In my last blog post, I wrote about the importance of preparing for a trade show. I had a chance to put my own advice into practice shortly thereafter when I attended the truly excellent Excel 401(K) show in Dallas. Because trade-show ROI can notoriously difficult to quantify, it is often one of the first things to go when belts and budgets need to be tightened. 

As an exhibitor, I’m usually paying anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 for my booth space, plus another $1,000 shipping, $500 (minimum) in booth furnishings, and $1,000 in personal travel expenses…and these are only the dollar costs. The opportunity cost for my time out of office is often equally pricey, especially if I’m sending multiple people to a show. 

Let’s dive into the Top Four Considerations which make a show a “must attend” as opposed to a “could lose it if I had to”… How do we evaluate which shows to keep and which are destined for the chopping block? I generally look at four key metrics; New Business, Existing Business, Competitors, and Referrals.

New Business

This is the number one driver for an exhibitor like me. Do I think that I’ll make enough new connections at this show to fill my pipeline, and then convert them into clients, to pay off the show? Evaluating potential new business generation from a trade show is a combination of two functions: The number of attendees at the show, and the quality of these attendees.

Number of attendees

You’ve got to have a critical mass of people. 100 people aren’t going to cut it. 300 is about the absolute minimum I’ll even consider, and even then, the exhibiting price had better be pretty low. 700-1,000 attendees is where I like shows to be.

Quality of attendees

This critical component is often overlooked. Are the people I can expect to meet with at the show capable of buying my products? I’ve found that when I’m considering a new show I can often request a list of the attendees from the previous year’s conference. Even if you can’t get names, at least get a combination of company+title. What I’m looking for here are people with purchasing authority, or who may be senior influencers with my buyer.

Since I often sell to exhibitors, I include them in this category. One of the items that make a show a slam dunk for me, specifically, is when someone who actually signed one of my contracts is going to be at the show in person. Not only does that mean we can grab some coffee and strengthen our relationship, but also means that there may be others like that person in attendance.

Existing Business

A subscription-based business like mine grows on new sales but survives on renewals of the existing book of business. When considering a trade show, I will always look at the list of exhibitors from previous years (and, as noted earlier, the list of attendees) and do some quick math. Any show which has high-level representatives from 1/3rd or more of my existing client base is a must-attend.

Competitors

Sometimes, you can get lucky and just let your competitors do the homework for you! Any show that is hosting two direct competitors is something I’ve got to be at too. If there’s only one competitor, I’ll give it a good look, but there are definitely shows with a single competitor that I’ve taken a pass on.

Exhibiting at a show where one of your competitors is not only allows you to take advantage of their homework, but also lets you be on hand to answer that important question; “how are you different from X”. Some attendees might not know that there is another option out there, and others may be interested in seeing your different approach to solving the same problem. Be sure to be able to clearly articulate your value proposition and what makes you different.

Referrals

Of the 100+ shows I’ve exhibited at over the last 16 years, every single one has had some downtime when the exhibitors could mix and mingle with each other. When that happens, we almost always talk shop, and three questions consistently come up:

1. How has your foot traffic been this show?
2. Are you guys coming back next year?
3. Where else do you guys exhibit?

Some of the best shows I’ve found are the ones that were recommended to me by my fellow exhibitors. New shows are always popping up, and as we discussed earlier, there is a significant expense associated with exhibiting. Getting the “seal of approval” from other exhibitors who are trying to reach the same audience I am is a big green flag that a new show is worth my time.

Trade shows are a critical part of the sales process for both individual subscribers and enterprise-level accounts. Making sure that you can select the right show to attend and that you maximize your time there (https://www.judydiamond.com/blog/making-the-most-out-of-trade-shows/) is essential  for every sales manager.

Here at Judy Diamond, we often find our retail level clients face unique challenges. Frequently these users are the members of small teams, if not the only person at their office responsible for bringing in new business to their firm. Perhaps they are members of a larger firm with dedicated support teams, but others are vying for the resource. Many clients are new to the business. They come to us looking to learn how to sell in this space as quickly as they can.

In the end, each of these groups come to us because they need some “back office support” to meet their sales goals in the most efficient and straightforward path possible. 

What is this “Back Office Support”?

A big challenge for these clients is how to do all the activities required to bring in new business while maintaining their current book of business. Tasks such as:

• Benchmarking analysis
• Determining what plans in a market are weaker than others and explaining these weaknesses to plan holders
• Writing marketing letters for direct or email campaigns
• Creation of presentation-ready reports and graphics
• Dig up information on businesses current plans

I like to call these tasks “Back Office Support”. These are support tasks often provided by knowledgeable staff focused on helping you win over your client. Larger firms often have dedicated departments of experts devoted to these support tasks. However, at smaller firms, these support roles are usually rolled up into the hands of the same person responsible for bringing in the new business. 

