Is your telephone outreach, often referred to as cold calling, falling flat? It’s a common issue for many financial professionals.

After all, most people today are unwilling to answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize.

Still, when practiced effectively and systematically, making calls can enhance your broader marketing strategies, including email, social media, events, and search engine optimization (SEO). Together, they become a prospecting system that turns brand awareness into the trust required to have a conversation and eventually invest money with you and your wealth management firm.

This guide explains how to improve your phone outreach activities.

What Does Effective Phone Outreach Look Like Today?

Cold calling can still work for financial advisors when it’s done correctly. 

It involves reaching out to prospective investors with a clear, specific, and valuable offer. The outreach occurs after you’ve built brand awareness and trust through social media, content marketing, and other promotional activities. You make the offer only after you determine the prospect is qualified. The offer could be an introduction to a novel investment opportunity, a retirement planning review, or an estate planning session. Whatever it is, it must be tailored to the prospect.

What’s critical is that you not pitch products, solutions, or services.

Instead, deliver value to generate interest and tease out how you can help them achieve their financial goals.

Cold calls are most effective when they build on brand awareness and momentum. In other words, they are not truly “cold.” Perhaps you target prospects with helpful social media content. Maybe you have someone download a guide or white paper after they provide their contact information. Perhaps they receive a series of beneficial email newsletters from you.

In any case, you’ve got to take steps to warm prospects before calling them. In other words, you take the cold out of the call.

Done right, cold calling can be one of the fastest ways to speed the sales process from awareness to interest to action.

‍How to Improve Your Phone Outreach Efforts

Here are some proven cold calling tips for financial advisors.

Conduct thorough research

Even though it’s referred to as a cold call, you should never go in cold. Conduct thorough research about your prospects so you can better deliver value and keep their attention. 

Without research, you appear clueless by demonstrating you’ve made no investment in the prospect. You can’t waste time asking people basic questions when the answers are readily available through a relatively quick online search. They will simply hang up if you know nothing about them.

In short, the more personalized the outreach, the better your conversation will be. 

Some simple places to find out about prospects include:

• LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms
• Google
• Your prospect’s company website to learn about the work they do and their likely income
• Your client relationship management (CRM) system (to explore previous brand interactions)
• Yelp and Google Business Profile (if your prospect is a business owner and may have business planning needs).

Get creative to find out anything you can about a prospect before picking up your phone.

Come up with a strong opening

The first few seconds are the most important part of the entire call. You have limited opportunity to grab your prospect’s attention. 

Unfortunately, many financial professionals bumble the opening by saying something unhelpful and innocuous like, “Hope this isn’t a bad time.”

Instead, start by explaining the reason for your call, leveraging some of the intel you gained from your research. This approach is effective because people seek out reasons for doing what they do. When financial professionals explain why they’re calling in a personal way, it puts prospects at ease and makes them more willing to continue the conversation.

In short, your opening should establish credibility and provide a strong reason for people to listen to you. Explain who you are, why you are calling, and what’s in it for them. For instance, if you’re speaking to a relatively young investor, explain how you could help them plan for a first home, save for college, and protect their family.

Personalize your value proposition

Explain the value you can deliver to the prospect in a way that is unique and meaningful to them. If you do financial planning and are speaking to someone in or near retirement, explain how you could deliver value by helping them plan for retirement income in a way that could be better for them than competitors. If you are introducing a prospective investor to a novel investing solution, explain how it could be an improvement upon what they already have in their portfolio — or how it could fill a gap.

Personalizing the value you offer to individual prospects will help draw them in. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach will turn people off, especially in a world where so much of what they experience is customized to them.

If you’re having a hard time identifying your value proposition, think about your best success stories.

• What challenges did clients face?
• How did you help them overcome those challenges?

Use your success stories as a starting point and begin to outline some ways you can explain your unique value to prospects in a sentence or two. Your value proposition must be concise so prospects can quickly see what’s in it for them.

Things to NEVER say during a call

Here are some things to never say during cold outreach and why you shouldn’t say them.

• “I’m calling to introduce myself and my company.” Why would the prospect care?
• ”Is now a good time?” It’s never a good time to take an unexpected call.
• “I’m sorry for bothering you, but…” Just makes you seem sad and unconfident.
• “You should…” People hate being told what to do.
• “Touching base.” Does not communicate any value.

