A Long-term Digital Strategy to Boost Financial Services Sales

By Brian Cleary, CMO, Pitcher, sales engagement platform provider

In 2023, the financial services industry is navigating a number of challenges and remains as highly competitive as ever. Firms struggle to differentiate themselves at the same time that investors’ expectations are skyrocketing. With the proliferation of technological solutions and communication channels, financial firms require a sales approach that allows advisors to both build trust and demonstrate their ability to deliver on clients retirement and wealth management goals. Only 45% of financial services executives report they are highly confident in their ability to build a sales pipeline optimized for growth. What modern firms need is an approach that captures and consolidates data, makes communication effective, and demonstrates value—a digital strategy that packages everything into an extraordinary client experience.

With Salesforce finding that 88% of buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services—a 10% jump since 2020—there’s little question as to how important user engagement is. It’s a tall order—managing a client across a distributed network of advisors, across an omnichannel engagement model, in a compliant fashion. But today’s financial service companies are increasingly turning to sales enablement to help them deliver.

Sales enablement is about providing the most relevant content, customer insights, selling tools, training and coaching, and expert knowledge to empower sellers to convert more leads and achieve more revenue per customer. Gartner projects that sales enablement budgets will see a 50% increase by 2027 as increasing numbers of firms use it to drive revenue growth, meet changing buyer preferences, and boost seller effectiveness. For financial services firms looking to realize such benefits from sales enablement, below are a few tips as you evaluate your options. 

Be intentional about content

Advisors spend a significant amount of their week searching for the right content, and since the content is usually created by a number of different teams, it’s often stored in different repositories and hard to find. 

Transfer the administrative burden to your sales enablement tool, and optimize the process with: 

• Instant and easy access to content that matches real-time client information needs through tools like user-friendly search, filtering, and navigation features. 

• Personalized content that doesn’t require time-intensive manual updating, but gives sellers the ability to configure, customize, and personalize content at scale.

Streamline advisor and agent training

Training and coaching independent advisors and agents have historically been constrained by wholesaler timelines and availability. Ongoing coaching is critical; research shows that a formal sales coaching approach leads to significantly better performance than those that are informal or random.  For those looking to scale sales training and make it available on-demand, sales enablement can train and coach with the tools, knowledge, support, and client insight sellers need to be successful. Look for solutions that centralize current product information, marketing materials, video coaching, and other needed resources through a single source of truth. Some platforms enable just-in-time microlearning, an effective alternative to full-course, curriculum-based programs because it organizes and delivers the right content, in the right timeframe, for specific client selling scenarios. Also evaluate how you’re tracking advisor or agent performance as sales enablement tools can determine engagement performance success, suggest areas for improvement, and track progress over time. 

Make compliance more effective

Because financial advisors are subject to regulatory compliance requirements around the use of advertising and marketing, data disclosure, and the protection of client assets, firms need a tightly controlled process for how advisors and agents can and should use content. Set your sales enablement platform to automatically curate compliance bundles that can be sent to clients. Your platform can also serve as an authoritative source for maintaining the latest, compliance-approved content, and help control advisor publishing, distribution, formatting, and general use of content.

Be client centric through omnichannel engagement

Firms have incredible new ways to communicate and interact with clients, but they must also consolidate the data and manage communication to deliver an incredible client experience. Empowered investment clients expect a self-service model designed for on-demand, client-driven experience. Financial service organizations need to leverage multiple interaction channels to meet the needs of clients whose expectations range from the traditional to next-gen. Ensure your sales enablement platform can span digital, in-person, and hybrid channels to maximize advisor success. Digital sales rooms are another critical tool, one projected to account for 30% of sales cycle activity by 2026. They give clients a personalized and secure web-based portal where advisors can communicate and manage engagement transactions across the entire client relationship lifecycle. 

Optimize engagement with data-driven approach

Simply capturing data isn’t enough. Nearly half of sellers say that incomplete data is their biggest challenge. Today’s financial firms must move from siloed engagement systems and integrate it with an analytics engine for maximum results. With such integration, advisors will get unique customer insights and proactive recommendations, such as a real-time sentiment analysis or responsive planning calculators for a more conversational environment. 

Build trust with guided selling 

Organizations that leverage sales enablement technology such as guided selling can see significant revenue growth. Guided selling boosts client engagement by allowing advisors to customize presentations and content in real-time based on data and algorithms, then present personalized recommendations based on a client’s unique financial profile. By automating many of the manual tasks associated with content upkeep, advisors can shift the time saved to focusing on building trust and providing guidance. 

Financial service firms will continue to face rising competition at the same time that customer expectations evolve. Understanding each client and their individual needs is essentia—not just for sales, but for providing the right kind of guidance around the right investment products that can be a foundation of a long-term relationship. With the right sales enablement approach, firms can streamline processes, increase revenue, and generate higher levels of customer satisfaction for increased customer retention.