With so many tasks falling onto one person, organization and efficiency become even more critical.

Judy Diamond listened to the needs of these clients. We spent two years building Retirement Plan Prospector Plus (RPP+) to do just that: Act as your marketing, graphics, and research departments so that you can walk into your next meeting with everything you need to move along your sales cycle. 

In this series of posts, we will look at how to take advantage of the edge RPP+ gives you. Let’s first look at how RPP+ can support your marketing and graphic design needs.

Marketing Letters

After you know who you want to reach out to, your next step is to decide on messaging. What do you want to say to these leads? How can you get your value proposition across effectively?  When starting a new business campaign, larger firms may bring in assistance from their marketing department. The marketing team often provides two essential tasks to help the salesperson. 

• Make sure the copy, or text, conveys the message the salesperson wishes to send out using the best tone and voice possible. 
• Layout the text in an attractive and easy to read format

While having a whole team of marketers helping craft your messaging is the best way to go, RPP+ can help those whose firm does not have a dedicated marketing team. It can also act as a stand-in for those firms whose marketing teams are unavailable.  

Those who do not have access to a dedicated marketing department can turn to the RPP+ module for support. This add-on module grants users access to professionally written marketing ready for you to use! These letters are not only crafted by our knowledgable team, they are also tied into our powerful RPP+ data. This means the letters pull in plan details specific to the business you are reaching out to. They are also easily downloaded so that you can make any adjustments to the letter (if you wish). 

In no time at all, you have copy ready to be included in your next email or direct mail campaign!

Presentation-ready Reports and Graphics

Often when you are putting together your materials for a meeting with a potential client, it’s a good idea to include graphics. Graphics are a great way to take complex material and make it more easily understandable. Additionally, graphics help pull in clients who are more visual learners. 

However, not everyone has the time or inclination to learn how to create graphics packages of their own. If you work for a large firm, the marketing department might be able to build some charts or format a few graphs for you…if they have time. But even then, you have to worry about collecting the data you need, give it to the graphics expert, explain to them what the data means and how you would want it shown. This would likely take several emails back and forth, plus the additional call or two, to sort it out. 

Our RPP+ module reduces the need for all this hassle by providing attractive and easy to understand charts and graphs ready for our clients to use. If you were want to show your client how Microsoft compares to other software publishers, you can! By accessing RPP+’s Benchmarking tools, you can quickly build a peer group containing software publishers. Then, which a couple 

of clicks, you can generate a graph comparing Microsoft’s Plan Score against over 2,000 other companies in the same market. 

No worrying about collecting data, now worrying about if the graph correctly represents the data. In under a minute, you have a graphic ready for you to drop into your report.

Let’s say you need a heat map showing what states or counties have Software Publishers. Once again, in a few seconds, you can have a graphic pulling on that same data pool of over 2,000 different sponsors. 

But RPP+ goes even further. Not only are we able to provide these single graphics for you, but we also provide each RPP+ client with our presentation-ready plan reports. These adjustable reports pull all the data that you receive with your RPP+ account into a multipage PDF. You get to select what information you want to include in the report. You get to choose

What about Research?

But we all know that preparing for a sale is more than just squaring away your marketing and graphics. You need to know all you can about your lead. Not only that, you need to know how your lead compares to the client you prefer to work with. Moreso, which of the nearly 800,000 plans that are filed every year provide the best ROI of your valuable time?

In my next blog, we will go into how RPP+ can act as your back office Research team providing you with the data you need.

Last April, Judy Diamond Associates released Retirement Plan Prospector+, a brand new upgrade to Retirement Plan Prospector that features an extensive collection of tools to boost retirement plan prospecting, from back office marketing support to advanced data analytics. One of the features introduced in the Retirement Plan Prospector+ update is the ability to benchmark retirement plans on a level of granularity that hadn’t been possible before.

The Plan Scorecard is a form of retirement plan benchmarking, but the default views available through the Plan Scorecard aren’t always the most useful when looking at how a plan stacks up compared to its peers. For example, looking at the Plan Score by industry won’t always give you a good benchmark when you want to compare a small five-person CPA firm when the pool of plans you’re benchmarking by industry against including huge, multinational accounting firms with thousands of employees.

