6 Ways To Help Increase Advisor Client Acquisition

If growth is your goal as a financial advisor, client acquisition is key. There are many pathways and tactics to get there—but which ones are most effective? In a recent study of LPL advisors, we found a group of advisors who are doing a fantastic job acquiring clients—bringing in $15 million to $20 million a year, each with an average of 29 new clients with around $710,000 in investable assets per client.

We dug deep into the tactics of these high performers to determine which are most successful, so we could pass along their strategies to other LPL advisors who seek growth. If you’re looking to grow, implementing some of these tactics could make a big impact on your practice.

1. Spend more time with clients and prospects

Overall, top financial advisors focus the majority of their energy on investor-facing activities. In fact, these advisors spend eight and a half hours more per week with prospects and clients than most LPL advisors—an entire workday. If a task doesn’t allow them to be with a client, it’s minimized or delegated in some manner. A great place to start is by reducing activities that take you away from being in front of investors.

2. Invest in multiple business development tactics

There is no single prospecting “silver bullet” out there that all high-performing financial advisors use. Instead, those who bring in a lot of assets each year engage in multiple tactics at the same time—often eight or more. Every top advisor has a slightly different mix of prospecting and marketing strategies based on their business, but all of them use multiple tactics and don’t rely just on referrals for growth. If you’re focused on a couple primary tactics, consider taking a look at your approach and incorporating additional strategies on top of what you’re already doing.

3. Use impactful technology

Advisors who are doing well at client acquisition put their energy into leveraging the most impactful tech tools, and using them to the fullest extent. The two most-used by top advisors include a client relationship management system, or CRM, and Account View 2.0. But they don’t just use them—they use all the features with every client in their book. If you’re not using these tools today, consider incorporating them into your practice. And if you’re using a CRM, ensure you use the workflow functionality to set up repeatable processes in your practice.

4. Engage clients in deep financial planning

Top LPL Financial advisors are doing in-depth planning, covering the gamut of client financial topics—especially tax analysis and retirement distribution planning—to help investors strategize for the future. As a result, they’re able to provide differentiated advice that stands out from the competition; build stronger, stickier relationships with their clients; and gain more referrals. If you’re focusing primarily on portfolio construction or goals-based planning, diving deeper into planning, especially with top clients, can make a big impact on both wallet share, and referrals, and also the way you position your practice in the marketplace.

5. Use a multi-generational approach

High performers make sure they know and work with all members of each client’s family, including spouses, younger generations, and even the older generation (i.e., the client’s parents). They’re able to do this by offering things like family planning meetings and specialized services for younger generations. A great way to start engaging more generations is by inviting your clients’ family members to meetings and expanding your service menu to appeal to younger investors.

6. Build a team

To bring in new clients at the rate they do, high-performing LPL advisors don’t take on everything alone. Instead, the majority work with an advisor team of four or more, so they’re able to diversify—and in some cases delegate—their services. If you want to grow, perhaps consider hiring some staff to whom you can delegate time-consuming tasks so you can focus on investors, or bringing in other advisors with skillsets complementary to your own.

Your next steps to growth

If you’d like to grow your business, implementing some of these tactics can make a significant impact and help you reach your goals. A great place to begin is by creating time for higher-value activities by reducing or streamlining lower-value activities.

To dig deeper into these six behaviors, discover exactly what the highest performing LPL advisors are doing to implement them, and get steps you can use to replicate them in your practice, download the full study, "How to Drive Significant Growth in Your Practice Each Year: A study on top-performing LPL advisors."

^{*In this study, we ranked a sample of 7,000 LPL advisors based on how much new clients in 2019 and 2020. We identified the top-ranked 556 and interviewed them to determine what they were doing to increase client acquisition.}