Q: How Many Contacts Are Required Before Your Prospect Writes Your Business?

A: Likely a LOT more than you thought.

In December, Ignites Research released a report called “The Responsive Sales Staff” .

The findings were based on surveys conducted with a total of 522 elite US financial advisors from The Financial Times 400 Top Broker-Dealer Advisors and the Financial Times 300 Top Registered Investment Advisors cohorts.

Among the treasure-trove of insights came this:

Our takeaways:

The number of All Advisor – Total No. of Interactions required to move the advisor to write a piece of business (7) falls in line with other industry’s data, vis-à-vis the number of touches required to make a sale.
The fact that only 20% of those touches are in person is eye opening and the Ignites report explains the rationale behind this number.
The notion that RIA’s (FT300) require 32% more interactions (7.0 vs 9.3) underscores the challenge of the channel.
Our concern is that, at a local territory level, we are certain that not enough wholesalers are structuring both their teams and their communication strategy to address this data.

Recommended actions to take:

Read the post and listen to the accompanying podcast: 12 Skills You’ll Need To Hone For The Next Decade Of Wholesaling
Make certain that your Follow-up Process is honed to a sharp edge, using either your firm’s CRM or our Follow-up Task Worksheet. If only 1.4 of your touches will be live, you’ll need a solid plan (and tracking system) to better understand who is following up, when they are following up, and what they are communicating by way of information when they do follow up.

Final thought:

If 80% of your interactions, in pursuit of your first piece of business, will be something other than live visits, the need to have value that extends beyond your firm’s product is glaring, since you can’t keep beating the advisor over the head with a product brochure.

In fact, this insight is also from the report: