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This is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On this episode:
Vendor name:
WealthReach
Vendor category:
Marketing
Episode host:
Brad Wales
Episode guest:
Mike Barrasso
Vendor contact info:
Full Transcript:
Brad Wales – Hi, I’m Brad Wales from Transition To RIA and this is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode we’re answering the question, “What is WealthReach?” And to help me with that is Michael Barrasso. Michael, thank you for coming on.
Michael Barrasso – Hey Brad, thanks for having me. Really excited to dive into it.
Brad – Yeah, I’m excited. Spoiler, sorry for anyone that’s listening along before Michael gets a chance to kind of explain it himself. This is an AI tool. This is the first AI tool that I’ve done a profile on, so I am looking forward to this conversation. I think it’s indicative of where we are as an industry, where we are as a society. So very, very exciting conversation.
So with that, if you could, just at that high level, could you maybe give us the backstory of the tool that you guys have recently rolled out. What is your high proverbial elevator pitch? What is WealthReach?
Michael – Yeah, 100%. It’s an honor to be the first. I hope we can set the bar high. So WealthReach at its core is a prospecting tool for financial advisors. WealthReach, our goal is one, to surface prospects that are warm to hot and allow advisors to not even focus on prospecting to cold people. And then the second layer of it is making it really easy to reach out to these people and get them booked for meetings with the advisor.
Brad – I’ll let you extrapolate, but the wealth management industry has a pretty bad track record with organic growth. You hear in a lot of news about inorganic and firms being acquired or practices.
Obviously the market, we’re on a great bull run for many years now, but organic growth and finding new clients, it is what it is. Unfortunately the statistics are pretty poor for most practices and I assume you’re out trying to improve on those figures. Was that kind of the driving force of saying, there’s a problem (if we want to use that word) in the marketplace and hey, maybe we have a solution for it? What kind of got you to launch something like this?
Michael – Yes, 100%. So it’s a really interesting story. I started my career out of college actually in software sales. So I was doing a lot of cold calling, a lot of cold emails, cold LinkedIn’s, a lot of outreach. The company I was at was always on the cutting edge. When I first started there, I think we had $50 million in funding and then they raised $100 million around about halfway through my career there. We always had the best tools, always had the best data and it was great, frankly.
From there I ended up leaving. I always wanted to join the family business which was an RIA. I joined my father’s RIA just about two and a half years ago now and one of the first things I noticed was that one we weren’t doing much prospecting at all and two the tools we had for it were not good.
One, the data wasn’t great and two reaching out to prospects was just very hard, time consuming, and labor intensive. And for me as a salesperson who is very experienced in that area, I was making hundreds of cold calls a day, sending thousands of emails a week. For me, it was hard to figure out. So I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like for an advisor trying to start from scratch on that.
From there, I ended up building WealthReach as an internal tool for United to help us. It was obviously very janky and not what it is now, but it worked. We were seeing results. So I focused more on building the tool and improving it and improving it more. From there, I talked to David DeCelle at Model FA. David was coaching me and the other advisors at our firm. I brought it to him and I’m like, hey, we might have something here.
We had the hard numbers that it was actually helping our growth. David and I dove in head-first together and became partners. We brought in a few engineers to help me get it from 80 to 100% of the way there. During that time, I taught myself how to code as well, so that was helpful. And now we have WealthReach in its core today.
Brad – I love an origin story like that. As you likely know, there are a multitude of successful software tools in our industry that were born in the same fashion that were a pain point or need by literally an advisor team in their office. They built something and it evolved and then they realized they could essentially spin it out to its own product because there was a lot of demand for it. So it’s a cool background story on that. I like that. And again, certainly other established vendors that are across the similar path could relate.
Would you say the WealthReach tool, is this a case of making a process that’s already being done just more efficient or are these new ways to kind of prospect altogether? The example of cold calling which, good job, you earned your stripes on that, but is obviously very inefficient nowadays if it ever was efficient.
