You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”: the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Financial advisors, we have a special, special episode for you this week. I rarely do guest episodes. I mean, there was a period, I think, in 2022 or 2023, I don't even remember, where I posted on LinkedIn and basically said, “I don't feel like doing all the work for the podcast this summer. Who would like to be a guest?” I got about 11 people in a row and that was pretty cool, but ever since then, I haven't taken on that many guests, simply because I like to keep it focused on what I've seen and what I'm doing. [00:58.2]
But every so often, I come across people who are absolutely crushing it into space and who are doing phenomenal work, and who serve a need that financial advisors actually have—and this week, I have Jeff Rusin, who is the founder, or one of the co-founders, I should say, of Advisor Tech Partners, and we are going to talk about CRMs and automation, and how that applies to your marketing.
I want to preface this episode before I let Jeff take the wheel. The reason I'm especially interested in this topic, for financial advisors who have been with me forever and ever and ever, back in 2015 the original platform of the Advisor Coach was coaching-based. Thus the name “The Advisor Coach.” A few of the things that I helped financial advisors with back in the day were things like follow-up, choosing a niche, and a little bit of CRM and automation, but I practically had to beg financial advisors to use CRMs. These are three of the things that would absolutely move the needle in their businesses. [01:52.7]
The landscape has evolved tremendously. Now using a CRM is kind of sort of like table stakes. It's not something that I have to beg financial advisors to do anymore, which I think is really cool, so a lot has changed in 10 years—and I want to get Jeff to talk about what he has seen in the marketplace, why financial advisors should, I guess, use the CRM, if they're not, and some of the things that they can do in their business to extract even more productivity from their technology.
Jeff, I'll let you take the wheel. Talk about yourself, what you do, how you got here, and whatever else you want.
Jeff: All right, awesome. James, thank you for having me. Firstly, I've noticed your LinkedIn posts all the time about the marketing for financial advisors and how important it is to be sending those emails, have different messaging, instead of just talking about holistic plans—and all that garbage, right?—actually stand out.
When we're working with clients at Advisor Tech Partners, we do a lot of automation inside of Wealthbox and Redtail CRM systems, and so this directly affects what happens inside of Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Sendinblue, any of those email marketing platforms. We set up automation so, practically, when someone becomes a prospect and then turns into a client, you don't want to be sending them those daily emails that James is recommending to ask for an intro call, right? [03:13.8]
So, I'll preface this whole conversation [by saying that] automations inside of the CRM are good for email marketing.
James: Yeah, and we'll talk about specific examples. It doesn't have to be complicated, right?
Jeff: No.
James: In the system that you're talking about, when I recommend for financial advisors to email every day, they kind of get confused, where they say, “Wait, do you want me to sit down and write an email every day? I don't have time for that.” No, not necessarily, not if you absolutely want to do that. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. But, typically, I recommend they have an email sequence. When someone joins your email list, they go through the sequence of five to 12 emails. This is typically what I recommend.
Jeff: Right.
James: At the end of that sequence, they exit and they go to some other list, so that’s what you're talking about. They could get—what do you call it? Do you call it tagging? They get tagged as a client. [04:01.8]
Jeff: Inside of Redtail and Wealthbox—I'll use Wealthbox as an example here—there's their statuses, right? There's contact types and statuses. Redtail is actually the statuses. Wealthbox is the types. So, when you change them from prospect to client or anything, what we want, we only have to get deep into it, we can make something happen inside of the email marketing software.
Let's just say that that five to 12 email sequence that you just mentioned, say that came from the website, so we could automate it from the website into the CRM as a lead, and then into that five to seven drip campaign. Then after, automatically get them into whatever audience that you want to get them into for those occasional emails, or when something big happens, like the Big Beautiful Bill, and you need to say something about it, right?
James: That makes a huge difference. I know we're talking about email. What are some of the most comm
on things that you help financial advisors with? Just big picture, what are some of the most common things? [04:58.1]
Jeff: The biggest thing that we do is automating in tandem with workflows inside of the CRM. If an introductory meeting is scheduled, then a workflow that we custom build for the firm is automatically launched, so the associate advisors, CSAs, lead advisors and owners all know what they need to do in order to make that a successful first impression.
