Research from Gartner shows that 84% of sales leaders see effectively cultivating their organization’s tech stack as a key to meeting revenue targets. So how can you ensure you’re optimizing your tech stack to meet key business goals?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I’m your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Here to discuss this topic is Jonathan, or JB Belair, the vice president of recruiting technology solutions at Osaic Wealth. Thank you for joining us, Jonathan. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Jonathan “JB” Belair: Thank you for that and thanks so much for having me on the podcast today. My name is Jonathan, or JB Belair as everyone calls me. I’m the VP of our recruiting technology here at Osaic, and Osaic is a large broker-dealer. In my specific role, I look to help our sales team better recruit financial advisors who are looking to join our firm. And just to lay that down, so everyone knows exactly what we do here. In terms of my experience and background, oh my goodness, I have been in technology longer than I like to publicly admit. Sometimes in the front end, also in the back end, and in development. But, part of my background is also being a financial advisor. I’m unique to this role because I get to talk about technology. How financial advisors can come to our firm here at Osaic, have a really great experience, but also I can rely on my experience as a financial advisor and still am a financial advisor. That’s a little bit about what I do. It’s been about 15 years now since I’ve been in this industry, fully registered as well as a broker. Also as an investment advisor myself. In addition to that, my responsibility really extends beyond that as well to help manage some of the technology that’s used in our enablement team.
To ensure that our recruiting efforts are both effective and innovative for our, what we would call our clients, which are recruits looking to join the firm here. Also, I help articulate our Osaic technology story to prospective financial advisors or financial professionals. It’s the industry term we use just so they can understand what we have to offer and also so that they’re with us, which is a firm that really prioritizes having that advisor-centric technology, and tools available for them to help them service their clients grow their big book of business, and, of course, thrive.
SS: JB, one of the things that caught my attention was on your LinkedIn. You mentioned that your expertise per your introduction is in harnessing technology to drive innovation. I’d love to understand from you, what are some best practices for curating an effective enablement tech stack?
JB: Absolutely, that’s a great question. When it comes to enabling a tech stack—and I am full of anecdotes left and right—I tell everyone it takes a village, and it really does. But, one of the key things is making sure that it aligns with your business objectives. You want to make sure you have your goal defined, right? Ensuring that the technology that you’re looking at—in this case, Highspot—really lines up with one, our firm’s objectives. What we’re looking for in growth, and also efficiency. We have to also make sure that we have stakeholder buy-in as well as another important thing. You want to make sure that you involve those key stakeholders from across different parts of the firm to ensure that one, we have this for our use in recruiting. But, is there a cross-departmental need as well, right? Do we have other parts of our firm that could also benefit from this?
So that was a note, sneaking that into later down in our podcast where we talk about why we chose Highspot, but that’s one of the pieces. I think it’s also, from a best practice, good to prioritize integration and compatibility—that’s a big one. We all know as larger firms, typically, we use our CRM tools and we have different automation tools.
We want to make sure that Highspot, as I say, plays nice in the sandbox. That’s important, because if we lose your tool, then we don’t have any integrations. It’s not going to do us any good, honestly, at the end of the day. But also, some other best practices in there are making sure that you can focus on the user experience as well. It’s important to us to have tools that are intuitive and user-friendly so that we know then that adoption among employees—whether it’s our group or around the firm—will easily get on board with that. But, also, there’s training and support as well. I certainly would say that I’m a Highspot pro. Debbie DeLuca on my team is also the Highspot pro of the team, hands down. And she definitely does training with some of our other groups, that’s another piece of it. But outside of that, some of the other pieces where I make suggestions are the cost-effectiveness. What is the ROI on the tool that you’re looking for?
There’s some scalability and flexibility, as well. It’s just as important that your tool is able to scale up and scale down with us, right? Because that helps when we think of things like, let’s say, future-proofing some of our tools. As we grow, we want to make sure that tools can expand. That’s an important part of the puzzle.
Another couple of things that I would say, too, everyone does it: go to Yelp, go to Google, take a peek at the reviews, and see what people have to say. You can usually tell pretty quickly if people are having a good experience with the tool or if they’re not having a good experience because if there’s one thing we all do in our Reddit culture is there’s a subreddit on everything.
