A few months later, Shanna decided to rebuild all her processes and practices, from the ground up, with PreciseFP at the core of her onboarding process. Initially used solely as a data-gathering tool to allow clients to do data-entry into advisors’ various systems (EX: CRM, financial planning), PreciseFP has evolved to cover many aspects of client engagement.Shanna quickly designed templates and published them on her website to guide the 30 to 60 leads she was getting a month down a predefined path. She thinks of PreciseFP as her “gatekeeper”. Instead of leads asking for a call-back from Shanna or her staff, requiring hours to be spent emailing and calling, they are first asked qualifying questions to better ascertain the level of service a given lead would qualify for.

“I had to find a way to automate my onboarding process and stop spending every evening on the phone calling prospects to try and get them to my office. And that’s where PreciseFP came in and saved the bacon in my practice.“

For instance, if a lead indicates investable assets of < $200k, the logic built in to the PreciseFP template will offer that lead a 30 min telephone consultation. Shanna found that this simple filter allowed her to service clients at all asset levels, but making sure that her day isn’t filled with a bunch of no-shows that in-person meetings oftentimes would generate.If the lead answers > $200k to the investable assets question, the PreciseFP engagement offers up an in-person 1 hour appointment. The results were meetings that were scheduled with less time and effort and more productive meetings since the appropriate data was being gathered from the client.

While this all seems relatively simple (and it is), the real and unexpected results on the revenue side of things are what made this gatekeeping initiative exciting. Shanna saw that leads that came through PreciseFP had a 66% higher closing ratio, and generated 73% higher revenue when compared to leads coming from other channels. For Shanna, that was a totally unexpected bonus of streamlining the onboarding process, making the transformation all the more worthwhile.

Even we (PreciseFP) were amazed by those numbers and really couldn’t give an explanation for them other than to say that there is something to be said for striking when the iron is hot. When someone visits your website and is being offered a means of engaging with you immediately, there is a certain element of instant gratification that compels the lead to take action.

But the benefits don’t stop there for Shanna. She uses PreciseFP to populate her CRM and financial planning tools, eliminating manual data entry. Not only is it a big time saver for her firm, it puts the responsibility of erroneous keystrokes on the client’s shoulders, not on hers.

Additionally, PreciseFP has drastically reduced the amount of time Shanna and her staff spend “chasing” things. One example she gives is the automatic reminders that clients get when they don’t finish an engagement. She lets them know that they will get weekly reminders until the Engagement is completed. Instead of those reminders coming from her staff, they get them from PreciseFP. The result is clients finish their “homework” so that next steps can be executed in the onboarding and/or financial planning process.