Client Profile

A large national life and asset management company whose range of products & services includes pensions, life cover, mortgages, insurance & a range of investments.

The Brief

With the potential loss of current clients as a result of the introduction of RDR, our client required the identification and verification of new future prospects. This was carried out by performing in-depth market intelligence on prospects supplied by our client.

Data

Supplied by the client.

The Result

•  47% completed surveys
•  20% decision maker stated that RDR is not relevant to their business
• 13% declined to take part
• 9% were uncontactable
• 11% no longer trading

Summary

This exercise provided a valuable insight into the views of IFA’s regarding RDR in general and how their businesses will change specifically. The research also accurately measured the size & profile of potential prospects in terms of assets under management, the split between fees & commission, identifying where their business comes from, which system or platform is currently used, types of products & tax wrappers currently used, research utilised for product choice and previous dealings with our client.  This enabled us to build a comprehensive picture of likely targets for our client.

Market Intelligence tailored for each client

The service that we provide is bespoke and individually tailored to our client’s requirements. What we could potentially offer you will depend upon exactly what you wish to achieve. For example, do you want to segment your current clients or target new prospects in specific market sectors, or perhaps both? If it is not telemarketing, then it will be intelligence gathering, but the use of that information will affect how it may be collected in terms of what is asked.  The client mentioned above wanted market intelligence essentially to be able to effectively target prospects to replace the clients that they are going to lose after the fallout resulting from RDR.  They will eventually use the information obtained for appointment setting purposes and will probably engage Chartered Developments to do just that.

Hours in region of 30 hrs / week (to be confirmed)

Chartered Developments provide qualified lead generation services for accountants, law firms, actuaries, banks and global business consultancies. The company is based at Pynes Hill, Exeter and an opportunity has arisen for an admin/accounts assistant to join our busy office.

As first point of contact, a very important part of the role includes welcoming visitors and answering the phone.

Other duties include:

• credit control
• purchase ledger
• sales ledger
• petty cash
• booking/preparing meeting rooms
• stationary & office supply orders

You will need to be of smart appearance and have a professional approach with an excellent telephone manner. IT literate (Microsoft Office) together with a knowledge of QuickBooks would be helpful but training will be given.  The ability to work to deadlines and be understanding of client confidentiality is essential as is experience of working within a professional office environment.

Please send cv and a short covering letter to:  Melanie Redhead (melanie@chartdev.co.uk)

Your profile is a form of marketing, and a significant marketing tool for your business.  Anyone can look at it and you should be mindful of making your profile look as professional as possible.

LinkedIn enables you to actively connect with people you have met at seminars, networking events or business appointments. Even if you do not think business will come of your connection now, you never know what that person will be doing, or looking for, next.

As I am sure you are aware, LinkedIn has turned into the social networking sight for business. Whilst sites such as Twitter and Facebook are all about maintaining relations with friends and pursuing personal interests, LinkedIn is about one thing; Business.

The importance of maintaining a good profile for yourself is paramount. You want people to see that you are ‘switched on’ and engaged within your own business community.

Here are the 5 basic steps for setting up your LinkedIn profile.

1. Photo – Make sure you have a professional, smart looking, headshot photo of yourself. Make sure the photo represents you accurately (less than 3 years old).

2. The Summary – this should be a succinct description of your current role.

3. Your Specialities – these are short terms that describe the market you operate in / your areas of expertise. For example ‘Telemarketing’, ‘Accountancy’ or ‘Intellectual Property Law’.

4. Groups – Join some groups that are relevant to your expertise. Groups are a great place to start discussions with those you are not yet connected with. This lets you show off your expertise in a certain field to a group of complete strangers.

5. Recommendations – These are possibly the most important thing to have on your profile! This provides the credibility you need to ratify all the other information on your profile. You can get recommendations from; senior colleagues, clients you have long standing relationships with, friends (for the more personal touch that a profile needs), your lecturers / teachers or old work colleagues.

So, head over to LinkedIn.com now and get connecting!

Click the link to view the article - Maintaining a Good LinkedIn Profile or to view the PDF click here.

Referrals are often taken for granted, and treated as ‘freebies’. Simply demonstrating a higher level of involvement in your referral plan, and implementing a solid structure to it, can dramatically improve the volume and quality of new clients for your practice. The concept of the Referral Machine conveys the necessary fluidity of the BD process; following up referrals in isolation can be arduous and inefficient. Creating established referral groups from your network of professional and personal contacts, through a variety of channels, is a great way of constantly generating referrals and improving your BD process through feedback.

