Fund Guru: Sell Well Grow Well

If you have the desire to grow, here is the way to go

Volume is the buzz word now. Go out and double your client base - that's what everybody is telling you. Investor appetite for financial assets is increasing and you know this is the time to capitalize on that trend by adding new clients. At the same time, margins in the business are going to shrink - and the only way forward is to grow volumes sufficiently to make up for thinner margins.

If you have the intent to grow your client base significantly, here is a 5 step process that you must adopt to ensure that the intent is translated into reality. In the sales world, this is known as pipeline management.

A lead becomes a prospect who then becomes a client. Managing every part of this journey is vital for you to ensure that you meet your new client acquisition aspirations - month on month, every month.

1. Generating leads: Where are you finding your prospects? What are your sources of leads?

1. Do you actively seek referrals from existing clients? If yes, do you have a process in place that ensures you seek referrals from all clients at pre-defined intervals - or is it only a casual process that depends on when you remember to ask? Do you for example, send out referral request mails periodically to all your clients? Do you conduct annual customer satisfaction surveys and make it a point to seek referrals from all clients who give you a high score?

2. How active are you on social media platforms? Do you track engagement levels? Do you have a process in place to contact prospects who engage regularly with you on social media platforms? Do you review your metrics at least once a month to determine who to add to your leads list?

3. Do you conduct Investor Awareness Programs regularly? Do you collect feedback and contact details from participants? Do you have a process in place to add leads on the basis of IAP feedback received?

4. Are you socially active? Do you earmark a certain number of hours a month for social / community work, which gets you in touch with prospects? Do you have a process in place to ensure additions to your leads list on a monthly basis from these community activities?

2. Categorizing prospects: With limited time and resources, it is not possible to chase every prospect. The key therefore is to efficiently categorize your prospects into even something as simple as High/Medium/Low. You can have a 2 level matrix as an alternative, where you slot prospects on the one hand in terms of likely ease of conversion and on the other hand in terms of potential relationship value. Relationship value here need not be only that prospect's portfolio size - it could also take into consideration how much of an influencer this person is likely to be - and therefore referral prospects in the long run from him. Once you have this 2X2 matrix in place, you would obviously prioritize pursuing leads that look easy for conversion and have high potential relationship value, and then work your way down this list. If you have team members who also go out on sales calls like you do, you may also want to decide which category to assign to whom.

3. Follow-ups: Once you have made your initial sales call, it is very important to come back to your prospect matrix and evaluate which of the four slots this prospect now fits in. Will you now move this prospect for example from "difficult to convert" to "easy to convert" following a good initial meeting? Would you move a prospect down on relationship value after your first meeting, in light of additional information you gained in the meeting? Updating your prospect matrix will tell you exactly where to focus your follow up efforts. You need to define for yourself the frequency of follow-up that you will carry out for each of the four categories of prospects and ensure that you are maintaining the required frequency for all prospects. After each follow-up, you need to keep updating your matrix, based on your current evaluation of the prospect.

4. Measuring results: Measuring results is vital to pipeline management. You need to be able to understand your closure success rate (percentage of leads converted into new clients) and average time taken for closure of successful leads. Tracking trends on both these metrics will tell you whether you are becoming more or less efficient in your sales efforts. The next step is to break down the successful closures into homogenous categories of clients. This could be by profession (doctors/lawyers/salaried executives etc) or age groups or localities etc. Measuring which group is giving you more success than the others will give you great insights on sharpening not only your prospecting efforts, but also your customer proposition - to tailor it to this promising segment.

5. Refueling your pipeline: When you know average success ratio and lead time to conversion, you will be able to figure out how many leads ought to be there in your pipeline to help you meet your desired level of monthly/quarterly new client acquisition goals. When you see that your pipeline is short of the optimum level required, you need to work on refueling the pipeline. Whether this means organizing another IAP, seeking another round of referrals or any of the other means discussed in step 1 - you need to quickly decide which one or more have to be used right away to refuel your pipeline and thus help maintain your run rate.

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