers for advisors to join your practice.6. Visual Follow Up
The handwritten thank-you note is great and all but have you ever received a thank you video? Have you ever had someone reach out to you in the form of a thoughtful recording that mentions you by name? It takes time, well really not that much, but it’s worthwhile in our opinion. It’s also not a bad way to get things done with your team either. The next time you want to make an introduction, or follow up with someone you recently met, try leveraging a 1:1 video using Soapbox by Wistia, Loom, or Vidyard. Also, check out our tips for creating an effective message that will resonate with your audience.7. Get To Know Everybody Dinner
Yes the theme for 2020 is business gone digital with everything getting done electronically. But pump the breaks for a second. Remember it’s still important to take the time to break bread not only with the advisor exploring a move to join your firm, but also the people in that person’s trusted inner circle. This might include their spouse, close friend, child, whomever the advisor leans on for making big decisions. The longer we’re in this industry the more we realize the business is more than just about the advisor, the work you do also affects the entire family around you. So remember to get the rest of the family’s support, as this decision impacts them, too.To discuss your recruiting needs and how to appropriately plan for bringing advisors or practices to your firm, set up a meeting with us.