SS: No, there definitely is, and correct me if I’m wrong, I believe you guys were using a different solution prior to Highspot. What were some of the major challenges that your team was faced with during that time?
JB: There was a lack of a hub for information. We know that one of the reasons why our sales enablement team is so effective is we can have a hub for us, right? And the other platform didn’t allow us to create customized pages that could serve as centralized hubs if you will. That really makes it difficult to organize and access collateral and other information in ways that is really intuitive for the people who need to get their hands on it.
In addition to that, we had limited analytics with that tool. It wasn’t built to be a sales enablement tool per se—air quote that one for those of you who can’t see me. I think it served a lot of purposes. It did some things well, but it didn’t do anything really well, and that can be an issue for us in particular. We didn’t have a great Salesforce integration with that tool—full disclosure, we use Salesforce. So that was very important for how we look at our recruits, and keep information, and how we track contacts—that was a really important part of the puzzle as well.
Also, Pitch analytics. If we sent something out from the other tool, we weren’t getting anything back. It just wasn’t detailed enough, so that can also certainly hinder our effectiveness at measuring how we’re trying to engage, but also that helps us understand what’s landing and not landing well. So, that’s challenging. If you can’t understand if the Pitches are making sense to whoever you’re sending that to, that could be a problem. So those are some of the pieces, but also it just seemed a little disjointed, because we didn’t have that integration to Salesforce.
Again, we use that as our CRM here, and that just made it difficult because we lost out on the integrations and that flow we want to have. Also, I would say, just the transparency across the firm. Cause we certainly work with other teams in this role and not having that ability to see, “Oh, Hey, it looks like JB sent out a Pitch on X, Y, Z.” That can be really helpful to another person having a conversation. And we didn’t have that in our system.
SS: Absolutely. And so it sounds like there was a really good impetus for change. And, obviously, you all decided to partner with Highspot—thank you. Since implementing Highspot, how have you been able to overcome some of these previous challenges and really drive innovation?
JB: It’s industry-leading technology, right? So you all at Highspot offered cutting-edge tech that really positioned us at the forefront of our industry. In the enablement world, if you will, we certainly have firms that we compete against. I don’t know technically who uses Highspot, but we certainly know who does not use Highspot, I’ll tell you that. Having some advanced features and capabilities was critical to ensure that we could be in that leading technology spot, right? That’s part of our brand identity as well as our firm. We’re not trying to be the stodgy old, broker-dealer that sounds like a law firm, we want to be industry-leading with technology. We know that’s where people are going, and we’re looking to attract those types of professionals to our firm. So that kind of helps in it, but also those enhanced analytical insights that we get, that’s important, right? That was a major driver and the need for us to have more robust tools, deeper insights into our recruits, what they’re looking at, what’s landing well, what doesn’t land well, and really the analytics.
Highspot helps us with that, but also it helps us stay organized, which is a great thing. So for those of you who don’t have Highspot right now, we love the search field because it actually uses AI. So when people are in there looking for collateral, they can type in a word that they’re searching for. They say, “Oh, I know that this piece had this phrase, right?” It helps connect those things together, but also those enhanced analytics, when I hit on that topic. It allowed us to open up other pieces that people didn’t know were available. So, maybe there’s someone in a different part of the business who said, “Hey, I didn’t know that we had this specific collateral piece, right?”
Because maybe it doesn’t touch that group per se on a regular basis. So that helps, it creates more engagement. But also, at the end of the day, the biggest thing, of course, was the seamless integration into our ecosystem. That’s an important piece of the puzzle. If it can’t integrate with what we’re doing, we can’t get that into our CRM—which is Salesforce on our end—it just is not going to do us any good.
SS: I could not agree more. JB has not been compensated for the things that he’s saying, he just really loves the platform and is using it in a phenomenal way. So, thank you for sharing that. Now, Osaic has experienced a lot of change this year, including a rebrand following a few acquisitions. What are your best practices for driving, as you call them, recruits to have a consistent experience with you all amidst all of this change? And how are you leveraging Highspot to help?
JB: Absolutely, that’s a great question and an interesting one. We went through a big rebrand, so we used to be multiple firms. We brought everyone together into one Osaic, right? And Highspot has played a really important role, especially on the recruiting side of the puzzle. Because just like anything, when you hear a new brand, you need to have great collateral. You have to have the Sales Plays and other things that you can go in and Pitches that we can get out so we can talk about who we are.
