Asset Manager Scales Growth By Leveraging AdvizorPro

Asset manager Cboe Vest needed to infuse its pipeline with high-quality advisor leads to accelerate its exponential growth. The partnership with AdvizorPro has empowered the team to rapidly increase AUM and save thousands of labor hours.

Background

Asset manager Cboe Vest manages over $8 billion in mutual funds, ETFs, UITs, and retirement-specific assets. Beginning as a scrappy team of four in 2012, they have experienced rapid growth in their mission to bring more certainty to investors. Cboe Vest has developed a successful sales process that has driven their growth. Developing a consistent prospecting engine and providing the wholesaling team with access to the right data has been key to their success. The AdvizorPro database has become a foundational piece of fueling this process. Chris Lee, the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Cboe Vest, sat down with AdvizorPro to explain how AdvizorPro has enabled a way of prospecting that is more targeted and time-efficient – ultimately leading to expansive growth for the company.

Prior to working with AdvizorPro, Cboe Vest was already at an inflection point of growth with rapid increases of AUM, product expansion into crypto funds, and a doubling sales team. While the company was poised for exponential growth, Cboe Vest’s prospecting strategy could barely maintain its current pace let alone support the expansion Cboe Vest was looking to capture. The basic prospecting system they’d used to get the company off the ground relied on a mix of Excel spreadsheets, databases with unreliable data, and inefficient hours of research by junior employees. It quickly became clear to the team that their growth was hindered by the level of existing advisor data at the team’s disposal. The sales team needed access to robust, up-to-date data to power their prospecting goals. Cboe Vest decided to partner with AdvizorPro to help drive their growth and streamline their process – allowing Chris and his colleagues to spend less time managing data and more time creating real relationships with advisors.

Growing with AdvizorPro

From launching a new product to running targeted sales campaigns, Chris shared a few key ways Cboe Vest has been able to leverage AdvizorPro to build stronger relationships with the right prospects.

Running targeted sales campaigns

A core part of Cboe Vest’s growth strategy centers around steady campaigns to advisors in each wholesaler’s territory. Chris says that their highly tailored style of email messaging they’ve been doing has allowed their wholesalers to be in an optimal position to engage with prospects in an intentional way, and their full pipeline has proved the effectiveness.This requires having valuable timely messaging and a quality list of prospects to engage with to sparking new advisor relationships. Using AdvizorPro, the team is now able to seamlessly filter to identify advisors by geography, custodian, personal interests like golf, and specific firms. They import these lists directly into Salesforce using our CRM system and the wholesalers are now able to work on reaching advisors with their value add as opposed to worrying about data collection and quality.

Penetrating advisor aggregator relationships

Expanding relationships with advisors at RIA aggregators Cboe Vest has established a formal relationship with is a key focus for the team. Chris spoke of a specific large aggregator they have developed a relationship with and needed to cultivate relationships downstream at the advisor level. As is often true, there is significant turnover at the firm and creating an accurate list of current advisors can be a challenge. Chris described how easy it was to create and maintain an active list of the firm’s advisors with accurate data they could trust. The team has been able to run with this list and successfully build the relationships they needed. AdvizorPro’s data freshness has been a game changer for this challenge.

Launching a new fund

In addition to growing its existing product lineup, Cboe has expanded with new products. AdvizorPro has helped the team launch new products by empowering them with targeted data on which advisors to focus their early sales toward. For example, Cboe recently launched a bitcoin strategy and leveraged AdvizorPro’s targeted search engine to identify advisors who have noted interest in cryptocurrency. They then used these lead lists to run phone and email campaigns within each wholesaler’s territory. This helped to jump start the new fund and offered a warm connection point with key prospects.

Maximizing the return on conference sponsorships

Advisor conferences have been a reliable way for the Cboe team to efficiently connect with a large number of advisors. Chris points out that though conferences have always been a step in Cboe Vest’s prospecting, their AdvizorPro partnership has helped increase the ROI of these events. Working off of basic lists provided by conference sponsors, the Cboe Vest sales team strategizes before even arriving, queuing and warming-up potential relationships. The team then leverages AdvizorPro’s high-quality data to grab additional advisor contact info like emails, phone numbers, and Linkedin profiles which they plug into cold email campaigns in order to engage with these leads prior to the conference – even successfully nailing down in-person meetings for conference week.

Chris shared that at a recent conference, the team was able to connect with 350 attendees and move directly into warm relationships with many of the attendees. Prior to AdvizorPro, this was a tedious task of trying to piece together as much contact data on the attendee list from various sources which still often resulted in many holes. The team now uses AdvizorPro to collect up-to-date contact information on conference attendee lists they can use to prepare for the conferences. They can even match attendee lists by CRD or email address with a single click.

Seamless integration with Salesforce

Leveraging the AdvizorPro Salesforce integration has been key to solving one of Cboe’s main goals with AdvizorPro – alleviating the significant amount of data work required by the team. Additionally, enabling their wholesalers to work within one tool – Salesforce, is fundamental in ensuring the wholesaling team is set up for success. Cboe Vest was able to set up the AdvizorPro Salesforce integration with surprisingly minimal effort. As a result, all the wholesalers’ activities are aggregated and monitored in one place, with less risk of error and information overlooked. Chris describes his sales team now as happier – and also, more focused, efficient, and productive overall. Additionally, the Salesforce integration has enabled the wholesalers to act much more quickly on new leads. Prior to AdvizorPro there was often a time lag between getting new leads into their CRM system. It now happens weekly and automatically.

If we hadn’t done the AdvizorPro integration, our sales teams would still be working manually from old, unreliable spreadsheets. What the integration does most importantly for us is keep the salesperson totally in the Salesforce CRM –what a time saver. Everyone can stay productive and focused.

Chris Lee, Cboe Vest

More Than A Data Vendor

Throughout Cboe Vest’s relationship with AdvizorPro, Chris noted that the customer success team at AdvizorPro has been different from the usual vendor – their ability to leverage AdvizorPro is more fruitful because of this relationship that Chris calls a genuine partnership. He notes how AdvizorPro’s customer success team has been quick to answer questions as well as facilitate interactions with the tech team for custom integration needs and enhancement ideas.

I think the big defining factor is how well you deal with your customers. How you treat them. How you hear and listen to them. That’s what we want.

Chris Lee, Cboe Vest

Results

Since partnering with AdvizorPro, Cboe Vest has seen substantial growth as they’ve tuned their prospecting process and reached new markets. Chris explains that streamlining their database strategy has facilitated company growth in a large part by recovering time – he estimates that tens-of-thousands of manual labor hours have been saved by eliminating the need for once tedious and inefficient tasks from the team. Although Chris says that it’s hard to put into sufficient words all the advantages they’ve won through their AdvizorPro partnership, he attributes hundreds-millions of dollars in asset growth to the relationship.

AdvizorPro has saved us tens of thousands of manual labor hours, and if we’re talking about AUM, using AdvizorPro has earned us hundreds-millions of dollars in assets.

Chris Lee, Cboe Vest

The team continues to leverage the AdvizorPro platform and the Salesforce integration to empower continuing growth by building deeper advisor relationships. As a result, Cboe Vest’s wholesalers are more productive, time-efficient, and focused.