Background
SaaS provider Fiduciary Decisions has provided 401(k) benchmarking and other related software to financial advisors since 2008. Counting many of the biggest players in the 401(k) space as their clients, Fiduciary Decision’s continued search for growth led them to AdvizorPro. AdvizorPro had the chance to talk with Fiduciary Decision’s Chief Marketing Officer, Craig Rosenthal, to discuss the impact AdvizorPro has had on their ability to further penetrate the 401(k) space with better leads, as well as launch a new product in the retail market.
In search of more qualified leads
A top priority of Craig as Chief Marketing Officer is establishing and maintaining a quality pipeline for the sales organization. To achieve this, Craig and his team had built robust marketing workflows within Hubspot to help them reach their audiences at scale. However, having enough of the right leads to populate these workflows was a challenge. The team was handcuffed by their then-current lead generation sources, which were not built through scalable sources.
To acquire leads, the Fiduciary Decisions team had been relying on loading spreadsheets from various sources on an ad hoc basis, including conference attendee lists, business cards, and contacts from a competitor advisor database into their Hubspot CRM. It was tedious, inefficient, and not scalable. Furthermore, data quality seemed to be a never-ending problem. The combination of staleness and mixed-lead quality led to lower than desired email opens and response rates.
Craig knew that to hit Fiduciary Decisions’ growth goals and fill their marketing engine with more qualified advisor leads, they would need a different, trustworthy lead source that would fit into their existing workflow. His search to solve this problem led Fiduciary Decisions to partner with AdvizorPro.
Leveraging AdvizorPro for growth
Craig shared some of the key changes that have resulted from Fiduciary Decisions’ implementation of AdvizorPro into their marketing & sales processes – including more effective email campaigns, entering into a new market space, and significant time savings.
Less data digging, more marketing
An inefficient process for acquiring leads, getting them into Hubspot, and keeping them fresh were Craig’s biggest challenges prior to AdvizorPro. When Craig turned-on the AdvizorPro-Hubspot integration, this quickly changed. The direct integration between the platforms allowed the teammates to live within a single platform (Hubspot), have the most up-to-date and accurate contact information for their leads, and constantly add new and better leads into their marketing funnels. Ultimately these wins, which were implemented quickly, removed a huge bottleneck in their marketing process.
“AdvizorPro has given us marked gains in time and intelligence. When our sales team goes into HubSpot now, they have more profile data available about the prospects they’re emailing than what they had in the past.“
Because all of their prospect data is now housed within Hubspot and is up-to-date, neither the sales or marketing teams need to jump between different spreadsheets and platforms – eliminating tedious steps and gaining huge savings in time. The team can focus more on prospecting advisors, rather than wasting time and money on gruntwork.
The data is now refreshed automatically and frequently, and the wholesalers can work more quickly – engaging with leads as soon as they receive the notification of new data. Eliminating the bottleneck of activity that used to happen when the marketing or sales team manually uploaded files, Craig noted that because his sales team has a more efficient process, the team can now focus on marketing tasks that are the best use of their time.
“I know how challenging integrations are. But this one was a piece of cake. Frictionless. I could see the value instantly.”
Higher ROI email campaigns
A key part of Fiduciary Decision’s marketing strategy includes running email campaigns to targeted advisor audiences. Historically, Craig found that conversions for their email campaigns could take multiple touches over a period of months where they warmed up a prospect’s familiarity with their firm. However, this changed drastically when he began using lead lists created via AdvizorPro. Craig began to see immediate improvements in the results of their email campaigns, which he could easily validate with Hubspot. Using AdvizorPro to source leads for their campaigns, Fiduciary Decisions has achieved a massive 4x increase in email open rates, and a 2.5x increase in email click-through rates.
“Due to AdvizorPro’s data quality and ability to more specifically target meaningful prospects FDI has been able to achieve a 4x increase in email open-rates, and a 2.5x increase in email click-through rates.”
Craig attributes this to both their new ability to target more qualified prospects by leveraging AdvizorPro’s unique filters, as well as the quality of fresh contact data for those prospects. The sales team also now has much more intelligence on marketing qualified leads, as they have been able to create robust advisor profiles in Hubspot, benefiting from AdvizorPro’s deep database.
Penetrating a new market
Already having significant brand recognition in the 401(k) space, Fiduciary Decisions needed to reach a new audience of retail advisors to launch their IRA rollover tool. The team used AdvizorPro to quickly filter for their exact target audience in the RIA space and push fresh lists instantly into Hubspot for their marketing workflows. This allowed them to launch their product much more quickly and with more firepower – a big win for the team.
“AdvizorPro gave us access to a detailed database in a market segment that we didn’t know and didn’t know us – now we have enough information to be dangerous.”
Without AdvizorPro, Craig noted that using other methods to enter the wealth space would have taken too much time and manual effort. Scaling from zero wealth advisors in their database to having access to hundreds of thousands, AdvizorPro provided the single reliable source for accurate leads in the wealth space the team needed.
A real partnership
Feeling the consistent support of the AdvizorPro customer success team from day one with onboarding, training, and continued support, Fiduciary Decisions has confidence they are in good hands. Craig described the partnership as above and beyond the usual experience with a vendor.
“With AdvizorPro, I’m not a number. I’m not a contract. I’m a client that you care about. And that’s a very good feeling.”
Continued success
Since partnering with AdvizorPro, Fiduciary Decisions has seen marked improvements in the efficacy of its marketing efforts and lead quality. The time savings, new and better leads, and depth of data that AdvizorPro has provided continue to play a foundational role in Fiduciary Decision’s continued growth and success.
“We're doing sophisticated prospecting and marketing – that's because we have AdvizorPro as a sophisticated partner.”
