Bluespring Wealth Partners, a support platform for independent RIAs and subsidiary of Kestra Holdings helmed by President David Canter, has launched a program aimed at helping partner firms attract more—and more likely-to-convert—leads, while reducing the time it takes to get from introduction to onboarding.
Bluespring Blueprint for Growth is a four-track program focused on marketing and lead generation. Six Bluespring partner firms have signed up to develop custom marketing campaigns with the in-house marketing team, receive marketing coaching and content creation support from FiComm Partners, partner with Catchlight.ai to optimize lead generation and learn sales strategies and tactics from The Collaborative.
“We’re really bringing best-of-breed partners together to work with us in a coordinated and thoughtful fashion because we’re really keen on understanding how we’re going to move the needle here for our partners,” said Canter. “Investors need help, they just don’t always know where to find it. What this is trying to do is connect those investors with advisors who can help them.”
The firm spoke with a number of potential partners before selecting FiComm, a marketing and PR firm serving independent wealth managers that won the 2022 WealthManagement.com Industry Award for Digital Campaign of the Year, as well as The Collaborative, a “human behavior-based” coaching, professional development and marketing firm, and Catchlight.
The partnership with Catchlight will give firms access to AI-enabled software that can parse potential prospects and identify those most likely to convert, while identifying personal data points beyond basic demographics for more tailored pitches. The technology, launched by Fidelity Labs, is trained on more than 100,000 conversions and has aggregated more than 2.5 billion data points, according to the firm.
“It’s not just lead optimization using AI,” said Canter. “It’s also good ol’ focusing on who those leads are and where those opportunities are in the pipeline today.”
The program is integrated within the Bluespring platform and will be monitored, assessed and tweaked before becoming available to Bluespring’s entire network of 21 partner firms.
“Blueprint for Growth is an end-to-end solution that integrates each step of the business development process, addressing ongoing issues that RIAs face,” Bluespring COO Angela Osborne said in a statement. “These include rising client acquisition costs alongside declining prospect-to-client conversion rates, and the juggling of disparate tools that focus on individual parts of the lead-generation journey with no comprehensive structure tying the elements together. As an integrated B2C solution, the Blueprint for Growth program will accelerate growth and build efficiencies within the entire Bluespring network.”
Canter said the program was developed after looking around at what peers are doing and finding many firms rely on brand-building, marketing and luck. He said Bluespring wanted to build a more holistic approach bringing together skills and approaches often overlooked by the industry at large.
“How to figure out what leads already exist in a firm's pipeline,” he said. “How do you get advisors better at telling the story? How do you get advisors more equipped to close leads and do so in a prompt manner? And then, what's the best way of telling that story to the marketplace through digital and other media?”
Based in Austin, Bluespring completed nine acquisitions adding nearly $4 billion in client assets last year and appears to have taken a beat in 2023 to focus on organic growth initiatives—but Canter said the firm is still pursuing M&A and to expect news on that front before the end of the year.
“We’re focused on four things that I’m really excited about,” he said. “Finding talent, retaining talent, helping them to succeed and grow organically, and inorganic growth through M&A.”
Bluespring doesn’t disclose total assets, but the median AUM among its 21 firms is around $750 million, according to Canter. The firm is one of six Kestra subsidiaries with a collective $185 billion in client assets across more than 2,000 financial professionals.
Kestra’s Grove Point Financial, with $15 billion in assets, is set to be sold to Atria Wealth Solutions later this year.