Avoiding saying these things is a simple and proven way to make your phone outreach efforts more effective.

Set goals

How can you achieve something during a call if you don’t define what it is?

Setting goals for each call will help prevent meandering conversations that go nowhere.

When you make calls, have a mission in mind. Common goals for wealth managers include setting up another call or earning an in-person meeting. Keep your goal clearly in mind as you make your calls and don’t stray from it. 

Don’t sell during an initial call

Many financial advisors make the common mistake of trying to bring in a new investor on the first call.

Selling too soon can sabotage a call by scaring off prospects. Keep things simple and low-pressure. An initial call should be viewed as an opportunity to qualify a prospect and move them ahead in the sales process, not close a deal. 

Use a script to guide you

Some wealth managers stick to a script. Others don’t use one at all. The former can lead to stilted calls that seem formal and non-responsive to the prospect’s concerns. The latter often results in calls that go off track.

The ideal approach is to use an outline to guide your calls. It will help ensure you make key points while staying focused on the prospect, not your script.

Practice

Few people get things right the first time. This is true of sales calls. Never go into a call cold. Take a few minutes to practice by reviewing your outline script and prospect research. It will help you prepare for anything that could happen during the exchange.

Focus on your prospect, not on you or your business

The best calls are those centered on the prospective investors. Top callers ask a lot of questions and gather information to see if the person they’re reaching out to is someone they want to do business with.

Plan appropriate questions prior to the call and include them in your outline script. Ensure you ask the right questions to determine whether the prospect is a good match for you and your firm. For instance, if you do retirement income planning, you will want to find out whether the prospect has reasonable retirement savings and a desire to stop working in the years ahead.

Keep your pipeline full to reduce stress

Cold calls often go wrong because wealth managers feel pressured to close deals too quickly. A great way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to increase your sales pipeline. Leverage common promotional tactics like content marketing to demonstrate expertise, social media promotion to increase awareness, and email to stay front and center with prospects. Using these tactics to drive traffic to your website and encouraging people to leave their contact information will generate more leads. It will help take the pressure off individual calls by providing more prospective investors to reach out to.

Overcome outbound calling avoidance

Call avoidance encompasses all the reasons and things financial advisors do to NOT make calls to prospective clients. Whether it’s emotional discomfort, lack of sales confidence, mediocre communication skills, or perfectionism, it’s critical to overcome obstacles to calling prospective clients. It’s the only way to continue attracting new investors.

Talk to your manager or a mentor about what’s holding you back from dialing prospects. Or work with a coach to help break through barriers. Do whatever it takes to call, the first step toward bringing in more new investors.

Call when it’s best for prospects

There are many studies about the best times to make outbound sales calls. For example, one article says it is between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., while another says it’s right after lunch. Yet another piece explains how the ideal calling time is after 6 p.m. 

What’s a financial advisor to do? Test your cold calls and figure out the best time for yourself with your specific audience. Keep track of your dials and contacts and see if there’s better performance during a certain time of the day. 

Keep it simple

Stick to one pain, a single way you can help solve it, and one option to take action, such as: “Would a quick call later this week make sense to explore retirement planning more?”

Ambiguity and complexity are the enemies of successful outbound marketing.

Control energy and pacing

Sound human, not rehearsed. Smile even if you are on a phone; it comes through in your tone. Match the pace of your prospect. If they are slow to take in information, keep it slow. If they get it quickly, move along faster. Keep responses tight, and don’t fill every pause. Give the prospect time to participate.

Stay legal and compliant

By their nature, outbound calls are spontaneous and rife with legal and compliance challenges. Check and honor DNC (do not call) lists. Don’t make any promises. Never provide unfounded advice. If you’re not sure about what you can say or how you can say it, check with your supervisor, legal counsel, or compliance officer.

Phone Outreach for Wealth Managers: The Bottom Line

Cold calling could be viewed as a dead tactic in today’s virtual realm. Or one that is still very much alive, but must be approached in novel ways. Leverage the tips in this guide to improve your phone outreach. And feel free to reach out to Dan Sondhelm and the sales and marketing experts at Sondhelm Partners to discuss your phone outreach and other promotional activities.

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