Over time there were ways to maybe make that a little more efficient with software tools that could auto dial and make the process quicker. So that’s an example of making something more efficient. Then an entirely different prospecting tool like when LinkedIn came along and maybe you could establish professional relationships on that. That was something entirely new people could use.
So what would you put WealthReach in? Is this taking kind of existing prospecting approaches and making them more efficient or do you think it’s maybe that but also an entirely new approach to prospecting?
Michael – This is an entirely new approach to prospecting and that’s for a couple different reasons. The first is our data and how we go about finding what an ideal prospect is. The majority of tools you’ll see out there today are focused on mostly prospecting by a wealth trigger event. So they’ll go out and try and find people that may have just received an inheritance, may have just sold their home, may have just moved, things like that.
Our goal is to find people that are actively doing research on finding a financial advisor, rolling over my 401k, looking for information on tax planning, looking for information on life insurance policies. So the way I look at it is we take it from a prospect that might be right at the top of the funnel who might need a financial advisor. We’re trying to find the people that have that need now, that burning need. They’re actively looking.
And we do that really in two different ways. So one, we’re able to identify up to 32.5, as of this morning, percent of people on your website. So they never need to fill out a form. They never need to book a meeting with you. All they need to do is hit your website. We’ll give you their name, their email, their LinkedIn, their job title. We even enrich net worth and income data, as well as if they own a home. You can prioritize who to reach out to if you have a lot of website visitors.
The second area where we get data, it’s called offsite intent data. This is the cutting edge of data. And a lot of these massive software companies, I talked about the company I worked out earlier that we were always on the cutting edge. They’re just starting to get this data. It’s very hard to get. It’s very expensive. We were able to secure it through a couple different partnerships.
In the past when I was doing prospecting, we had company-level intent data. You’ll see this with HubSpot and a couple other platforms. You’ll be able to see, for example, if someone at Salesforce was researching a given topic. Salesforce has thousands of employees, so it’s like good luck finding that needle in the haystack. We allow you to see the exact person who was doing research on a given topic.
So Brad say, for example, you’re on your computer, you start looking up tax planning. In our platform, you’ll be able to select tax planning as a topic, and you’ll get thousands of people that were doing research on that given topic yesterday. So we’re updating those topics on a daily basis, and the advisor is able to benefit by getting thousands of new people to reach out to on a daily basis. That’s the data side of things.
So in a nutshell, we want to help advisors get people that are actively doing research, not waste time with if they might need something, might need a solution, or just prospecting by zip code or location or age or job title. From there, our goal is to make it extremely easy to reach out. This is our bread and butter and what really will differentiate us from any other platform on the market.
Why I say that a lot of time and energy went into building our outreach engine was one, working with the 250-plus firms that Model FA has coached across the country. So actively working with advisors, actively seeing what’s working on the ground level with my firm and making it easy for advisors to reach out.
Two, one of the things that Michael Kitces has referenced in his advisor tech study is that most of the prospecting platforms out there today don’t make prospecting, they struggle to make prospecting not suck. And that was our goal with doing this outreach. So in our platform, if you drop prospects into an outreach sequence, we do deep research on every prospect. So we’ll hit hundreds of different websites, pull as much information as we can about them. We’ll go into our database of just over 260 million people, pull what information we have on them and then we’ll create completely custom email and LinkedIn messages to do outreach to them.
When I say custom messages, this is an important nuance. There are some tools out there today that have AI messaging. They’re typically just personalizing that first line. Our tool allows you to do completely custom messages for every single person. Every message is completely personalized and unique.
This is really important for two reasons. One, AI spam filters are getting much better. So personalizing just the line and having the rest of the emails templated frankly isn’t working anymore. Those emails are not getting delivered. The second thing is it just performs better. You know, when you get a canned templated message, you’re likely to send that right to spam or delete it. With ours, the majority of the time, if you get a really, really personalized message that might catch your eye, you’re much more likely to answer.
And before I stop talking, one more example of just how crazy this personalization is, yesterday I was doing outreach to a realtor that was on our firm’s website on Long Island. And it actually went on MLS, it went on homes.com, it found his exact listings, and it referenced those listings down to the town in the outreach. He responded within the hour and we booked a meeting with him. So pretty cool result there and I just had to tell that story. But I’ll let you talk now, Brad. I know I threw a ton at you.
