If you’ve been practicing for some time, you likely have a good sense of your own specialized expertise and target client. But these days, we have the tools to push beyond hunches to better understand our client base, shine a light on our blind spots, and uncover insights that can help us double down on our unique formula for success.
That is to say, your customer relationship management system is a goldmine, offering a window into client trends, from demographic to geographic. If well maintained, this database can help you identify patterns in your client base that have emerged over time that you may not have noticed organically, whether that’s a high concentration of employees in layoff-prone industries, many divorced individuals or a strong cohort of retirees planning transfers to their heirs.
In turn, this data can help you develop a highly tailored social media, content and broader marketing strategy, with messages geared toward reaching current clients and prospects who share their characteristics.
But that’s the catch. As with any data set, the rule of “garbage in, garbage out” determines its utility. An incomplete or messy data set in Salesforce or Redtail can negate any benefits you might have reaped.
Maintaining and then getting the most out of your data does take some effort, but the path to doing so is straightforward and well worth it. Here are the three most important steps to take.
1. Prioritize Data Integrity
Every advisor I know is strapped for time. In the rush and excitement of onboarding a new client, that often means glossing over key details when entering them into the CRM. Leaving fields blank, or using a generic range for the salary field, for example, can leave you with inconsistent or incomplete records. An entry in the net worth field such as “$500,000+” could mean $501,000 or $2 million; it’s not providing an accurate picture of the client’s available assets. Not to mention, using different conventions each time you input a new client’s information can leave you with disparate records that are harder for the platform’s built-in analytics tools to make sense of.
While somewhat time-consuming, practicing good data hygiene from the start can pay dividends in your ability to extract value from that data. But the work doesn’t end at onboarding. It’s critical to update at key intervals, such as the semi-annual or annual client meeting, to ensure you are capturing changes in career/income, family situation and more. Once a year is a good baseline, but if you see a client announcing a change in job status on LinkedIn or mention an upcoming move or major purchase during a regular check-in, recording those updates in the moment can give you more accurate data points. Importantly, include spouses and kids in your data entry; keeping up with their details can be essential in strengthening relationships and potentially gathering additional family assets over time.
2. Take Advantage of Built-In AI Features
AI tools, like Salesforce’s Einstein, can be extremely useful in divining trends from your data and designing customized materials to engage clients and prospects.
But at this stage in the technology’s development, AI is more of a means to an end than a magic wand. Again, its outputs rely on your inputs. By prioritizing data integrity, you give these tools what they need to give you what you need. Isolating concentrations in geographic location, profession, age, gender, family status, net worth, etc., requires having that data accurately recorded in each client and prospect’s profile.
The other factor in effectively using AI is giving it the right prompts. AI isn’t performing real-time searches, but it will give you the information you ask for if your queries are sufficiently specific. For instance, you can ask it to pull from your CRM a list of clients and prospects who are doctors with a certain level of net worth who you haven’t spoken to in six months so you can check in and offer content tailored to their needs. Einstein has prompt-building assistance to make this even more foolproof.
3. When it Comes to Marketing, Let Data Be Your Guide
Once you’ve mined your CRM and identified the niche audiences in your practice, you determine which topics to focus on in your outreach and content for your website, LinkedIn and email marketing.
For example, if you discover that you have a significant number of clients working for a large corporation in your area, and that company announces a round of layoffs, there is an opportunity to seed the market with information about how to have family conversations, update resumes, network and manage finances/roll over a 401(k) in a time of job transition. This can help you deepen connections with current clients while also showing up in front of their networks, where prospects are abundant.
Remember, too, that what you thought you knew about your client base may have changed over time. Perhaps your core demographic used to be parents saving for college tuition, but as life has evolved, those same clients are now nearing retirement, thinking about long-term care for their parents and perhaps themselves, and may be thinking about succession planning or their philanthropic legacy. Some areas of your client base may have emerged as more profitable than others, such as business owners or tech workers. By identifying these pockets of opportunity, you can more effectively target your newsletters, direct outreach, website, marketing material and other touchpoints—and put the right topics in front of the right audiences, showing you “get them” and building credibility and affinity. The aforementioned AI tools can also be instrumental in drafting such content for you, incorporating the specific concerns and priorities of each demographic group.
The Bottom Line
Understanding your own book helps you frame your value to the market. How you do that is by harnessing your data. You’re sitting on a goldmine; let it pay dividends.
Michael Lieberman is a Partner at Advisors Capital Management