I mean, you're coming right off that email, which, if they scheduled, is a good impression. You want to have a workflow in place, so those pre-tasks leading up to that intro meeting are perfect—and a good example is sending a Loom video to that prospect before, right? That's a high-quality touchpoint you can do to really get them to really stand out and probably convert them before they even get on the call.
James: You mean if someone schedules an appointment, or once someone does schedule an appointment, you can record videos saying, “Hey, thank you so much for scheduling the appointment. I look forward to meeting you. Here's what you need to bring,” that sort of thing. [05:53.2]
Jeff: Yeah, you can do that and, if you trust your associate advisor enough, you can make it so that task goes to the associate advisor. They record the Loom video. Say, “Hey, James, it's great that you scheduled a call with us or a meeting with us. You need to bring X, Y and Z. We really look forward to meeting you,” and can reference some information that they put in the notes inside of the scheduling link automatically launched when an intro meeting is scheduled. Right?
James: That's cool. When you talk to financial advisors about these sort of workflows and processes, are they generally open to that? Are they happy to get on board with that, or are they a little skeptical and hesitant where they don't want to do all this automation?
Jeff: It really starts from the ground-up. They need the customizations in their CRM, so they need to make sure they know what's what and who's who in their CRM, first of all. That's the first step. After you get all that groundwork in place, like prospect, client, client tier levels, all that stuff, then you can move into what I've talked about, which is the workflows. [06:57.5]
We always start off with the customizations first. Because all firms have their own lingo, we want to make sure that lingo translates customized into the CRM that they're using, whether that be Redtail or Wealthbox. Then they get more comfortable with the workflows, and then we get team meetings with associate advisors, CSAs, lead advisors, all talking about the processes, and it ends up being a good mediation session, a good therapy session for people to get the real processes in place, because without those types of calls, we're not going to get the custom result that we want that actually fits the firm likely glove.
James: It's cool that you get everyone on board, because that saves a lot of time. At least from my perspective, it's not even just about the advisor and the client or potential client. It's actually about all the internal communication. That saves a lot of time, too. You don't have to go to your associate advisor or your receptionist, or whoever you have in your business, your assistant, and say, “Oh, I need you to do this, this, this and this,” or even remind them. It just all happens automatically, which is cool. [08:00.0]
Jeff: Yes, very much so. Posts, like actually implementing this for firms, we encourage people to reach out to us, because there's a phase where we're actually revising workflow steps. If the CSA doesn't like a workflow step, they can reach out to us, tell us why they don't like it, and then we can change it. Maybe there's a different outcome to the step. Maybe it needs to be worded differently, but whatever floats their boat. Then we'll send out. We'll make the changes in their Wealthbox or Redtail CRM and shoot them over a Loom video with the changes, explaining why, and then we encourage them to save that video, put it in their server for future reference.
James: That's a good business practice, too. I mean, that's just a thing that you should do. Even if you're not using all the fancy automation or whatever, this is something that you should just [do]. You should listen to your team members. I think that's a great thing to do.
I have a question for you that's kind of like from my selfish interest, simply because I've been around long before Redtail and Wealthbox really became massive and took over the space, so I've kind of seen this evolution of the two, and really, I love to see their growth and I've loved to see their evolution over the years. Why do you think they have become so successful and have been the dominant players over the past, I would say, five to 10 years? [09:10.8]
Jeff: Firstly, I'll get into, okay, with Salesforce, you need an admin. No question about it. It's that complex where you just need an admin for the CRM. I think a lot of advisory firms, especially RIAs just starting out, don't want to be spending that capital on a Salesforce admin, number one.
Number two, you can start using Redtail and Wealthbox fight out of the box. Especially with their marketing placement being a CRM for financial advisors, it really catches a lot of attention, so I think both of them have done a great job in putting their niche in. I think simply because of their niche is why they get all the business, you know what I mean? And I do think they do a lot of enterprise deals with bigger firms where there are IARs, independents, working underneath them that choose it because it's recommended to them. [10:06.3]
James: Okay. I mean, that's a huge deal, especially for cash flow, or just from a business perspective and I think in terms of being an entrepreneur, if you could land those big whales in the industry, you're going to get a huge infusion of cash that you can use to better your product to help your people perform better. It snowballs, right?
