Today’s financial services firms are operating in a difficult environment. The spread that money managers, financial advisors, and lenders can command has been going down for more than 20 years, putting considerable pressure on revenues. One of the main factors driving this pressure is heightened competition. The introduction of a vast array of new digital tools in the marketplace, for example, is providing end customers with plenty of alternatives to traditional financial services providers.
Practically speaking, that means that the financial services industry has no choice but to reduce costs and increase productivity. Adding the current business climate to the equation is accelerating the emphasis that firms are placing on reducing their customer acquisition costs and increasing their sales efficiency by ramping up engagement.
In this post, we’ll look at how financial services providers can help meet both of these objectives by supercharging their content with sales enablement.
Spread Too Thin
Financial advisors bring on new clients each year, who they then have to work hard to keep happy and engaged. The problem is that they also have to do the same for all of their other existing clients. Over time, as their roster of clients grows, they can easily become overextended and unable to engage with every client in a personalized and meaningful way.
Further complicating matters is the cost associated with traditional forms of engagement. The gold standard in financial services tends to be phone calls and in-person meetings, which by our estimates can cost $100 to $500 or more, respectively. Meanwhile much more cost-effective forms of customer engagement, including fulfillment orders, website visits, emails, click-throughs, and social posts rarely get deployed.
Using Content to Fuel Engagement
What all of this suggests is that as a whole, the financial services industry isn’t very efficient when it comes to client engagement. The tactics people tend to use are costly when they could be using other, equally if not more effective mechanisms to engage their clients. Most of those mechanisms revolve around content, including real-time content engagement, tailored outreach based on content consumption, and even using real-time data to drive one-to-one content delivery.
Unfortunately, most financial services firms have two big issues when it comes to their content. In our experience, their client-facing teams only tend to use 60 to 70 percent of the content that their marketing teams create. Not only that, 65 percent of the end consumers who wind up receiving the content say that it’s useless because it’s not relevant to them. All of that translates into a lot of lost time and energy, and wasted budget.
The good news is that with the right tools and data, it’s possible to create highly personalized and relevant content that your financial advisors and other client-facing professionals will not only use, but that your clients will actually value and appreciate.
Sales Enablement Increases Client Engagement
Sales enablement is transforming the world of financial services. In a dynamic, changing world, financial services firms need to find the right way to get highly personalized and relevant messages out in the marketplace as cost-effectively as possible. The key to doing so is sales enablement.
A good sales enablement tool will allow you to automate parts of the content creation process so that creating highly personalized decks, presentations, and other collateral becomes a fast and efficient process. Not only that, the right platform will deliver valuable insights back to your team about how that content is being consumed. That, in turn, can be used to guide customer-facing teams about how best to follow up and move the sales process forward.
Ultimately, adopting sales enablement is a critical step to creating more impactful content and collecting and analyzing relevant data so that you can improve your overall approach to client engagement. Over time, that will allow you to understand the impact that the content your marketing team is creating is having on your revenue and your firm’s bottom line.
And that impact isn’t trivial.
One large financial services firm, for example, reports saving $455,000 on marketing and $2 million on printing every year thanks to sales enablement. Meanwhile, a smaller firm credits sales enablement adoption with being able to save each of its admins two weeks’ worth of time during each reporting cycle.
Why Sales Enablement Matters for Financial Services
The bottom line is that sales enablement helps financial services firms free up their time and budget so that they can be more strategic about their approach to client engagement. In that way, client-facing teams can be more selective about when and where they devote their time, so that they’re not only meeting every client’s needs, but also carving out time for face-to-face interactions with the ones that really matter most to the business.
To learn more about how to make the most of every client interaction with an accelerated engagement strategy, check out this on-demand webinar.