As much as we’d like to think that everyone knows who we are—maybe they recognize one of our old firms like Woodbury, or Royal Alliance, and those firms, maybe that was in the back of their mind. We need to make sure that we can talk about our new firm, right? Osaic, who are we? But also that helps us bridge the timeline for those people who may not be aware that we’ve been around more than two years. We’re not the nucleus of the block, we just brought the thing. Basically, we took all the pieces together to make a really nice firm from all of our other broker-dealers. We had certain strengths from different firms and we brought that all together to create and curate a great experience for financial advisors.
One of the ways is really a unified voice. When we send out collateral, it’s consistent and it has the right brand voice on it, which is important, especially during a rebrand. It’s essential we have that in all of our communications because we want to be really consistent with that. Highspot helps us because one thing, I’ll tell you—and this is for anyone listening, whether it’s our industry or, pharmaceuticals, whoever it may be—what we didn’t want to have was people using old collateral they saved on their desktop. I’ll send them out this piece, and maybe it had our old branding. Because what does that do? It creates confusion because they’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re Osaic, but why are you sending me something from Advisor Group? I thought your name was Osaic.” So, it helps that just from a procedural way, because if they’re sending it from Highspot, they’re sending it from Osaic. We know it’s the most up-to-date version.
Another benefit, again, I’m not paid—I do accept free coffee, and I will drink coffee all day long—is that as we update pieces on our end, it updates in Highspot itself, which is great. So we have the most current brand that’s out there. We certainly have a marketing team, we have a design team, and when they make those changes it’s uploaded to a tool that we have. And then from there, it’s updated in real-time in Highspot. So that’s important, but I think also Highspot can be used not only just as an enablement platform, but you can use it to help train as well.
Remember, the cool thing is, you’ve got those Spots that you can make. And I’ll tell you a story: interestingly enough—and this is a best practice for anyone out there who wants to tune into this part of the podcast—when we originally created our Spot, we thought about it from the standpoint of ‘what we want to see in enablement’, right? What is important to us? What do we want to see? It was interesting, we went to your conference out in Seattle, which was really fun—big plug for anyone who has not gone, Spark was super fun, go if you get a chance—and we had some time to sit down with Katie and Elise. Look at our spot, and speak with someone, one of your professionals there who could give us feedback and advice on our Spot. What we learned was, and I will take full responsibility for this one, the light bulb went off in 60 seconds. I’m like, oh my gosh, we created this for us to use. We didn’t create it for the end user.
So, we went back to the drawing board, we refined what we did, and we learned very quickly that when it was speaking to the end user, that’s where we had the liftoff. That’s where everything started coming together because then our recruiters could go in and say, “Oh, hey, this is the spot we fit in. Here’s the information we need.” So that was one of the pieces to how I think that surprisingly through this rebrand, you can actually use Highspot for a little bit of training because we can create those pages and put those pieces there with a narrative as well to help out with that.
Also, Playbooks. It’s another thing you can do in there as well to guide you through different scenarios. There are a lot of ways that you can manage a rebrand, it was so exciting. But it’s, again, one of the kind of bringing these comments to a close. It’s so important that it’s consistent with what we do to drive home our brand message: who we are, what we stand for, and what the thematics of our firm are. I’ll tell you, that was the whole point of our rebrand, is making sure that people knew who we were. Without that consistency, that training, and all the other support, it wouldn’t be as successful as it’s been.
SS: I love it, and thank you for the plug. I do hope you’re coming out to Spark ’24 in October this year again. But, I want to talk about Plays, because you touched on it just now and you have achieved an impressive 67% adoption of Sales Plays. I’d love to understand what are your best practices for building effective Sales Plays and then how are you driving adoption of those with your teams?
JB: Absolutely. So one thing that I will tell anyone—and this is whether it’s a Play or anything else you’re doing—if you can gamify the process and make it fun, people will get on board. If you can make it a challenge maybe there’s a—, and full disclosure, we have certainly run little competitions with different groups about this. Whenever it’s a game people get excited and they really get into it, so I found that has worked well. But as it comes to building effective Sales Plays, I’ve got, again, Debbie DeLuca, who’s on our team, who’s amazing.