Simply waiting for recommendations and referrals to garner new business is not enough anymore. Utilising varied means for lead generation, and being more fluid and proactive with the use of your contacts has never been more important.

Detailed below is a process we would suggest for building your own referral network.

1. Create Your Referral Group

Your referral groups should be made up of a varied selection from your network of contacts. This is not to say it should be just anyone; carefully select members depending on how useful their contribution can be to strengthening your BD process at a given time. Typically referral groups can be defined as: Clients, Suppliers, Social Groups, Business Associates, and Professional Bodies. Using a variety of sources for your referral groups is a great way of multi-tasking as a practice; you can give due attention to both large and smaller clients, improve relations with your suppliers through reciprocal referrals, let your personal social network reap rewards for your practice, and simultaneously improve your knowledge of other industries and sectors in an effort to improve your own way of working.

2. How to store the data

Using a CRM or marketing database has become common practice for professional services. It can have a dramatic effect on your BD process, as it ensures a degree of discipline is applied to your lead generation. Running a system such as this accurately will encourage:

This normally comes down to appropriate follow up actions; to call people, write to them, email them, invite them etc.

• A nurturing strategy to remain in touch with people once you have met them.
• A process to thank people for introductions.
• Recording all your target partners / managers details, particularly the email addresses.
• Grouping each of the sections of the database so that you can then start to record return on investment.
• Ensuring there is some accountability in the system, so that you make those calls, or write those letters/emails within a timeframe, to help strengthen the structure of the referral process.
• Some useful information on the potential referrers, including, who they currently prefer to refer work to.

3. Making the initial contact / inviting them into your group

The way in which you approach your potential referrers is instrumental to any possible relationship you could have with them; your initial contact has to be appropriate. The defined group they come from will determine the formality of your approach, be it an informal email to a friend/long term associate, or a written request for an initial meeting with respect to a contract or formal agreement in place for best practice.

Meeting sufficient numbers of people to create a referral group seems daunting, but quiet persistence and a positive and regular approach will pay dividends, as over time you will have gathered key information about your target referrers and be in a position to build good quality, long term relationships with them. The 80/20 rule applies, don’t waste your time and resources on the wrong targets by being impatient.

4. Nurturing / regularly asking for referrals

Nurturing means communicating, in a range of different ways. This basically relates to making consistent contact, possibly up to 8 – 20 times annually. In the pastdecade or so, ‘newsletters’ and latterly e-newsletters have become the norm. There is a particular issue with these, which is that they can seem impersonal in the extreme. This is not necessarily a problem; so long as the content is relevant and accessible. So please do not believe that by sending a generic newsletter, whether ‘e’ or paper, that you are communicating with your referrer. You need to be remembered and be professional; demonstrate this by making your contact specific. For example, any positive initial meeting will have had an informal element to it, normally whilst establishing early rapport, so allude to this when making future contact. It is easy to assume this will happen, but very often gets overlooked, wasting all the good work put in at the initial meeting.

You should not fear asking for referrals regularly; it is an integral part of any BD process and should be embraced. As a professional you will be expected to provide referrals yourself, and it is not unreasonable to expect as much from others in any referral group you may have created or be a part of. It is important to of course vary the way in which you make regular contact be it via phone calls, business cards in the post, emails, letters, or indeed social media such as LinkedIn or otherwise.  Use each medium as a way of educating; interspersing your contact with relevant information, testimonials, articles etc keeps the relationship fresh and up to date, and shows your practice has those qualities too.

This education process will also give your referrer the feeling that you are a caring giving organisation, which is vitally important if they are to give you their clients.

5. Feedback

Giving feedback serves multiple purposes. Firstly it reinforces the relationship, as you are showing that you appreciate their efforts, thus prolonging the relationship and keeping it positive. Secondly, it provides an opportunity to review, evaluate, improve your BD processes. This is necessary to ensure that your referrals are getting you closer to the kind of clients you want, by refining your activity and using your data to your advantage.

Summary

a. Target Referral Group
Buy the database, expect it to be full of inaccuracies.

Get it verified by desk and phone research.

• Accountants
• Corporate Lawyers
• IFAs
• CABs

b. CRM / Marketing database
Without a system the process will fail. Do this part properly and you’ll save money, reduce failure, allow delegation and save time.

• Group the database to measure return
• System to ensure nurturing takes place
• Accountability – are you doing your job?
• Discipline to capture contact details targets
• Details on incumbent IP

c.  Make the initial contact
Email / letters / LinkedIn and other social media are not as effective as introductions on their own, the odd meeting might be forthcoming. They all require a follow up phone call.

