The Secrets to Getting More Leads
- Aureko
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Why Sales Efforts Fail
During my career in Business Development, I’ve seen many salespeople falling systematically short of their asset raising targets.
The top three causes I identified are
Not enough leads
Lack of perseverance
Poor conversion rates
Can something be done about it? Absolutely!
The good news? Once you know why your sales efforts fail, you can start influencing the how. Clarity gives you power.
This insight focuses on the first key issue: not having enough leads.
For many years, I asked myself “so where do I start to get more leads? And how many do I need exactly?”
The most successful salespeople I know use a simple framework to think about Asset Raising:
# Leads
x #Meetings/Lead
x Conversion Ratio
x Average Ticket Size
= Asset Raised
To put it simply: if an Asset Manager wants to acquire 10 new clients in a year, assuming a 10% conversion rate and that they handle all meetings to close the deals, they’ll need 100 qualified leads.
It’s that simple, yet vastly underappreciated.
When I finally understood and applied that framework, my life changed.
What About You?
How many leads do you have?
How many new leads did you acquire this year?
And how many should you acquire to stay consistent with your conversion rate and Net New Money target?
Many Asset Managers don’t actually know how many leads they have per sales channel, product, or segment. And even when they do, few use the framework above to check whether their current reality aligns with their asset raising objectives.
Why Getting Leads Is Getting Harder
Simple facts: time has changed, tools have changed, communication has changed.
You can either see it as a nightmare or as an opportunity to make a difference.
Take Switzerland, for example, a major market in Europe for asset raising. In an effort to give end clients access to a wide range of products, regulators have made fund distribution relatively easy. The result? Swiss investors across all segments (Private Banks, Family Offices, Wealth Managers, Pension Funds) are bombarded daily with emails and cold calls.
The rise of AI has only made this worse, with distributors now blasting generic, impersonal messages at scale to potential investors. You are most likely witnessing it yourself in your mailbox. How do you feel? How do you think investors feel?
They no longer pick up the phone, and most emails end up straight in the trash. Reaching out and communicating has become much more challenging.
This leaves you with two options: suffer or adapt and act smarter.
Which do you choose?
Back To Basics
So how does a salesperson find more leads in such a competitive and commoditized industry?
When in doubt, I go back to basics. In that case, Brand and Lead Magnets.
In short, Marketing.
Of course, there are tools like conferences, investor databases, events you can organize. But at the end of the day, if you don’t get your brand and lead magnets right, you won’t be able to attract prospects and scale to systematically reach your targets.
At its core, Marketing is about one thing: getting leads. That’s it! Whatever you do in marketing should serve that single purpose.
The Why of Marketing
Too often, in my conversations with Business Development people “Marketing” is reduced to a website, a newsletter or a social media plan.
But these are only tools.
They are the how, not the why.
The why is your north star.
Your goal is to attract and connect with someone and resonate with their need or desire.
The how is the machinery.
That’s the website, the logo, etc. These are the tactical tools that serve the why.
But here’s the trap: when the why gets blurry, the how takes over. We lose meaning and get lost as we strive to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Markets change. Trends shift. Algorithms evolve overnight.
Only the why (your clear sense of meaning and direction) gives you the right direction.
Marketing isn’t about looking good; it’s about earning resonance.
To earn resonance in a commoditized industry, you need a brand and lead magnets.
How do you build your brand? (Hint: it’s more than a logo)
Building your Brand
Building a brand is not easy. For a very long time, I found it harder than I expected.
Even when I looked at how famous brands described their conception of branding, it was still blurry. While it is interesting to read that for Jeff Bezos a brand is “what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”, it did not tell me what I needed to actually do everyday if I wanted to copy his methodology.
After several years of pondering, here’s what finally clicked for me:
A brand is how you communicate your vision and your values to your targeted prospects.
The people who connect deeply with your vision and values get attracted to you. A good start usually is to find an association with something or someone that is already known and liked and that embodies your values.
Golfers spend $60 on a Nike shirt that costs $5 to make because it connects them to Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer of all time. When buying that t-shirt, golfers identify with Tiger’s abilities, with his journey to become number 1 and stay number 1. It inspires them.
Computer enthusiasts started buying Macs because Steve Jobs dedicated his company to “the crazy ones” who believed they could change the world. Customers who bought a Mac wanted to belong to this community of original people that could potentially change the world.
The beauty of a strong brand is that it attracts customers to you because of how it makes them feel. As branding guru Matt Johnson said “a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism in an easy mode”.
But those brands weren’t always immediate success stories.
One Step at a Time
Picture the early 1970s: Nike isn’t Nike yet. It’s a scrappy outfit called Blue Ribbon Sports, importing shoes from Japan. Adidas and Puma dominate the sports world. Nike has no money, no brand, no reputation. But they had a vision. Anyone can push beyond their limits.
Phil Knight, Nike’s co-founder, had an ingenious idea how to go about it.
The concept of athletes being paid or signed to a shoe deal? Practically unheard of.
Trust had to be earned first, one pair at a time. Even when athletes liked the shoes, Knight still had to convince them to take a chance on a no-name brand with uncertain supply.
So, what did he do?
He went after Steve Prefontaine, the most electrifying runner in the U.S. Knight used everything he had: his relationship through co-founder and coach Bill Bowerman, sheer persistence, and a promise of partnership, not sponsorship!
Prefontaine became Nike’s first real athlete in 1973 (that’s almost ten years after Nike’s creation), not just wearing the shoes, but embodying the rebellious, relentless spirit of the brand. Knight had found someone to associate with that represented Nike’s values.
Everyone starts small. The successful ones persist one step at a time.
If you had to remember one thing from this post, it would be Vision + Values = Victory
By building a brand, you attract people to you.
To bring them one step closer, you need lead magnets.
Building Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a piece of content that gives value to your prospect. An important rule is that it must be free. It either teaches something new or helps see a problem from a different angle.
Ideally, a lead magnet, also called insight, reveals a problem that is significantly impactful. It should be innovative because it uses a fresh approach, and it is a bit risky because it goes against consensus and is too complex for your prospect to replicate easily.
Why does it work?
It gives value away for free.
It gives information competitors could charge for.
That content becomes a magnet, pulling prospects in and making them want to know more.
That’s a new lead. And a new lead is one more prospect!
Here is what happened to my LinkedIn connections since I started writing content as Lead
Magnets after launching Seneko.
As Dale Carnegie once said: “To be interesting, be interested”.
What About You?
If you need to get more leads, then Aureko’s workshop is for you.
Often salespeople or sales manager I speak to tell me “I have got it all covered”.
To which I usually reply “so did Tiger Woods when he was Junior World Champion before turning pro!”. Yet, to become the number one pro in the world, he was eager to improve his skills to perform no matter what. He used several swing coaches to improve his game under the most significant stress.
The result? He was number one in the world for thirteen years (a sports record), won 15 Majors, 82 tournaments and achieved a career Grand Slam.
Who is the workshop for?
Asset Managers looking for their Sales Team to reach systematically their Net New Money target
Wealth Managers who need to find more new clients
A new Salesperson eager to acquire the right foundation for consistent asset raising
Aureko’s workshop will provide you with strategies tailored to your needs. You will also learn about tactics and hacks to get your foot in the door while others are still sending emails.
Aureko’s workshop empowers every salesperson to push beyond his limits.
Aureko’s workshop will give you that new momentum to acquire new leads.
The framework I will share on that day changed my life!
When I started in Business Development 15 years ago, I had ZERO leads.
Today, I can make a living thanks to my network.
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