Be good with numbers. Be better with people.

Relationships in Financial Services, like all relationships, are built on trust and communication. This means your expertise isn't worth much unless your prospects and customers have faith in the value you can bring them. It also makes your ability to connect with people one of your greatest assets.

There are lots of different ways you can cultivate trust. Financial service relationships can last for many years, so naturally, the best long-term approach is to consistently demonstrate that you don’t just understand how to meet your clients’ needs, you’re willing to make them a priority.

But there are steps that you need to take before you can get to that stage. Building an authentic relationship with prospects means establishing a rapport early, alleviating concerns and establishing exactly what value you can provide. And the only way to do that is by understanding their circumstances.

When it comes to something as sensitive as money, there are fewer things more likely to turn a prospect off as an irrelevant sales pitch. If you’re offering something without any knowledge of whether it fits with their professional priorities, personal values or significant life events, the only thing smaller than your chance of landing a client is your chance of keeping them long-term.

So, data is the key. But it’s about the right data. If your information is not current or relevant, then neither is your proposition. It’s why LinkedIn Sales Navigator can play a huge role in improving close rates and speeding up sales cycles.

PayPal gives cold outreach the cold shoulder

Before investing in Sales Navigator, PayPal Australia was spending a lot of time and money on rich data lists of the top 1,000 companies to target. But sales leaders found that the information was either not accurate or not up to date, which resulted in expensive and laborious data scrubbing that slowed down the movement of leads through the funnel.

And even when the data was accurate, very often it left the salesforce with a single contact to build relationship with and attempt to close the deal.

Paul Weingarth, head of field sales at PayPal Australia, says: “We found that our deals were at a higher risk and were taking longer to close as we only had one key contact that we could rely on.”

Because Sales Navigator encourages multi-threading (connecting with multiple contacts in a companys buying committee), PayPal can now engage several contacts in various departments. Sales leaders can also quickly identify the work history and experience of each contact, discovering information that can resonate during the business development communications.

At an investment of $10,000, Weingarth estimates that Sales Navigator brought in at least $300,000 of new business within its first year. In addition to this, the sales cycles at PayPal Australia have been reduced by an average of 25%.   

Central to PayPal’s success was its salesforce’s ability to quickly establish credibility with prospects, which is a trait shared by Wells Fargo Advisors when they implemented Sales Navigator in the US.

Wells Fargo expands their network

With a vast network of financial advisors serving clients in all 50 states, Wells Fargo Advisors found the tool didn’t just help new advisors identify potential relationships, it also allowed senior advisors to stay on top of their extensive networks.

When Wells Fargo Advisors introduced Sales Navigator to its next generation advisors programme, 74% of advisors said it enabled them to reconnect with an existing client and 57% said it helped them start a conversation with a potential new client.

Wells Fargo Advisors identified 712 new client opportunities and onboarded 24 new clients in the first year alone. The new opportunities influenced by Sales Navigator resulted in $4.22 million in new client assets.

Chris Diskin, VP, digital marketing at Wells Fargo Advisors adds: “If a financial advisor is using Sales Navigator, they’ll see when a life event has happened— a change in jobs, etc—and be able to reach out at the right time with the right message, instead of waiting for that client to reach out to them.”

When you live or die by the strength of your relationships, the right data can be the difference between commitment and client apathy. And because Sales Navigator enables those within financial services to access more relevant information, we’ve found it generates 13% more pipeline and 28% larger deal sizes, influencing an average of 50% of all revenue generated.

To learn how to grow your sales pipeline through Sales Navigator, download our short eBook and discover how you can optimise relationship building with your financial services clients using LinkedIn.