As a wealth manager, when you are a thought leader, you have distinct and powerful business development advantages over your competitors. These advantages are recognized by the overwhelming majority of wealth managers and other professionals striving and doing business with the wealthy.
That being the case, thought leadership is evolving in a host of ways. Looking forward, there are three interconnected trends.
Everyone into the pool: Within the last half dozen or so years, the number of professionals across all different industries intent on becoming thought leaders has exploded. The most important motivation is the ability for wealth managers to build their high-net-worth practices in hypercompetitive environments with often persnickety affluent investors.
Because of the business-building power that accrues to thought leaders, a growing number of wealth managers and related professionals are going to progressively take actions so that they become thought leaders. While the market for professionals wanting to be thought leaders is quickly becoming saturated, the market for stellar thought leadership is not.
The decisive battlefield: As wealth management services and products are almost completely fungible and often impossible for affluent prospects, clients and centers of influence to evaluate, the competition for thought leadership status more and more is becoming the cornerstone of success for many wealth managers and other professionals. It is painfully clear that almost any wealth manager can become a thought leader, and those who fail to build a substantial professional brand are likely to have limited wealth management practices.
A bifurcation among the ranks of professionals focusing on the wealthy will increase. For wealth managers, a major contributor to this divide will be between the relative few who are thought leaders and the majority who are not. Considering that all investment professionals are fungible—which in no way diminishes the fact that some are objectively better than others—being a thought leader will preceptibly make the essential difference to financial success.
Raising the bar: As more and more professionals, including wealth mangers, look to become thought leaders, the requirements and costs of creating exceptional content is only going to rise. To develop and distribute high-quality thought leadership products in a crowded field, where all kinds of information bombards the most attractive audiences, requires content to be provided with a great deal of consistency that stands apart. Even curating high-value thought leadership content requires a dedicated effort.
With becoming a thought leader more and more looking like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, wealth managers are going to have to seriously commit to the endeavor, or they should avoid it altogether. With competition among professionals escalating, the absolute quality of thought leadership content will have to continually reach greater heights to have a positive impact.
What’s the future of thought leadership for wealth managers? Being a thought leader is undeniably exceedingly advantageous for any wealth manager, and that is why the appeal of this business development approach is only going to skyrocket.
