Lead-Lag Live

The Advisor Marketing Blind Spot: Mike Barrasso on Intent Data, AI Outreach, and Finding Clients Before They Call

• Michael A. Gayed, CFA

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In this episode of Lead-Lag Live, I sit down with Mike Barrasso, Co-Founder and CEO of WealthReach, to uncover one of the biggest blind spots in advisor growth: knowing who is researching you before they ever reach out.

From intent data and website visitor identification to compliant AI-driven outreach, Barrasso explains how advisors can stop wasting marketing spend and start engaging prospects at the exact moment they are actively looking for help.

In this episode:
– Why over 90 percent of advisor website traffic disappears without a trace
– How intent data reveals who is actively researching wealth management topics
– The difference between cold prospecting and warm, high-probability outreach
– How AI can personalize compliant emails at scale for advisors
– Why better data changes how advisors grow in a competitive market

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SPEAKER_01:

The first thing is that our AI is trained on SEC mark on the SEC marketing rule as well as FINRA rules and regulations. It'll never say things like guaranteed returns or any other promissory language like that. We also put guardrails in place for bigger firms that might have juniors doing outreach. For example, our AI crafts three different emails to send to somebody. A junior on your team might go in and edit the email and make tweaks. Say you have someone go rogue and they say the returns are guaranteed. Our AI will actually flag that on the back end for your team to handle internally.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm giving away this duffel bag packed with a bunch of our signature Few Crew branded merch that has all the inside jokey slang that you only get if you actually get it. So what's inside? Well, a men's What Up Blitches hoodie, an exquisite hoodie for her, and a few other things to take you from, I think I get it, to Few Crew certified. Now, if you want in, here's the deal. You have to follow at Lead Leg Report on X. Follow me, Mela underscore Schaefer on X. Subscribe to Lead Leg Media on YouTube and like and share this video. You do that, and boom, you're entered. No gimmicks, no funnels, and no nonsense. One winner gets the whole package. The rest of you stay fed until next year. Happy holidays from the Few Crew. I'm your host, Melanie Schaefer. Welcome to Lead Leg Live. Today we're digging into one of the biggest blind spots in advisor marketing: the fact that most firms have no idea who is researching them online. Advisors spend real money driving traffic, yet almost all of it disappears without a trace. WealthReach is trying to change that. It's a platform that identifies who is visiting an advisor's website and even who is researching them across the internet. And then it gives advisors an easy, compliant way to reach out. We're going to talk about where the idea came from, how the tech works, and what happens when Elite Data meets compliant AI. My guest today is Mike Barrasso, co-founder and CEO of WealthReach. Mike, it's great to have you here.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me, Melanie. Excited to talk through it.

SPEAKER_00:

So let's start uh with the story. New FinTech shows up every week, but it feels like something you built because you personally saw the gap. What sort of pushed you uh to start Wealth Reach? And what was the problem in the industry that no one else seemed willing to solve?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, great question. I so I started my career in software sales. Um, I was selling contract management software to lawyers in Boston. Um, I kind of worked my way up the chain, but I was always doing lots of cold emails, lots of lots of cold calls, lots of cold LinkedIn messaging. Um, so tons and tons of prospecting. The last company I was at um when I was there raised 100 million when I was there, which was really cool. Um, so we always had the most cutting-edge software, cutting edge data, um, and and just the best tools, frankly. Fast forward, um, I decided to join the family RIA. Um, my dad owns a wealth management firm, decided to join his firm, um, which is a great firm. They've been have seen tons of organic growth through mostly referrals. Um, but the prospecting side of the house was something that they dabbled in, but never really jumped headfirst into. And that that was for a couple of reasons. Um, mainly, the tools out there for advisors were not good. Um, I joined the firm, they had a couple of different tools. I tried them. And me as a sales, as a salesperson by heart, um seeing those tools, I was not satisfied. I couldn't believe that an advisor would even be able to figure out how to utilize those tools. Um I started by building uh an internal tool from for our firm United. Um I taught myself how to code, AI helped with that as well. Um built a tool that was a little bit more janky than the beautiful wealth reach tool we have today. Um, so but the cool thing is it birthed out of an actual RAA, this tool. Um we've seen success at our firm with it from there. Um, we hired fractional engineers to come in and get it from 80% to 100% of the way there. Um, we launched in uh early November now. So we're just uh over 36 days with paying customers. Um we've seen massive growth so far. Uh we're up to 81 dump demos as of today. Um we're closing the majority of people we talk to, so they're impressed by the tool and like the tool. Um so things are going really well, and it's cool to see the response by advisors, and I think we've we're filling a gap.

