How AI Is Driving Organic Growth Opportunity, Accountability
Add another item to the list of how artificial intelligence is promising to help advisory practices: boosting organic growth.
According to panelists at Orion’s annual Ascent conference in San Diego, AI-backed tools are not just surfacing leads but also helping with follow-up, accountability and expanding wallet share among those who turn into clients.
“Advisors that are really embracing and understanding how AI and technology can help with organic growth,” said Andina Anderson, head of Cetera’s RIA Blueprint advisor platform.
She pointed to Cetera’s Growth360 program that uses AI to help generate leads and then follow through.
“It gives them a pipeline that is already formed and that they can work with,” she said. “It’s also really thinking about these value growth triggers and then thinking and then helping advisors identify what’s the next step, and making sure that they stay accountable to those next steps.”
Charles Goldman, executive chair of the board for Orion and moderator of the panel, said he met with AI lead generator FINNY AI at the Orion conference (FINNY is one of the firm’s partners).
“The amount of information they have on all of us already is incredible,” Goldman said.
FINNY, which raised funding last year, was just one of the lead-generation firms at the conference pitching its services. Snappy Kraken, also present, said early last year it was using artificial intelligence for a new enterprise-level marketing hub.
Last year, Anderson’s Cetera announced it was partnering with TIFIN AG to bring AI technology to improve organic growth, including syncing with Cetera’s internal data sets. Meanwhile, large RIAs are working with other firms, like Catchlight, for lead generation. And yet another AI lead-generation platform, Cashmere, landed $3.6 million in seed funding in September 2024.
Mike Woods, president and CEO of Denton, Texas-based Primary Wealth Group, has been part of building a successful referral channel through partnering with financial advice author and radio personality Dave Ramsey with his SmartVestor Pro network.
Woods said during the panel session that those referrals have been fruitful, partly because Primary Wealth Group has assembled a cross-generational team—including his daughter, Vice President and Wealth Advisor Megan Johnson—to quickly follow up on client referrals of all types.
“We have people that immediately are on the phone calling; we have texts that go out; we have an automated campaign that runs for a year, a marketing campaign that tracks them, and they just keep drip marketing to them until they say something to us,” he said. “Either they say, ‘go pound sand,’ or ‘yes, fantastic, let’s talk.’ Either response is useful.”
Woods and team, which is affiliated with broker/dealer Cambridge Investment Research, have also started using AI-backed lead generation via Snappy Kraken.
Otherwise, he said the team is in the “early stages” of using AI, with most of its use for notetaking via Zocks, scheduling with GReminders and drafting client scripts with ChatGPT.
More broadly, Woods stressed the need to work with families as a full unit to capture the younger generation, many of whom will be inheriting assets.
“We are actively, aggressively building out that multi-generational family, and we try to create FOMO [fear of missing out],” he said. “We go into meetings with a family where we’re not working with multiple generations of them we mention it and talk about how they’re the anomaly within our firm, and we create FOMO. It’s shocking how powerful that is.”
Anderson agreed with the need to work across generations rather than rely solely on the first generation of clients.
She told the audience of advisors to keep in mind that the next generation of financial advisors shares similarities with the younger clients they’ll be serving.
“Just as the next generation of advisors don’t want to be salespeople, the next generation of your clients don’t want to be sold to,” she said. “You have to really recognize this is not an industry where the wildest marketing or biggest tagline is going to really make a difference.”
Goldman, who had been CEO and chairman of the board at Accenture Federal Services, also reiterated to the audience of advisors the importance of quickly, efficiently, and consistently following up on leads to turn them into clients—whether they come from an AI-driven platform or a more traditional client referral.
“For most advisors, if they ask for a referral, then the client may send an email or something, but then it goes to the bottom of the pile,” he said. “If you don’t have a catcher’s mitt to take that and then sell to that client, I personally have not seen it work.”
He also reminded the audience that landing new clients is simply not easy to come by, according to industry statistics, and takes focus and staffing.
“Growth is scarce, and growth is hard,” he said.