Our Benchmarking tool is the solution to getting the best benchmark possible for every kind of plan by allowing you to build your own set of criteria to benchmark against. We even provide an algorithmically defined peer group for many of the plans in the database, so you don’t have to make your own. It’s easy as saving a search using the criteria you want to benchmark against and pulling up the Benchmarking tool when you’re on the Plan Details page of the plan you want to benchmark. If you don’t have access to the Benchmarking tool in your version of Prospector, you can call (800) 231-0669, option 1 to speak with a sales representative to learn about upgrading to Retirement Plan Prospector+.

The applications of the Benchmarking feature are endless. You can define your peer group for a potential prospect to see how the plan currently stacks up against its peers, and you can use any weaknesses or shortcomings you find to build your talking points when you have your meeting with the prospect. You can even create a saved search for your own plans to use as a benchmark to either monitor their performance against the competition or use as a selling point to potential prospects by noting the strength of your plans’ average performance against their current plan performance.

The Benchmarking tool is just one of the many great features included in Retirement Plan Prospector+, and learning to use it effectively will be a massive boost to your prospecting efforts. If you need help with using any part of Prospector+, we have weekly training sessions available with our experts that you can sign up for, and you can call our support line at (800) 231-0669 from 9 am to 5 pm EST.

Using 5500 Data for Offensive and Defense Business Development (Part 4): Planning the First Meeting

Meeting with a potential lead is the first big step in winning their business. While personal preference determines the style of your pitch, it is always a good idea to back your pitch with data. Additionally, being able to tailor your pitch to each lead, quickly, is invaluable.

It is also a good idea to present your pitch using multiple modes of communication. While you are going to be speaking your potential clients, remember that not everybody learns or retains information the sale way. For instance, while listening to a speaker may help some, others are more visual learners and react better to charts and graphs. Still others prefer to read the material to listening to a speaker.

It’s a good idea to plan on presenting your pitch to a lead using multiple modes of communication. That way,

PLAN REPORTS

When discussing the future of a lead’s retirement plan, it is often helpful to be able to talk confidently and clearly about the plan’s past. Building a detailed history of a plan will help you show negative trends to a client; trends that you would be able to avoid.

CHARTS AND GRAPHS

Some people learn by reading the material, others, by hearing it. Still, other people best consume data by seeing it. It is important
to provide your lead with the same data in multiple ways. This increases the impact of your presentation and makes complex information more easily understood by your potential clients.

THE VERBAL PITCH

Sometimes even the most seasoned salesperson may forget the importance of their verbal pitch. And there are times that new financial advisors may need a little guidance or inspiration in how to start a pitch. While your verbal pitch should reinforce the visuals of your graphs and the data-heavy details of your reports, it should not be a recitation of these facts. This is where an advisor can reveal how they are able to solve the challenges unique to the sponsor.

THE JDA ADVANTAGE: Our tools are designed to help make your presentation shine. Our Dynamic Plan reports consolidate all our research on a plan into one modular, presentation-ready document. Have all the specific details about a lead’s current plan neatly organized and right at your fingertips.
The performance-based Benchmarking tool in our Prospector Plus creates downloadable professional-looking graphs and charts. By inserting these into your sales deck or pitchbook, you will be able to walk your clients through all the reasons why they would be better off working with you.Need some inspiration? Prospector Plus’s talking points help walk you through a plan’s weak spots. They also suggest different approaches to help your leads understand the challenges their plan contains.

Using 5500 Data for Offensive and Defense Business Development (Part 3): The Offensive Approach

The most common, and effective, way to use Retirement Plan Prospector is offensively. The size of the data pool contained in the data set not only provides brokers with a massive lead list but also provides details required to make a data-driven business development plan work.

IDENTIFY THE BEST TARGETS

While looking for red flags and plan scores are a great way to begin identifying the leads with the highest chance of conversion, that is just the beginning. If you know of a competitor’s offering that you outperform, locating the plans they manage is a great way to focus your efforts.

THE UNSATISFIED/VERY SATISFIED CLIENTS

Retirement Plan Prospector has data on plans stretching back nearly 10 years. This history can show sponsors who frequently change their financial advisors. Noticing that a sponsor changes their FA every couple of years might indicate that they are likely to reevaluate their current plans. However, such a sponsor might be hard to retain. On the other hand, you could identify sponsors who tend to pick and advisor and stick with them. These leads might be more difficult to win but are likely to stick with you once you have won their business.

