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Dealing with Teams of Advisors

by Lee Kowarski

According to our most recent FA Vision Benchmarking Survey, the average advisor now works on a team with three other investment professionals and two support staff. With over half (53.3%) of advisors working on a team with at least one other advisor, asset managers must adjust how they track and support financial intermediaries.

Most asset managers are not currently set up to be able to effectively support teams:

• Most firms' systems track individual advisors separately from their team, leading to duplicate and inaccurate entries for customer relationship management and sales reporting
• Most firms' Web sites do not allow an advisor to easily share content with another advisor on their team
• Most firms' metrics for wholesalers do not take teams into consideration (e.g. wholesalers are asked to identify their "Top 200" advisors and incented to build business with those individuals)
• Most firms' Web sites do not easily allow a sales assistant to access information about a team's book of business or specific materials for specific advisors on a team

The trend towards teams has only accelerated over the past decade and all asset management firms should look at how they market, sell, and service advisors to see how this can be improved to better support teams. This will require changes to CRM and sales reporting systems, enhancements to Web sites, additional training for wholesalers, and more.