Want an Immediate Boost to Your Productivity? Reduce Your Calls-to-Close

As we step into a new year with freshly assigned goals, there’s no better time to ensure you have a defined strategy to achieve those goals. While there are a few key sales metrics you can focus on to boost your productivity—whether as an individual advisor, a team, or a firm—reducing your “calls-to-close” is one of the simplest and most impactful.
The Power of Enhanced Sales Process Efficiency:
A Simple Calculation
Let’s break this down with a few straightforward assumptions. For example, assume in 2024 you ended up with the following metrics:
Average Calls to Close:
3
(from qualifying a prospect to close – sold or lost)
Qualified Prospects in Pipeline:
50
Close Ratio:
40%
Average Revenue per Sale:
$15,000
Based on these metrics, you would have generated $300,000 in new client acquisition revenue. Now, imagine reducing your calls-to-close from 3 to 2 while keeping other metrics constant. This small change leads to a 50% productivity increase, boosting revenue to $450,000.
Another way to look at it is that you can now generate the same amount of revenue in 100 calls that last year required 150 calls, freeing you up to focus on other qualified prosects or further expanding your pipeline of prospects. If you assume an average of 2 hours per call (which is likely low given call prep and travel time), you are gaining 100 hours (or nearly two weeks) of productivity time over the course of a year by reducing the calls to close metric by 1.
Scaling the Impact: Team and Firm-Level Benefits
Let’s consider this at a team level. If you’re a leader managing a market with 15 advisors with similar metrics, reducing their calls-to-close from 3 to 2 again yields a 50% productivity increase across the board, increasing your team’s combined revenue from $4.5 million to $6.75 million—an additional $2.25 million.
Such a boost can set your team on a strong trajectory to significantly exceed this year’s goals.
A revenue increase resulting solely from reducing your calls-to-close comes without any additional time commitment, and in the end frees up time to increase productivity even further.
How to Reduce your Calls-to-Close
Reducing the number of calls needed to close a deal is obviously a worthy goal, but achieving it requires a deliberate and thoughtful approach to every meeting, its agenda, and the outcomes you aim to accomplish with each prospect interaction. Much like the meticulously curated client experiences offered by renowned brands such as the Ritz-Carlton, this process demands precise attention to detail and purposeful execution. By applying the same level of intentionality to create a more engaging and seamless sales experience for wealth management prospects, success can be achieved with fewer calls.
To get started, here are eight questions designed to help you assess your approach relative to the most common sales process inefficiencies we see from advisors across the industry. Having clear and confident answers to each of these questions as it relates to every prospect will help ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness in your sales efforts.
8 Questions to Reduce Your Calls-to-Close
And one additional important question that far too many advisors resist addressing, typically because they like having prospects in their pipeline and believe at some point any given “prospect” WILL eventually become a client …
- As soon as possible in the sales process, have I verified that this prospect is one who is inclined to do business with me and if so, is a good fit—one we can truly help and who will be a profitable client?
Be willing to walk away if the answer is no. This ensures a focus on the RIGHT opportunities and generating new ones.
TAKE ACTION
If you’re ready to enhance your productivity in 2025, start by reflecting on these questions with every prospect. This will help you shorten your sales process, increase efficiency, and focus on high-value opportunities.
Additionally, consider looking into our advisor2.0© Forum —a unique, comprehensive, episodic program designed to help individual advisors, teams, or firms accelerate their productivity by developing a more intentional approach to engaging prospects, expanding client relationships and structuring a more efficient approach to their practice. To learn more about this proven program, call us at 404-324-4600 x120 or by visiting (https://www.greeneconsults.com/advisor-2-0/ and https://www.greeneconsults.com/advisor2-next-gen-advisor-forum/).
Let’s make 2025 your most productive and impactful year yet!