THE BOOK OF BUSINESS COMPARISON

Plan scores look at the relative strength of a plan. By collecting the plan scores of all the plans in your book of business, you can come up with an average plan score for your clients. Comparing a lead’s low plan score to your “book of business score” is a great use of plan scores. Such a comparison is a data-driven reason for the sponsor to consider having you perform the same great work you did for your other clients.

THE JDA ADVANTAGE: With our monthly updates, you will always have the most recent data available. Quickly knowing that a plan is in trouble, and who to reach out to will give you a better chance of locating a floundering plan before its advisor is aware something is wrong.

Using 5500 Data for Offensive and Defense Business Development (Part 2): Finding Your Target

Now that the east coast is covered in snow, it’s the perfect time to continue my series on Prospecting the Federal Form 5500, this time focusing on how to find the targets you identified in the first post of this series.

With hundreds of thousands of plans out there, it can be hard to find those plans that are right for you to reach out to. Instead of spending time, effort, and even money contacting leads with little chance of conversation, you need to focus your attention on leads that would be more receptive to your approach.

WHAT ARE RED FLAGS?

Red flags are a series of indicators the experts at Judy Diamond Associates identified to aid in locating “in trouble” plans. These red flags not only identify a potential issue in a plan, they also act as tags which can be searched for. Which 19 separate Red Flags to choose from, it is easy to tailor one’s research. Included in our red flags are:

• High Average Account Balance
• Corrective Distribution Issued
• Insufficient Fidelity Bond Coverage
• Highest Admin Fees

For more on our red flags, check out Michael Iapalucci’s outstanding new series focusing on our Judy Diamond Associate’s red flags.

PLAN SCORES

Knowing how a plan stacks up against other plans in a state or industry can be critical in identifying trends in your market. Therefore, having access to tools that quickly aid in plan comparison is a must! Plan scores provide you with seven metrics by which a plan can be compared to other plans. Additionally, JDA includes an overall umbrella score for a more high-level analysis. These scores help you understand the landscape around the plan so that you are better able to develop your pitch, or guide your business development efforts.

ADVANCED SEARCH

Now that you know what your current clients look like, you can use the advanced search feature to find other companies that match! This may seem a challenge since there are over 450 fields of data in a 5500 form. There are many options including Participant or Asset Total, to specific Red Flags, to Broker or Vendor Names. However, the advanced search box allows you to quickly narrow the field of leads from hundreds of thousands to a more manageable number of perfect leads.

PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKING

Knowing how a plan performs against other plans very helpful. It is a good idea to research a plan to determine if they really are a good lead for you. Performance-based benchmarking is a great way to accomplish this. Identifying a plan that historically underperforms plans in your region or your own book of business helps you focus your attention.

THE JDA ADVANTAGE:

These are just a few of the tools within Retirement Plan Prospector Prospector Plus tool designed to bring the experience of the JDA Team to your office. These tools are easy to learn, quick to use, and, most importantly, they provide results. There is a reason our clients stay with us year after year.

Using 5500 Data for Offensive and Defense Business Development (Part 1)

This article is the first in a five-part series devoted to helping you more effectively use the 5500 for prospecting. By the end of this series, you will learn:

• Steps to locate viable new business
• Defense strategies for your book of business
• How to approach your first meeting with a potential client

Identify your Clients

There are over 1 million ERISA qualified plans active nationwide each year. Nearly 800,000 plans in the retirement space alone. Finding the plans that fit well into your business model can seem like a daunting task. The first step in business development is often research. Here are 3 questions to ask yourself:

Who Are My Current Clients?

Knowing who you currently work with is a great indicator of where you should be looking for new business. Consequently, as no one knows your client’s as well as you, it is always a good idea to dig deeper and see if there are unifying traits that you may not be aware of. The 5500 form provides a ton of information that, when analyzed, can reveal trends and traits that may not have been uncovered by your face-to-face interactions.

What Are My Strengths?

Properly identifying your skill set is imperative when planning your prospecting. Perhaps you are a good educator and skilled at letting employees know the value of their plan. Maybe you are a data wonk and are skilled at identifying trends in large pools of data. You may have spent years in the 401(k) market and are known in your region for strong 401(k) performance.

Who Looks Like My Current Customers?

A good place to start are those categories of sponsors that are similar to what you work with and blend well with your strengths. Therefore, if you can find sponsors who resemble your client base, sponsors that also may have an unhealthy plan, you have yourself a beginning of a great lead list.

THE JDA ADVANTAGE:

The Retirement Plan Prospector database was designed not only as a lead generation service but as a tool to help you identify trends in large datasets.

Find the second post in this series Here!