She is the absolute pro at making these Sales Plays. But, first and foremost, you have to start with a clear objective. What is your goal? Defining that goal for each of the Sales Plays, whether it’s to introduce our brand story or adoption of messaging to support a specific product or initiative we have; that’s important. You’ve got to have a clear objective as the first point. But then also along that, you need to make sure it aligns with the business strategy itself. Where does that fit into those puzzle pieces? Super important. Number one, that clear objective. Number two, I would say is understanding who your audience is, right? So we can tailor Plays to different roles and teams, because maybe the recruiting team may have a very different Play than our engagement team, or maybe one of our product, professional groups, or our retirement plan sales consulting group, right? So, it’s going to look different. It’s always important again, to remember who your audience is as you think about that. We like that Highspot allows us to really create rule-specific Plays as well. So, that means that everyone has that relevant and actionable content, right? But also have their persona focus in there as well, right?
So, customize the messaging: who is it to, who is the end user? An example of that would be if I’m talking about our technology to an existing person at our firm. That message may sound different to a recruit. What voice are they looking to hear? But also, we do work with third-party recruiters as well. When we consider that, the voice is a little bit different because they’re hearing their clients. They’re our client, per se, because they contract through us. Their client is actually that end advisor. So that voice is a little bit different. So that’s certainly nice, but also leveraging the guidance, make sure it’s structured in there, what are the step-by-step pieces, right? Clear step-by-step instructions are important.
Also, if you can put scenarios and use cases in there, that’s always helpful as well. And of course, it wouldn’t be Highspot if you didn’t have the ability to integrate some cool stuff—media, photos, presentations, PDFs, those kinds of things, those go a long way, right? If I give you a play and it’s just a Word doc, let’s be real—you’re losing interest in five seconds, you’re done. But, if we’ve got pictures and other things in there, that also helps to engage users, but again on top of that, it’s a support piece. I like to call it support collateral, I would say that goes in there.
So we can link in pieces from our collateral library, templates, scripts, and things like that we have that make it nice. But also, in addition to that, we can go back and look at the performance, too. Are those Plays, are they hitting well with the audience, or are they not? Because if they’re not, we might have to go back and figure out, okay, if we have a 2% open rate, what are we doing wrong? What messaging isn’t getting there? And I would tell anyone, “Hey, the best thing to do is reach out to one of those people that you’re literally creating the Play for.” You may be surprised—what you think they want to hear and what they actually want to hear are two different things, but analytics help. If you have to swallow your pride from it and be like, “Okay, I thought I was right, clearly I was wrong, let me make the phone call to escrow, what do you want to hear?”
Along with that, some best practices in the Plays is facilitating the collaboration. We can collaborate across teams on there, too, which is great. I know that was a short question, but a lot of details on that one. Again, I’ve got a great team of people that I work with and we love Highspot, obviously, so one of the best ways to use this tool, is it needs to have a feedback loop on these things, right? That’s how you can really refine it and make it great because that’s the whole purpose of us using this: to engage, educate, and do everything we do.
SS: Absolutely. Now, I want to talk about the impact that this has had, and you guys have seen some really impressive increases in quota attainment and win rate. Can you tell us about some of the business impact that you’ve been able to achieve since implementing Highspot?
JB: We have had—this last quarter, into this year—some of the best recruiting that we’ve had on record, which is great. Now, there are a lot of people who can take credit for that, right?
There are a lot of people who contribute to that goal, but I can tell you that what we’ve noticed is you can achieve higher efficiency in what you’re doing by using Highspot. Because, now if we have recruiters or other groups throughout our firm who want to leverage the tool, they don’t have to shoot in the dark to find 50 places and find the collateral or the tools they need in their role.
That helps, because there are a lot of hands in the cookie jar when it comes to bringing financial advisors over, and in my role specifically. On a regular basis, we have to work with a lot of different groups. That’s one thing that’s important. It also increases the kind of quota attainment itself, we know when people are engaging with us, and we know when they’re not because we have analytics to that. If we see someone that’s engaged, that’s a way better way for us to spend our time. Let’s talk to that recruit, let’s continue the conversation. Or, maybe we’ve had someone who opens up emails or they just look at it and glance. Maybe it’s time for a phone call, right? So a couple ways [it can help] is one, it can help us gauge is the lead cooler than we think, or is the lead warmer than we think? How do we want to take those actions? It also helps us drive higher win rates because we have those data driven insights, that’s important. I know we’ve talked about it a lot, but those advanced analytics to help our team understand what’s important to that person they’re speaking with and that’s across the firm. As an example of the recruiting side, are they interested in hearing about our wealth management offering, maybe it’s our succession and acquisition planning we have, are there services that we have that they’re really interested in?
