Leveraging LinkedIn to Find and Engage High Net Worth Individuals

Featuring:

Josie Gaba, Customer Success Manager with LinkedIn

Kris DeBonville, Regional VP and Wholesaler with Capital Group

Josie Gaba: Hello everyone. I’m Josie Gaba, customer success manager with LinkedIn.

Today we’re going to talk about how financial professionals can leverage LinkedIn to find and engage high net worth individuals.

You may be familiar with LinkedIn; you may even use it to stay connected to friends and colleagues. But did you know that high net worth individuals are more highly engaged on the platform than the average user?

High net worth individuals have two times the connections and are more reachable through InMail – they check messages 84% more often than the average user.

Despite this active engagement, 71% of high net worth individuals on LinkedIn are not yet connected to a financial advisor or wealth manager.

We think this represents an untapped opportunity for financial professionals.

Joining me today is Kris DeBonville, regional vice president and wholesaler with Capital Group, home of American Funds. He’s going to show financial professionals like you how to maximize your efforts on LinkedIn and use it to build relationships with the people you seek.

Take it away, Kris.

Kris DeBonville: As Josie mentioned, my name is Kris DeBonville. I’m a regional vice president wholesaler for Capital Group|American Funds in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

And today I wanted to share a few examples of how advisors can utilize the free version of LinkedIn to help build their businesses.

The most important thing to note before we get started is that all broker-dealers have different rules and restrictions, so please consult your compliance department with any specific questions.

Now, before you start using LinkedIn, I think it’s important to make sure you have your profile set up, including both a profile and banner photo as you can see in both photos here. Try to use a professional photo if possible. And make sure you are the only one in the photo. I’ve seen a few examples of advisors using either a family photo or a team photo, but use one that is just you. This is your personal page, and many people may look to your LinkedIn to try to see what you look like prior to a meeting.

Also make sure you have your name, your title and, as you can see here in “About,” this is your summary. The summary should be a quick, concise biography of who you are and what you do. Now the one thing I know about the summary is that I do believe that it should be written in first person. 

Oftentimes, I see an advisor copy and paste their biography from their website, which is often written in third person. So if it is, just copy it over and then retype it, or just change it so it’s written in first person. 

Once you have your profile set up, that’s when you can start connecting with friends, family, relatives, clients, prospects and centers of influence. Once you start to build your network, that’s when you can start utilizing it to help build your business.

Once you've completed your profile, you can start using LinkedIn to generate new introductions, identify prospects and connect to the next generation. 

The first example of the way you can use LinkedIn to grow your business is by creating more introductions from your current client base and centers of influence. For this example, I'm going to use one of my colleagues, Holly. 

Holly is an employee of Capital Group working in LA. If Holly was a client of mine, and I was a financial advisor, I'm sure I'd ask Holly for an introduction to maybe one or two of her colleagues as a referral. The problem is, Holly might not know who I want to meet as a potential referral.

Here’s what LinkedIn allows you to do: You'll see that I'm already connected with Holly, noted by the “1st” next to her name. That means we're first-degree connections. 

Underneath the ”1st,” you'll see 500-plus connections. If I click on that, this will give me a list of all of the people that Holly is connected to. 

Now, over 300 people is too many for me to go through and try to identify the next best prospect. But I'm looking for someone specific: current employees or colleagues of Holly's that work at Capital Group. Along the top, you'll see these filters. I'm going to click on “Current companies” and type in “Capital Group.” 

And you'll see that this reduces the number of search results down to 46. Forty-six is a much more manageable number when trying to identify an introduction or a referral. 

For this example, I'm going to use Griffin. When I click on his profile, I will get a notification that I viewed his profile. Now, this is OK, because Griffin can see that we have a common connection in Holly. So, I don't see any issue with viewing somebody's profile and them seeing that I viewed them. 

One way to prevent multiple notifications if you're trying to gather information about that person is to utilize a feature in the “More” menu. You'll see to the right of Griffin's picture: “Connect,” “View in Sales Navigator,” and the word “More.” 

If I click on “More,” you'll see a drop-down menu with an option to save to PDF. 

What this does is create a resume version of Griffin's LinkedIn profile that I can save to my computer or simply print out and put into my client's folder. So that way, when we have our face-to-face meeting, I've got maybe two or three of these resumes already printed, and I can ask Holly for the introduction to these three, specific people. 

Not “who do you know?” but, more importantly, “how do you know?” becomes the conversation. Utilizing the ability to go through somebody's connections and identifying the next best prospect or introduction can be a very efficient way to ask for those referrals utilizing LinkedIn to identify them.

The second idea that I'd like to share is how to identify the next best prospect. 

So, starting on the homepage of LinkedIn, I'm going to use the search bar on the top left-hand corner, and I'll type in the word: “owner.” What we're going to focus on here are business owners. 

Here, you can see that there are actually 20 million search results that are coming up when I type in the word “owner.” And that is obviously far too many results to scroll through. 