• Email / letter in groups
• Follow up phone call
• Create meetings
• Repeat regularly

d. Nurturing
The majority of people you meet will like you. Their choice and ability to send work to you will be essentially dependant on your ability to remain in touch with them and educate them to send you leads.

• Educate them
• Let them enjoy your practice
• Make it memorable
• Make it helpful

e.  Feedback
Use feedback to your referrers as a tool to refine your overall BD process. This will help maintain the flow of meetings, and make each one more positive.

Make sure you feed back consistently;

• On receipt of a referral
• After a meeting as a result of it
• When you gain clients on the back of a referral

Click the link to view the article – Non Stop Referrals or here to view a printable version.

Prospect and performance management is the core of your sales activity, and to make it work you have to be able to clearly set out your aims, and then how you intend to get there. The first point is to make sure you know your product, as your knowledge of it and its benefit to prospects is critical to the success of it.

Your target data should be determined by the scale of your sales process, think carefully about who you wish to communicate with and at what level, so that your message has the best chance of being interpreted and understood in the way you want it to be.

Although your services may be relevant to a prospect’s business needs, and they have demonstrated enough interest to want to meet with you, it is imperative to remember that a core element of your brand, is you. The initial face to face meeting has to show that you believe in your service, and that you have the knowledge and skill necessary to help the prospect achieve their business goals by using it; part of that skill is letting your personality do some of the work.

To increase your brand awareness, you have to be able to convey your offering in a variety of ways. The right kind of telephone conversation can open the door for your first meeting, if it is appropriately structured and timed. Your initial conversation with a prospect needs to generate intrigue, which can be engineered through clear communication of ideas, and listening. A phone call gives you the chance to answer those important initial questions, and show how your services can help further down the line.

The relevance of your message, and how it resonates with the needs of your prospects, is the foundation for how your brand will be perceived. Tied inherently to your data, making your communication specific will make that first meeting or phone call go that much more smoothly. An unfocused message will lead to more tentative questions from your targets, which will mean the answers to those questions can more easily be answered by your competition.

Click the link to view the article - 5 Drivers for Success or here to view the pdf.

Do you have these qualities?
• Intelligent
• Quietly competitive
• Love communicating
• Consistently conscientious

Are you looking for ?
• A job with career prospects
• A growing company
• A friendly team environment
• Outstanding ongoing training & development
• Exciting professional atmosphere

Ideal candidates will be IT literate with a background in financial services and an excellent understanding of business. In addition candidates should possess outstanding written & verbal communication skills. It is expected that the successful candidate will be educated to degree level with appropriate financial /sales experience.

In the first instance please email your cv & a covering letter to : janet@chartdev.co.uk

Talk to Your Clients

In order to create good rapport and long term business relationships, plan for you and your partners to talk to your top 100 clients more frequently.  Consider one more means of communication each year than you do already, the aim is to truly understand more about their business.  What’s the result? More business from existing clients.

Should I use a CRM system for this?

Yes, this simple process can be tracked, recorded and reported on for increased business.  It is therefore a very easy first step to buying in the senior management to a new system, whilst demonstrating maximum ROI.

The biggest mistake we find from accountants is that they try to do too much too soon and therefore lose the buy in, which results in poor ROI.  Introduce a CRM system in small chunks across the business and start where the ROI is easiest (your clients!)

New Business, Engagement and CRM

Why do new clients join the faster growing practices?

They:-
• Create momentum in the marketplace through maximum engagement
• Offer great service to clients
• Actively market to referrers
• Actively market to prospects

These means of engagement will be processes through a whole host of communication channels from telephone, events, referrals, mailings, email and social media.  All of which can be maintained on the CRM.

Talk to your Prospects

Have your partners focus on the top 100 prospects, and begin to encourage them to use the CRM. Use the system to report on quantity of meetings, prospects you expect to become clients (the pipeline) and include this as a section in your partners meetings (which has developed into a sales meeting). A bit of competition between partners soon delivers results!

From this stage you can increase your level of engagement.  Remember a FD of a FTSE company will see branding from a Top 4 firm 100s of time a year, how often will your prospects see your name? Good data means it is easy to communicate with your prospects through telephone marketing, events, emails and mailings.

A CRM is only as Good as the Hand that Feeds it

The biggest mistake here is not keeping an up to date database on your prospects, contacts and communication within. Information is readily passed around from marketing, secretaries and partners, with no clear path. Accountants like rules, so make them around managing your prospects data, including reviewing it on a regular basis.

Our clients now use us to feed and maintain their data for their CRM systems (often for their clients as well).