Brad – No, it’s helpful and I like the real-life examples. They’re always a good thing. From a business development perspective, and businesses of all stripes are out there trying to grow their firms, I find it helpful to use a baseball analogy that when you are interacting with people they are perhaps already standing on first base. Maybe you’d say, I can actually have them on second base by the time you’re bringing them in.
Whereas the old school kind of cold calling, you’re calling people that aren’t even in the stadium yet, let alone at bat, let alone standing on first base. So to be able to shorten that cycle and actually just be talking to very warm prospects potentially at that point, I can certainly understand why that’s helpful.
So, and we’ll give contact information at the end, what exactly is the day-to-day or the week-to-week, how do people use this? I know at the end of the day, just someone sitting down going through a live demo with you will be the ultimate way to see the tool. So is this like, hey, I sit down and yeah, it probably takes me a fair amount of work on the front end, but then it’s kind of running and I just sit back and it does its thing? Or is this something I need to kind of go into once a week? What exactly is the application of it from a local level?
Michael – Yeah, I love that you brought that up. That was a focus for us from the start. Making it really, really easy for advisors. One of the things that I believe to my core and seeing what works here is that advisors should be focusing on spending more time with their clients, making sure their clients are happy, and working with clients. That’s it. That’s what makes advisors successful.
It generates more referrals and helps firms grow organically at the end of the day. We don’t want advisors to have to go into the platform, spend hours a day on trying to find people, and then manually have to build email outreach and sequences. We want to make it so it’s easy and that was the goal with WealthReach.
The way a day-to-day would look like for most advisors, 20 to 30 minutes a day at most, some advisors on our platform will use it once a week. They’ll go in, see who is on their website, drop those people into what we call personas, and then the outreach begins. All the advisor needs to do is approve the messages. That way they can make sure they’re compliant and everything runs smoothly.
From there, it’s mostly on autopilot. Our outreach is automatically following up with the prospect, and we take it to the point, even when the person responds and says, hey, I’m interested in meeting with you, our AI will draft a message for the advisor to send back to them with their calendar link. So it takes part of even booking that meeting.
For advisors that trust it, we even have a switch you could flip in the platform that that message goes out automatically so you don’t even have to spend time booking the prospect. So long story short, the goal from the core of this platform is to make it easy and not cost advisors a ton of time.
Brad – And how do you get them up to speed? I’m sure the goal is to make it as intuitive as possible. I did hear an analogy I love that the North Star for all of us when designing something should be like the iPhone. When you get a new iPhone and you open the box, there is literally no instructions. It doesn’t even tell you to turn it on. It’s just intuitive and then it just walks you through everything and easier said than done to be that hands off.
So I assume there is a little bit more hand holding or training on the front end. How does that work? So if someone liked this and they signed up, how are you and your team helping them get up to speed?
Michael – Yeah, great question. So we have a philosophy that we want to make it as easy as possible for them to learn the tool and utilize the tool, but we also want to be there in the background if they need support. And that’s why all of our support people are trained on best practices around sales, best practices on cold outreach, and are trained to hold your hand if you need that level of support.
What the onboarding process typically looks like is two calls. The first call is getting a tracking pixel installed on your website, making sure you’re compliant and making sure everything’s running smoothly. From there, once we’re detecting website visitors, in the second call, we’re helping you build out your persona.
So for example, my firm targets retirees and people nearing retirement. We have a specific set of strengths. For example, we provide tax preparation as part of our wealth management service. That’s a big selling point for us. In our persona, we’ve built it in that the AI knows that about us, knows what our strengths are, knows what our selling points are, knows what our typical client’s pain points are, and it gives our AI a really good baseline. So we’re utilizing that second call to help them build these out, making sure it’s all smooth.
From there, the advisor could start reaching out right away and we’re there if they need us. If they want to hop on a call and need some coaching because this persona isn’t working for them, what do you recommend? We’re there to help them with that.
