Nitrogen’s Inaugural Advisor Growth Survey Illuminates Winning Behaviors of Hyper-Growth Firms

Over 1,000 advisors participated in industry’s largest firm growth-focused study to date

Nitrogen, the company that is revolutionizing how financial advisors and wealth management firms grow, today released its first annual growth survey. The groundbreaking study contrasts the successful behaviors of hyper-growth firms with those of low-growth wealth management firms across their sales, marketing, and client satisfaction processes. Among the findings, the study identified the top-converting lead generation channels in wealth management during the last 12 months. In the final analysis, first-year Nitrogen growth platform customers were 1.5X more likely to exhibit growth of 21% or more vs. non-customers.

The company surveyed over 1,000 firm executives and advisors across the registered investment adviser (RIA), dual-registered, and broker-dealer channels on topics including technology, marketing, and client engagement activities in an effort to uncover the behaviors that separate fast-growing firms from more stagnant competitors. While the participants identified the same challenges to growth, the behavior of hyper-growth firms (defined as those firms growing at more than 21% annually) differs significantly from that of slow-growth firms.

Key findings include:

• Technology: Hyper-growth firms are much more consistent users of front-office, marketing, risk alignment, proposal generation, and Client Relationship Management (CRM) technology than slow-growth firms.
• Marketing Investment: Hyper-growth firms invest much more aggressively in marketing. Forty percent of hyper-growth firms report spending more than 6% of gross revenue on marketing annually.
• Marketing Channels: After referrals, events—including firm-hosted webinars—are the highest converting channel for hyper-growth firms, followed by paid social media advertising. Slow-growth firms rely almost exclusively on referrals.
• Lead Management: Hyper-growth firms are more than twice as likely to invest in purpose-built lead management software like Nitrogen to guide their client acquisition workflow.

“The harsh reality is that the majority of wealth management firms did not grow organically over the last 12 months, and market volatility has compounded the challenge of growing a firm,” said Craig Clark, Chief Marketing Officer at Nitrogen. “With this research, we were very deliberate to probe specifically into what fast-growing firms are doing differently from slower-growing firms. What we have learned is that wealth firms are absolutely elite at guiding the financial decisions of their clients toward great outcomes. They are, though, not naturally great at marketing and sales and can benefit from emulating the strategies of successful firms.”

Firms using the risk alignment, portfolio analytics, light planning, and proposal generation tools of the Nitrogen growth platform to guide their sales process were found to exhibit a 60% higher chance of being hyper-growth than non-Nitrogen customers.

Clark added: “The firms that are flourishing in this environment are those that market their businesses, take advantage of marketing and sales-oriented technologies like Nitrogen, and above all, they do these things consistently across their entire firm to create scalable, repeatable processes.”

For more information and to view the full survey, go to www.nitrogenwealth.com/growth-survey.

Survey Methodology

One thousand and sixty-five participants were recruited via email, social media, and in-product messages for a study with the description “2023 Firm Growth Survey.” The 50-question online survey of financial advisors and firm executives was conducted in March 2023. In order to be included in the study, the respondents were required to be a financial advisor, a firm owner, or a firm executive. The majority of participants (76.0%) were aged between 35 and 64 years. The majority of respondents were financial advisors who owned their own firm (62.1%), followed by financial advisors who worked within a firm (35.9%), and firm executives (2.1%).

About Nitrogen

Nitrogen is revolutionizing how financial advisors and wealth management firms grow with the launch of Riskalyze in 2011. Today, Nitrogen is the growth platform for wealth management firms, helping advisors turn leads into meetings, meetings into valued clients, and clients into referral champions. The company invented the Risk Number®, built on top of a Nobel Prize-winning academic framework, and is the champion of the Fearless Investing Movement — tens of thousands of financial advisors committed to our mission of empowering the world to invest fearlessly. To learn more, visit NitrogenWealth.com.

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