Ep 201: Building A Scalable Advisor Marketing Engine That Eliminates Reliance On Rainmakers Or Referrals with John Wernz

Financial Advisor Success

Michael Kitces

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2020

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

John Wernz is the former Chief Marketing Officer for Wealth Enhancement Group, an independent RIA based in Minneapolis that has nearly $20 billion in assets under management for nearly 20,000 affluent clients. Under John’s leadership, Wealth Enhancement Group went from nearly $1 billion AUM to $20 billion—and attracted more than $1.5 billion of net new client assets in the past year alone.

John joins me today to discuss in depth how he built the organic marketing engine at his firm, why direct mail became a foundation in their growth strategy, and how they leverage third-party data sources to better target marketing initiatives. He’ll also share why the firm uses a centralized sales team for inquiries, how he has structured a thirty-person marketing team to manage all of the different marketing channels, and why bird watchers make for their best client base.

For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/201

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner,
0:08.4	speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors
0:13.6	navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from
0:18.9	leading industry consultants about how to break through to the
0:22.0	next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.
0:27.9	Welcome to the 201st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast
0:34.7	is John Werns. John is the former chief marketing officer for Wealth Enhancement Group, an independent RIA based
0:40.5	in Minneapolis that has nearly 20 billion of assets under management for nearly 20,000 affluent
0:45.9	clients.
0:47.3	What's unique about John, though, is the way he's scaled wealth enhancement group's
0:51.2	organic growth through marketing over the past decade, as the firm has grown from
0:55.0	barely one billion of AUM to nearly 20 billion, attracting more than 1.5 billion of net new client assets
1:02.9	in the past year alone, not including acquisitions. In this episode, we talk in depth about how John
1:10.3	built the organic marketing engine at wealthalth Enhancement Group.
1:13.3	Why Direct Mail became a foundation for the firm's growth strategy.
1:17.4	How Wealth Enhancement Group leveraged its third-party data sources to enrich its client personas to better target its marketing.
1:23.7	Why the firm uses a centralized sales team to field all prospect inquiries before handing them off
1:28.7	as leads for local advisors to close and service, and how John structures what is now a 30-person marketing
1:34.9	team to execute across all of wealth enhancement groups marketing channels.
1:39.3	We also talk about the economics and metrics of advisor marketing.
1:43.4	How John evaluates the lifetime value of a
1:45.5	client to the firm and why the company will happily spend more than $5,000 to get one new
	...

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