SPEAKER_00:

It's a fantastic story. I mean, Mike, I saw a stat on your site that more than 90% of visitors leave a financial advisor's website without the advisor ever, you know, knowing uh that they were there. For an industry that spends billions a year on marketing, that that's kind of wild. Why is that happening? And what does it mean for the average advisor trying to grow organically?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I look at it as if someone walked into your office, was looking around, and and you didn't go introduce yourself to them, basically. Um, this person was on your site browsing around. Um, you should go introduce yourself. There are so many people that hit websites that they'll they'll go look at a couple different pages and then forget about it, X out. And then the next time when they actually are ready to take that action of booking a meeting or filling out a form or downloading some sort of marketing asset, um, they go on a different website. So there are so much falling through the cracks. And I call these people basically low-hanging fruit. Um, the other way I look at it is that there are so many people out there that are afraid to ask for help. Um, and that uh hiring an advisor is a stigma for a lot of people. So there are so many people afraid to ask for help. We want to allow you to reach out to them and capture them. So that's the goal with identifying website visitors.

SPEAKER_00:

So I mean, okay, so identifying the visitor is sort of one thing, but you're also tracking intent. Who's actually buying in buying mode before they even reach out? And for listeners who aren't familiar with that kind of data intelligence, can you break down what intent data means and how you know someone's moving from casual research into real consideration?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, great question. So when I was uh when I was in software sales, we had access to something called company level intent data. And what that is, is for example, say someone at Salesforce is researching contract management software. Good luck finding that needle in the haystack. Salesforce has tens of thousands of employees. So we've gotten to a point where we've been able to offer now contact level intent data. So what WealthReach is able to do, and what really differentiates us from anything else on the market, is that we're able to tell you who's doing research on topics like investment management, retirement planning, uh, 401k rollovers, doing research on specific fund providers or companies, um, topics like insurance planning, tax planning, um, other real estate topics as well. Um, and we're able to tell you exactly who's doing that research across the internet. Uh they never need to hit your website, they never need to download a form or fill out a form or download a marketing asset. Uh, these are people that are doing research across the internet. So instead of advisors having to waste time on reaching out to cold leads based on location or based on job title, we're servicing people that are actually doing the research now.

SPEAKER_00:

So I like that it's sort of one thing to service a warm prospect, but most advisors freeze on the outreach. I mean, some they they don't know what to say, when to say it, or how to tailor the message. How does WealthReach use AI to actually bridge that gap uh and get the advisor into a conversation that's more natural?

SPEAKER_01:

This was a focus for us from the start, um, not only to do it compliantly, but also to make it easy for advisors. Um, Michael Kitsis is a super popular name in the industry. I love his blog. I love what he does. Um, and he said in his his most recent tech report um that no provider has managed to make um prospecting not suck for advisors. So that was one of the first things we we thought about when building WealthReach. So WealthReach, uh, what it does is it does deep research on every prospect that hits your website or these prospects that are doing research across the internet. From there, our AI drafts compliant emails and personalizes each email for each person. Um, where we differ from a lot of the other tools that claim they do AI outreach is that most of these tools are only personalizing the first line and have templates for the rest. We're creating completely personal emails for every single person. And we're we're using the research we do as well as the data we have to put together that outreach. For example, if someone's on my retirement planning page on my website, our AI will see that and focus the outreach on retirement planning. Uh, the goal with this is to have it easy to set up for advisors and make their lives easy. We don't want advisors spending hours on prospecting a day or building these sequences. Uh, we want them to block off 10, 15 minutes a day, get the outreach going on autopilot, um, and get rolling and book clients for meetings.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And so, Mike, you mentioned the word compliance uh a couple of times there, and it's everything in this in this space. Uh how are you thinking about those issues and what protections are built into the system to make sure that advisors stay on the right side of the roles?

