RIA Client Acquisition Strategy: How I’d Build a System That Creates More, Better Opportunities
TL;DR
An RIA client acquisition strategy should help your firm grow revenue without making every new client depend on more advisor hours.
Count advisor time as part of acquisition cost, especially across referrals, events, prospecting, and intro calls.
Get more of the education and qualification done before someone reaches the calendar.
Pay attention to which sources are producing calls your advisors actually want more of.
Put more budget behind the channels and content that create those opportunities without adding the same amount of senior time.
How Much Advisor Time Does It Take to Win a Client?
Stop looking at the line item that says “marketing spend” and calling it a day.
A referral lunch doesn’t hit your marketing budget in the same way a paid campaign does. The advisor’s 2 hours still cost the firm something.
So does the webinar they spent half a day preparing for and the LinkedIn post they rewrote 3 times. The follow-up with someone who might be a good fit? That takes time, too. The introductory call that ends 20 minutes in because it’s obvious they aren’t a match? Timely.
Kitces found that advisor and staff time accounts for 71% of the total cost of marketing at advisory firms. Keep that number in the back of your mind when leadership says it wants to double growth without doubling the amount of time advisors spend bringing in business.
Your calendar will eventually become your biggest constraint if you keep chasing more growth with “less money spent”.
If landing another 10 great clients means you need 10 more rounds of networking, 10 more events, dozens more prospect calls, and more involvement from your advisors at every stage, your firm’s growth is asking the firm’s most expensive people for more hours.
Your RIA client acquisition strategy needs to be built on more leverage than that. Ask yourself: how much advisor time are we spending before a genuinely solid prospect walks through the door… and which parts of that could your marketing be doing earlier?
What Should They Know Before The First Call?
Listen up, because this one might be a reality-slap. By the time someone gets an hour on your advisors’ calendars, the website should have already handled a big chunk of the intro.
They should know who you work with and what types of situations you spend a lot of time working on. If they have to book a call just to learn whether your firm works with people like them, you’re probably bringing in a lot of window shoppers.
Stop letting your marketing hand over its responsibilities to advisors.
Early education and introduction could happen in a few places. Maybe a referred prospect is reading the website before they’ll reply to the introduction. Maybe someone who found you through search spends an extra 15 minutes on an article before they decide to check out your team page. Maybe an email subscriber has been reading your thinking for months before they decided the timing was right to reach out.
In each case, they should come to you with context already built.
That way, the first conversation isn’t spent going over the basics and giving them a feel for your firm. Your advisors can spend that time on the person sitting across from them and get into what their work together would actually look like.
For me, this is an insanely important part of an RIA client acquisition strategy because better financial lead generation should improve the quality of the conversation that follows, and the likelihood of that person becoming a client, instead of just adding more names to a calendar.
What Happens After Someone Refers You?
Someone says, “You should talk to my advisor.” Great. You’ve been given a head start.
Then 96% of referred prospects go online to research the advisor before making a hiring decision. Which means a referral turns into a little private investigation before anyone at the firm even knows the prospect exists.
They want to get a feel for the firm on their own first and see whether what they find lines up with what they were told. Their research can either make the referral feel even more credible or leave them wondering whether the fit is really there.
That’s why I tell referral-heavy firms to treat the research phase as part of client acquisition. The referral gets your name into the conversation, but your website and content still have to give the prospect a reason to keep going. We’re all being sold to all the time. There needs to be a reason for them to give you more of a chance than everybody else.
Make it easy for them to see why the recommendation fits. Show them how your firm thinks about the kinds of decisions they’re dealing with, give them enough substance to keep researching, and make sure the site backs up what the person who referred them already said.
Can Prospects Find You Before They Start Looking for an Advisor?
Before there’s a search, there’s usually a decision coming from life’s biggest situations.
An executive nearing retirement could be figuring out what to do with company stock and whether they should exercise their options before leaving. “Find a financial advisor” may come much later, after they’ve spent time trying to understand it on their own.
The good news is that RIA lead generation can start during that earlier process. The first time they hear your name could be coming from a substantive answer from your firm on your website. They’re not even thinking about hiring at this point, but they know who you are and that you can help.
By the time they do start comparing advisors, your firm may already be a go-to. They’ve seen your name attached to an answer that helped, maybe found another piece while researching the next question, and built some context around what your advisors know. And when they revisit your site, they see that you’ve just continued to build your library of resources that can help them and show them your expertise.
So when you’re building an RIA client acquisition strategy, look earlier than the moment someone types “financial advisor” into Google. The questions that come before that search can put your firm in front of the right people while the need for advice is still cooking.
Which Calls Would You Want More Of?
Let’s do an exercise: look at your last 10 prospect calls and put a star next to the ones your advisors would gladly clone.
Then, get that cloning machine you’ve been keeping in your closet for a rainy day (kidding). But you may actually want to clone them by reverse-engineering.
Look at who booked those calls, what brought them in, what they saw beforehand, and how much advisor time was taken up getting them onto the calendar. You may find that a few paths are what’s responsible for a big chunk of your opportunities, even if your CRM gives different channels the credit.
If there’s a source that sends 40 leads and 2 good calls, it could actually be costing more than the source that sends 6 leads and 4 good calls. The first one also burns advisor time sorting through the noise.
For your RIA client acquisition strategy, track the calls your team would happily take again. That’s the number you want to use when deciding where your budget should go.
Bottom Line
Your advisor’s hour should start when the conversation actually needs an advisor.
It’s the standard I use when I build content strategy for RIAs. I look for places where client acquisition is pulling advisors in too early, then build content around the questions and decisions that can be handled before the call. I also work with firms to make things like their websites, emails, etc. convert more of that interest from the right prospects into calls.
If more qualified prospects can reach the calendar with context already built (and with fewer advisor hours spent getting them there), your firm has more room to grow from the same team.
If you want your messaging doing more of that work, book a call with me.