Brad – And for folks, we’re just scratching the surface on this, right? These episodes by design are not meant to be full demos or whatnot. Hopefully this has got folks at least interested enough to say, hey, this is something I want to dig deeper into. Michael, you make this sound like this is going to do some wonderful things. And so maybe I do a demo and validate that. At the end of the day, of course, price does still play into it.
So, could you just to give a general idea how something like this priced out? Is this a subscription-type model or what does it typically look like?
Michael – Yup, it’s a monthly subscription. So our packages are available on our website at WealthReach.ai. We have a range of different subscriptions from all the way down to a smaller package for Solo Advisor all the way up to enterprise packages for big RIAs and aggregators and the like.
We’re also very flexible with our pricing because we recognize that some firms won’t fit into one package or the other. For example, some firms might have a ton of website visitors but not need a ton of seats. So we’re always willing to tailor to the right situation.
Brad – You mentioned what my next question was going to say and that is what is the best way for folks to reach out to learn more to maybe walk through a demo? So WealthReach.ai and I assume it’s fairly simple once they get there of how to book a demo or what does that step look like?
Michael – Yup, exactly. You could go on WealthReach.ai and then you could click the contact button. That’ll pull up a calendar link to book a demo. You could book a demo right there. Our demos are typically 30 minutes, very quick and easy.
We’re low pressure team, so if you wanna just hop on a demo and you don’t wanna move on anything quick, we’re never gonna pressure anybody. But that’s basically the process, one demo, and then we typically schedule a follow-up call from there to check in and see if someone wants to move forward.
Brad – Okay. Wealthreach.ai. We’ll put it in the show notes as well. I’ll wrap this up by saying, obviously I’m a believer in the RIA model, but this I think is a perfect example of one of the benefits of the flexibility of the RIA model.
I don’t want to make any assumptions about part of the market that’s just not going to be available to you, Michael, but if you’re at a wirehouse and you’re watching this and you think you can go through a demo and you like it and easily get your firm to approve moving forward with something like this, that’s not gonna happen. It’s usually a very, very tough climb. Michael, I hope for your sake you’re able to get some of these enterprise things to kind of clear that hurdle.
But in the RIA space, if you like the tool, if you like what it can do for your practice, you generally just put it in place. There’s no going up the chain to ask for permission or anything like that. So again, not to suggest it can’t be used in many different ways, but it clearly is easier to apply something like this that is particularly cutting edge.
I know that’s a cliche, but we’re on the front end here of the AI tools, and I think there will be a lot of the large legacy firms that will kind of drag their feet on this because they say, let’s let it play out for a while. And meanwhile, your competitors out there in the marketplace are already maybe using something like WealthReach.
So that’s my take on it. Are there any last thoughts you want to put out there for why folks should reach out you, I’d be happy to hear them.
Michael – Yeah, 100% and quick teaser on that. We are in conversations with a couple of the major players about getting approval. So we’re going through that right now.
One of the things I’ll also note is that since we’re creating completely personalized messages for each person, we get around a lot of the mass marketing rules because what we’re doing isn’t considered mass marketing. So that’s really helpful for people to note.
The last thing that I would say and why you should reach out to us is the way I look at it is the website visitor part of it is low-hanging fruit. Imagine someone walked into your office, looked around, and you didn’t introduce yourselves to them. What are you doing? These people are low-hanging fruit and I think every advisor is missing out on not reaching out to them. We’ve seen a crazy ROI at my firm and all of the customers that we’ve onboarded so far as well as our beta users.
The other part of it is if you’re doing cold prospecting, you’re reaching out to people at the moment, reach out to us. I promise you, you will have benefit from reaching out to people that are actually interested in looking for an advisor and doing that research. You’re cutting out a whole step and saving yourself a ton of pain.
Brad – Again, the first base and maybe even second base is a wonderful starting point to work off of. So with that, Michael, I appreciate you coming on, telling us about WealthReach and I encourage folks to take a look at the website and potentially reach out to you on it. So thank you for coming on.
Michael – Yeah, Brad, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Thanks.
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