So, along the top, we'll go back to the filters. This time, I'm going to scroll all the way to the right and click “All Filters.” You'll see here there are a lot more fields that I can choose from. 

The first one I'm going to highlight is connections, and I'm going to click ”2nd.” Second means the results will show people that I've at least one common connection with. Secondly, under locations, I want to search the Greater Boston area, where I'm physically located. In the title field, I'll type in: “Owner.” And in industry, we're going to go into: “Medical Practice.” 

So instead of 20 million search results, I now have 104 people that are listed as the owner of a medical service company, that I have at least one common connection to, that are in the Greater Boston area. This becomes your prospecting list. 

Now, you can approach this in any number of ways. You can reach out to your common connection and ask for the introduction. Or simply send them a connection request with an explanation:

Mr. or Mrs. Client or Prospects, "I'm reaching out because I work specifically with business owners to X, Y, and Z," whatever your value proposition is. 

You can also save the search and create a search alert. What will that do? Any time somebody new hits or fits this criteria, you will get an email alert that there's somebody new that matches that criteria for medical service owner in the Greater Boston area that you have at least one common connection to them, so that you can keep up on all the additional prospects that may come into your LinkedIn network. 

The last thing that I'd like to share is a premium version called Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is a tool that was designed to help salespeople identify and track leads. 

Now, you'll notice in the top right-hand corner of my page here, this is still the free version of LinkedIn. You'll see this compass icon with the word “Sales Nav” underneath it. 

If you're not currently subscribed to a premium service, this probably says something like, “Try premium for free.” 

When I click on “Sales Nav,” it'll bring me to a completely different interface. This interface is designed to help you identify those leads, not see posts and post content yourself like the regular interface does. 

Once I'm in Sales Navigator, I'm going to pull up Holly, the example that we used in the first example on how to identify introductions. 

When I look at Holly's profile through Sales Navigator, you'll see it looks a lot different. 

But if I click on her 500-plus connections, I'm again brought to a list of her connections. But what Sales Navigator does is it starts to give you some predesigned filters along the top. You'll see 17 have changed jobs in the past 90 days, 243 have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, etc. 

Along the left-hand side, you'll see all the different filters that you can use to drill down this list in a much more detailed way than you could with the free version of LinkedIn. 

One thing that you can screen for that's not available in the free version are rollover opportunities. 

So, if I click on “All Filters” on the left-hand side, what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at years at current company less than one year. 

I also want to look at years of experience: more than 10 years. 

What this is going to do is give me a filter within Holly's network that shows me the 42 people that have more than 10 years’ industry experience, but who have changed the company they've worked for in the last year. Obviously, this becomes a great source of rollover opportunity to ask Holly for the introduction to. 

Now, a second way to use the Sales Navigator is again like we did in the free version: to generate a list of prospects. Now you may remember that we generated a list of business owners in the Greater Boston area that I had at least a common connection to. We're going to do a search for our business owners again, but a little bit differently. 

Along the top, you'll see the search bar and, to the right of that, you'll see: “All Filters.” If I click “All Filters,” it'll give me the opportunity to look for “Leads” or “Accounts.” Leads are individuals; accounts are companies. We want to find individuals, so we'll click the “Leads” filter. 

The first thing I want to look at – instead of looking at the Greater Boston area – is a specific ZIP code. So, we will go 25 miles from my home. 

Seniority level: We want to look for owners. Years at current company: We want established companies, not ones that have just started off. So, we're going to go with “6 to 10 years” and “more than 10 years.” 

And we're also going to look at company and type, and we want to look at privately held companies, not publicly traded companies. 

And then, lastly, we'll go to Industry, like we did before, and look at “Medical practices.”

This list of 26 business owners of medical practices within 25 miles of my office that have been in existence for over six years becomes that prospecting list. 

You'll also notice that next to some of these names shows “3rd” degree. I did not focus on people I only have a common connection to because Sales Navigator gives you the detailed information of even those third-degree connections – where there are two degrees of separation between you and that person. I do think that this is an opportunity to reach out to those folks and represent yourself as a financial advisor who works with that demographic. 

You can do a list of business owners, C-suite executives. You can do a list of just rollover opportunities. There are endless combinations of lists you can run to help you identify a list of prospects. 

Lastly, again, if you are looking to develop a strategy for connecting to the next generation, you can do that through Sales Navigator as well by connecting to those folks and seeing more detailed information – even if they're a third-degree connection. Through Sales Navigator, you can see a lot more information about those beneficiaries of your best clients, as opposed to doing it through the free version. 

Now, we've shared a lot of information today. What I hope is that you've taken one or two ideas away from this to help you grow your practice in an environment where it's getting harder and harder to acquire new clients and new assets. 

I want to end by thanking each and every one of you for your time in watching this video, but also for your continued support of Capital Group|American Funds. Please let me know how we can help. And I hope you all stay safe, stay healthy. Take care.