We can plug into that, have a great conversation and go from there. It does help us achieve those higher win rates, but also just from a success standpoint. We’ve seen, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. There’s a lot of people in our industry, in our market, in our model, in our — even who compete with us, but we’re seeing really great recruiting success. I think part of that is our ability to help drive consistent messaging, have those collateral, but also share why people would want to see themselves with let’s say Osaic as a firm. That takes a story, it takes collateral, it takes teams, it takes consistency. I think when you add those all up, those contribute to that.
But again, the other important part as we think about that too, is that helps drive revenue. There’s that scalability factor, all those things play into that success. We’re lucky that we’ve been able to count on Highspot to be part of that. As we say, it’s not about the amount of touchdowns you get. It’s all about moving the players down the field and Highspot helps more efficiently move the players down the field, because that’s what you can control. And we know that leads to better win rates.
SS: JB, last question for you. As you look to the future, how are you continuing to drive innovation through technology at Osaic and how do you plan to leverage Highspot to help?
JB: Absolutely. I love tech, I could talk about it all day. But for us, as I think about ways that we’re continuing to drive that innovation, Highspot allows us to be user-centric with what we’re doing. And that’s important, whether it’s the internal user who’s using it on the inside, but also the user-centric piece on the receiving end.
When we’re talking to those recruits that could be our existing clients, who would be financial advisors, and professionals who are already with us as a whole, right? Having that technology allows us to continually refine what we’re doing, and scaling up and scaling down is a big piece of that. We are lucky enough that what I would tell people, the analogy that I use when I’m talking about our story here is, there’s a lot of firms who— whether they’re larger than us or smaller than us—we all have similar capabilities, more often than not. Let’s be real, right? We all know that. You’ve got 20 different coffee shops, they all serve coffee. But, what makes us stand out? One of the things we’ve done with our technology is make sure that instead of putting things together with band-aids—I like to say fishing line, and hope it works—one of the things we did over these past few years is we ripped out the wiring, we ripped out the plumbing on the house, we did the hard work first. Part of that was also us bringing on tools like Highspot, because when we have a better technology infrastructure as a whole, these things are cool because we can scale up, we can also scale them down.
The other piece to that too, as I look to drive that innovation, are those tailored experiences as well? That’s important. I’ve seen emails from some firms and it’s the exact same thing. I think to myself, how interesting would you be as the end user to get three of the same emails from three different firms? How crazy is that? We can create that tailored experience, and It also helps us show that we’re listening as well, because if you’re leaving the firm, you’re not leaving because you don’t have anything better to do with your time. There’s a reason, so let us help tailor that to your experience. But also, innovation-wise, we can really drive dynamic content as well, which is important that adapts to our users journey. Again, that could be internal or external when we use that as well. But, I think a lot of it can be summed up with one big thing: I’m looking to foster that culture of innovation, to help carry that torch across our teams and throughout the firm. I’m lucky enough that, quite literally from our CEO and our president down, they are so supportive about empowering us to create that innovation. We want to be the technology leaders in our industry, right in that broker-dealer space.
So there’s a lot of things I’m really looking forward to when it comes to innovation. Those are just a couple of them on driving that innovation. But, for anyone out there, even if you don’t have Highspot now and you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Hey, we got a different tool.” Just know that tailored experience, the analytics, the ability to, scale up and scale down and all the integrations for us at Osaic, we found that is where the magic happens and that translates directly to our win rates and success in other areas. We can create a really clear dotted line from A to B, and understanding what that ROI is as important as well. As much as I can talk about——, if you ask me, I’m going to say everything is fantastic. We’re making great progress and having great wins. We’ve still got to back it up with some metrics, too, and that’s where it comes in, on the analytic side. I would just I would do all emojis hey, here’s our whole scorecard. Everything’s an emoji. But usually people want some more tangible numbers to be alongside that as well.
SS: J. B., thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time. Thank you again.
JB: Thanks so much for your time, it’s been a pleasure.
SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
