As I’m heading towards 50, I find myself sounding more and more like that guy who bangs on about how much better things were in the old days. Something I hear often from financial advice business owners, who are around that age or older, especially those who learnt their trade at one of the big insurance firms, is how brutal but effective sales management was back in the day.
Bloated fees from expensive old products allowed big companies to employ heavily incentivised sales managers to peck the heads of their sales agents for activity - and results - at least twice daily. Typically, 8.45am: “What are you doing today?” 4.45pm: “What have you done today?” It was grim, but it worked. Maybe not for the customers, but certainly for the sales figures.
Over the past 20 years this hard-nosed sales culture has fizzled out of the advice industry. There are multiple reasons for this. The insurance companies shut down their big sales arms and new advisers have not been trained up through the lifeco sales machine. Most advice businesses don’t work with the scale and margins to pay for dedicated sales management. The culture of advice has changed and softened, for the good, with a greater emphasis on professionalism and client care, and less on sales at all costs.
To be honest, whilst it might have worked, it was also miserable and many of the advisers who left to set up their own advice business did so just to escape it.
Now financial advice and planning has never been more professional. But many of us still wonder if a little bit of that old school energy and nous could be added into modern day business planning, in a way that doesn’t compromise its ethics and good practice but brings more clients and revenue to it with quiet efficiency.
We're proud to introduce Hatch, designed to do just that.
We’ve created a solution called Hatch which is designed to solve that problem.
Its primary purpose is to provide business owners with all the insight and information they need about their marketing and sales performance, to allow them to invest sensibly, understand where they need to make changes, and avoid waste by making great decisions.
Why another piece of technology? The back office systems currently used by advisers are great for some of the specialist work required by adviser firms, such as fee reconciliation, connectivity to platforms and providers, and storing policy details. But it’s better and cheaper to use a purpose built marketing, communications and sales management system for those tasks, albeit ideally one which integrates into your back office systems. These Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are less specialised to financial services and work internationally. So users benefit not only from their scale, with millions of users helping to improve the solution, but also from global competition which drives down costs.
ClientsFirst has a sister business called Karman Digital which is a digital marketing agency operating outside of the financial services sector. Karman Digital has a particular specialism around HubSpot; the world’s fastest growing CRM. We’ve delivered sales and marketing capability through HubSpot to some of the UK’s major online retail businesses.
Hatch is a solution we’ve developed using all that expertise, specifically for the financial advice market. It uses HubSpot’s technology configured to suit the needs of a modern financial planning practice owner.
Hatch will:
- Measure return on marketing spend to the penny
- Record and improve sales performance
- Make your client communication better than ever
- Reduce time spent on data administration
- Tell you where you can improve
- Provide real time MI to put you in control of your business
- Always be easy to use, keeps improving, and doesn’t date
Want to find out more about how Hatch can help your business?
Book a demo today and lets talk.