The Wealth Manager's Guide to Advisor Enablement
As with every industry, it’s a highly effective way of making it easier for teams to collaborate on creating highly personalized content that drives meaningful business outcomes. In wealth management’s case, those teams consist of advisors on the one hand, and marketers, junior analysts, and support staff on the other. But before we get into all of that, let’s take a step back to define exactly what sales enablement is and why it’s so important.
You’ve probably heard of sales enablement, but have you ever stopped to think about how it applies to wealth management?
Introduction
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The Definition
Advisor Enablement & Content
In fact, according to HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound report...
Sales enablement is a growing field and a major priority for global firms.
of organizations consider sales enablement to be their top marketing priority over the next 12 months
of organizations consider sales enablement an overrated marketing tactic
37%
3%
While data points like these illustrate the fact that organizations are increasingly focused on sales enablement, they don’t explain why that’s the case. To understand that, look at the results you can get by deploying a sales enablement strategy.
Organizations that implement sales enablement solutions typically see:
350%
275%
65%
Increase in content usage
Boost in conversions
Uptick in revenue generated by new reps
Not only that, Aberdeen has found that organizations with a sales enablement platform experience a 13.7 percent annual increase in deal size. In the wealth management industry specifically, we’ve seen financial institutions use sales enablement— or what we like to refer to as
Advisor Enablement
—to create pitch books 83 percent faster. Meanwhile, others have used it to free up capacity so that they could develop hundreds of additional investment plans representing millions of potential new assets. Results like these can be game-changing and underscore why taking the time to learn more about advisor enablement and all that it entails is worthwhile.
This guide to advisor enablement is going to provide you with everything you need to know about this emerging field. That includes how the term is defined; the ways in which sales enablement improves content creation, storage, and retrieval; how it increases sales and marketing alignment; and how smart sales enablement platforms can unlock previously unknown insights resulting in smarter decisions and better business outcomes. Ready to learn more about the cross-firm value that advisor enablement can bring to wealth management? Let’s take a look at how we define advisor enablement, what it entails, and the value it can bring to a firm like yours.
Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system."
That’s because it means something different to every organization, and even to the individuals within that organization. And yet at the center of every advisor enablement strategy there’s a common goal of improving sales productivity by helping advisors sell better, faster, and smarter.
If you ask ten people to define advisor enablement, you’ll get ten different answers.
Click here for a few definitions of sales enablement (advisor enablement’s cousin) to help illustrate its impact on organizations as a strategic initiative.
FORRESTER
Defining advisor enablement — or finding the definition that clearly fits your firm’s goals — may be easier if we start with what it is not.
The job of sales enablement is to ensure that salespeople possess the skills, knowledge, assets, and processes to maximize every buyer interaction."
SIRIUSDECISIONS
Sales force enablement is a strategic, cross-functional discipline, designed to increase sales results and productivity, by providing integrated content, training and coaching services, for salespeople and frontline sales managers, along the entire customer’s journey, powered by technology."
CSO INSIGHTS
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Sales enablement is the activities, systems, processes and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with client and prospects."
GARTNER
There’s a residual misconception that advisor enablement is just training rebranded. While sales training can be included as a component of advisor enablement, the scope of advisor enablement reaches much further than initial training and onboarding. It also includes advisor content management and delivery, hiring and coaching, opportunity management, and delivering the right content and tools to wealth managers.
Advisor enablement is not training.
Unlike sales training, advisor enablement is an ongoing process that can’t be covered or mastered in a single meeting, kickoff session, or breakout group.
Advisor enablement is not a check on an advisor kickoff to-do list.
Advisor enablement requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality, where buy-in from individual advisors is just as imperative as support from the C-suite. It’s an ongoing, strategic initiative that you can’t solve with a single training session, tool, person, or meeting.
Advisor enablement is not solved by a tool or a single person.
Simply put, advisor enablement is the process through which traditional barriers are removed between advisors and the people who support their marketing efforts. It improves the entire content process, increases collaboration, enhances alignment, and unlocks insights that lead to better-informed business decisions. These initiatives are often accomplished through numerous internal stakeholders, a concerted strategy and process for execution, and a technological solution that provides users with the tools necessary to be successful.
Click to Cycle
Content is the lifeblood of any global, enterprise organization. Financial institutions are no exception.
Advisor Enablement and Content
Without content to support their conversations, advisors would be reduced to sitting in a room and talking with investors about the weather. And while that might make for a lovely afternoon, it’s not exactly conducive to converting those investors into paying clients. Conversely, without content, marketing ceases to exist.
Of course, content has many different definitions and can take a variety of forms. A presentation given to a room full of investors is content. A one-pager left behind after a meeting with a high-net-worth individual is content. A follow-up email containing information about potential investment options is content. So too are the custom reports you create for each of your client review meetings, as well as all of the collateral and educational materials you use to onboard new clients and answer their questions.
What’s the purpose of all of this content?
It’s to create a positive experience for your clients and prospects by imparting useful, actionable knowledge. The reality is that content is designed to attract potential clients to your organization and then shepherd them along each stage of their journey by creating a sense of familiarity, teaching them what they need to know, and building trust in the process. Content is an incredibly effective way to generate interest, both in terms of efficacy of driving leads as well as cost-effectiveness.
In fact, DemandMetric has found that content activities cost 62 percent less than other traditional marketing tactics. And, content doesn’t just cost less than other activities, it provides more for the investment. The same report found “[per] dollar spent, content generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.” Now that we have a clear idea of why content is so important, let’s look at how advisor enablement affects content storage, findability, and creation.
[per] dollar spent, content generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.