Jeff: Right.
James: We talked a little bit off air. I don't know how deep you want to go with this, but you talked about how a lot more advisors that you've seen using Wealthbox. I'm not sure, did I say “Wealthfront” before? I’ve got a different [name] just on my mind.
Jeff: No, Wealthbox. It’s Wealthbox.
James: I know. I think I may have done a tongue, a Freudian slip with Wealthfront. I've been working on something with robo-advisors this morning—but Wealthbox and Redtail. You mentioned that a lot more advisors are using Wealthbox, or at least, it seems to be that way for you. Why do you think that has happened? [10:54.0]
Jeff: I think it's, number one, their marketing, and, number two, their innovation. They have an AI note-taker coming out soon and a lot of the automations that we build are from Fireflies, and then Fireflies find the client or prospect email and then automatically post that note to the contact with Wealthbox, coming out with that AI built-in note-taker. It's just going to go directly to the contact, I believe.
And just innovation overall, such as in workflow steps now, you can send emails from workflows. You can do send-to actions. You can do contact updates, all within the workflow. So, they’ve done a great job with innovating and I think that's why a lot of people are on Wealthbox. Their innovation has been great.
For me, I like iPhone. I don't know if everyone else does, but I like the simplicity of it, and I don't care if Android came out with something better 10 years ago. iPhone is simple and I think Wealthbox is the iPhone of CRMs, even though it is great.
James: Did they pay you to say that?
Jeff: No, no, no.
James: No, I know.
Jeff: Advisor Tech Partners gets nothing from either of them. [12:03.6]
James: Yeah, I got you. By the way, advisors, I have no relationship with Wealthbox or Redtail, or any of the advisors-specific CRMs. Years ago, we're talking 2016 maybe, I wrote a blog post about the CRM that I recommend for financial advisors, and at the time, that was a company called Capsule.
I want to make it very clear to advisors, the reason I recommended that specific CRM was because this was an article that was going to get viewed by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands people who all had different needs. If I had to make one standard recommendation, it's not even about the company, it's about the simplicity, okay? That's how I was thinking at the time. I wanted to give financial advisors something that was absolutely drop-dead simple to use that they could get up and running, because you have to view it from my perspective.
At the time, financial advisors were not using CRMs as much as they're using them today, and the percentage of advisors who were using them was not as high as the percentage of advisors who are using CRMs today—so, getting them to do something was better than them doing nothing, which was typically what they were doing, CRM-wise. So, getting them to use something that was just drop-dead simple was what motivated me to recommend that specific tool. [13:15.8]
I imagine that Wealthbox fills that need even better today, I mean, based on everything I've seen. I'm not a Wealthbox user. I have a CRM that's a little clunky, but that's also because the tech that I use is a little more fragmented, I guess you would say. But it's just been phenomenal for me to see that growth over the years of Wealthbox and Redtail, and I think you're right—I think that advisors crave simplicity, because in a lot of ways, productivity improvement is really the killer app for advisors. That's what they buy. They buy the thing that is going to save them time, which helps them get more clients and make more money, and that's how they view it. Would you agree? Is it productivity? [14:00.4]
Jeff: I would agree, and I'll give you a little secret here about Advisor Tech Partners. We have no partnership with Wealthbox at all. We use Wealthbox internally for our own business, and we use workflows, and we use the opportunity pipeline. It's been wonderful, and I'm not saying that you can't do that in Redtail, because you can, but we've chosen to go the Wealthbox route. It's been helpful to use Wealthbox and then have a lot of our clients be on Wealthbox, right?
James: Like I said, it's just been cool to see advisors gravitate towards these. Who knows? It may be a bad thing in the future, I think, if you get concentration in a space that lends itself to some problems, but that's neither here nor ther