Summary

• To be serious about growth with clients and prospects you will need a CRM system.
• Implement it in small steps where you will maximise your ROI with senior users.
• Use experts to help you feed and maintain your data on the CRM system to generate the opportunity for maximum engagement with prospects.

Click the link to view the article – Is CRM for my Practice?

A highly respected global firm of Top 10 Chartered Accountants who have a wealth of experience & expertise in providing tax and corporate finance services over a wide range of sectors. They have advised over 100 AIM companies coming to market, combining a quality-driven, proactive approach to transactions with strong personal partner-led relationships.

The Brief

To uncover target firms with corporate finance and other specific accounting requirements; specifically to arrange qualified appointments between new prospects and the visiting partners. During the preliminary calls, other data, such as personal email addresses, other significant decision makers, legal and accounting advisors is collected. Relevant company details such as size, structure and financial information is also entered onto the database.

Client Services

Project managing sales, mergers and acquisitions, raising finance and re-financing, company valuations, disposal of non-core subsidiaries, MBO’s and MBI’s, refinancing, succession planning and exit strategy. Other specific accounting services including meeting IFRS requirements and helping with understanding complex transfer pricing issues.

Target Data

o PLC’s turnover £10m+
o AIM listed companies

The Result

• Continued sustained campaign running for over 18 months and continuing.
• Building valuable relationships with new prospects plus additional ‘warm’ prospects added to regional mailing lists.
• Increased brand awareness within the target market.
• New clients gained.

A leading global provider of asset management, investment processing and investment operations for institutional and personal wealth management companies.

The client assists private banks, investment advisors, investment managers, institutional investors and affluent individuals create and manage wealth.

The Services

A wealth platform enabling a firm to acquire, control, manage and report on all client assets on a common operating platform. The platform provides front, middle and back office IT and outsourcing solutions for organisations offering advisory and discretionary services.

The Brief

• To assist with a market segmentation exercise, and
• To introduce the prospects in the target market to the client’s wealth platform proposition and to arrange quality, qualified appointments with senior executive decision makers.

As the client’s proposition contained a large element of outsourcing it was imperative that the relevant decision makers (and their respective roles and responsibilities were identified) in order to avoid contact with Chief Operating Officers (noting that the Chief Operating Officers have a vested interest in the office function as a whole, rather than the growth aspirations of the firm).

The Target Market

The top 200 investment advisors in the UK, including, Ultra, Very High Net Worth individuals, Private Client Investment Managers (PCIM), Private Banks and the largest IFA firms/networks servicing the mass affluent market.  Specific decision-makers included, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, Chief Financial Officer and Finance Director.

The Campaign

An initial 3 month campaign, with a target of 8 high quality appointments, has since become a continuous long term arrangement.

The client accepted the premise that new business may not necessarily be secured immediately but took the view that they would be building a sales pipeline for longer term growth.

The objectives of the calling effort were:

1. To gain introductory meetings with senior level executive decision makers, exploring potential business alignment between the client and the targeted prospect;
2. To gain a better understanding of the prospects future business strategy in light of the evolving regulatory environment and changing demands of clients;
3. To increase brand awareness for the client within their targeted prospect database.

The Result

Phase 1
11 appointments made with relevant decision makers (3 above the initial target of 8). One of the appointments subsequently resulted in a deal worth £100k+ per annum.

Phase 2
16 appointments made with relevant decision makers, again, exceeding the expectations of the original campaign.

Ongoing
Following the success of the initial platform campaign, the client has since commenced a project targeting the top 1000 IFA firms. This focuses on offering their Asset Management proposition into the IFA intermediary wealth management market. To date we have secured 95 fully qualified appointments over 9 months, exceeding the clients initial target expectation by 100%.

Client Profile

A joint venture between a Top 10 Actuarial Consultant and a National Property and Asset Consultant designed to bring together the combined strengths of dedicated tangible and intangible asset valuation specialists.  The alliance meant our client was able to offer global reach to match today’s M&A marketplace.

The Brief

To gain introductory meetings with senior level executives (typically Managing Director, Finance Director, CFO or Company Secretary) to discuss the implications of the introduction of IFRS3 and to gain feedback from the marketplace with regards to future M&A activity and the requirement for advisory services.

Target Data

Chartered Developments worked with the client to source a database based largely on FTSE 250 companies with a history of M&A activity and a requirement to report under IFRS regulations.

The Result

Appointments were made with new target firms and the brand awareness of the specialist capabilities of the joint venture continue to be established within their target market.

Chartered Developments continue to work with both partners on separate project based campaigns.