SPEAKER_01:

This was a priority for us from the start. Um, the first thing is that our AI is trained on SEC mark on the SEC marketing rule as well as FINRA rules and regulations. So it'll never say things like like guaranteed returns or any other promissory language like that. Um, we also put guardrails in place uh for bigger firms that might have juniors doing outreach. So, for example, our AI crafts three different emails to send to somebody. Uh, a junior on your team might go in and edit the email and make tweaks. Say you have someone go rogue and they say the returns are guaranteed. Our AI will actually flag that on the back end for your team to handle internally. That's a massive thing for us. Um, the other thing where compliance is important is uh it's more of a safety thing for firms. So a couple of our competitors um are encouraging advisors to send emails from their own domains, which is a big no-no. Um, if you're doing cold outreach, you should never be utilizing your own domain, which is why we spin up domains for you, um, warm them up and maintain them for you. So you're covered on all fronts.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it sounds like you've got all of these angles uh covered. What kind of results are you seeing so far? And and when you demo this uh for advisors for the first time and that data starts populating in real time, what what's the typical reaction that you're seeing?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, the the reaction I've seen so far is being blown away. Um it's cool to see advisors reach out to me and be like, hey, I saw my client on the site. This is this is real data, which is awesome. Um, another thing to not to go off on a tangent too much, but if you're seeing your clients on the site, this is really valuable as well. Um, because if your client's on the site, they either one need something, or two, they're probably showing your website to someone and referring you. Uh so those are important. As far as results, we're seeing our results are we're really happy with our results. For website visitors, we're seeing based on website visitors identified, we're seeing anywhere from a 2.5 to a 3% booking rate on website visitors, which if you do the math on that, it's really, really powerful. Uh, we're seeing lots of firms add hundreds of thousands of new revenue, tens of millions of new AUM. Um, so we're pumped about the results. And and that that's also led to a lot of growth just via word of mouth for us, which we're really excited about.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And and so I wanted to ask you a bit about the tech. A lot of advisors, but not just advisors, people in in general, when they hear, you know, the word new tech, and they immediately assume onboarding is gonna be a nightmare. It's gonna be difficult uh to use. Walk us through sort of the setup and talk about how heavy the lift is to get started. What does support look like?

SPEAKER_01:

Uh that I think support uh was also a big focus for us coming in and something we're constantly trying to improve and add to, especially as we grow. Um, our goal is to get every advisor extremely comfortable with the platform, help them hold their hands, setting up the personas in our platform, which are the client profiles, um, getting everything extremely dialed in for their plat for their use case, um, and not just kind of tossing it on them and saying good luck. The onboarding um typically takes 14 days in total. And the reason why is we need to warm up email domains for 14 days. But the actual total onboarding lift for the advisor is typically two calls, one 30-minute call and one hour call. Um, and that most of that time is spent on just getting them comfortable with the platform.

SPEAKER_00:

So, in terms of uh the type of client that you're looking for, is there a sort of a sweet spot in terms of the firm size or the AUM uh that gets the most value out of Wealth Reach? Or can this work for the solo practitioner?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so there are different, I'd say silos of value for Wealth Reach. So firms that get a good amount of website traffic are obviously gonna bet benefit from being able to recognize their website visitors. Um, I'd say for that part of the platform, there isn't a minimum website visitor uh count that I suggest. We work with firms all the way from solo advisors all the way up to$20 billion RAs right now. Um, so the scope is large. I'd say if you're not getting website traffic, you will definitely still benefit from the off-site intent data. And that in turn, reaching out to those people will drive traffic to your site. So I think solo advisors could benefit all the way up to these$20,$20 billion RAs that are facing massive competition.

SPEAKER_00:

And sort of sort of the beyond this, beyond wealth management, can you can do you think this can be used for B2B or outreach? Could insurance agents, fund managers, et cetera, uh other types of professionals be using this, the product?

SPEAKER_01:

Really, really good question. So we just released in beta our B2B uh vertical of the software. So so far, we've onboarded recruiters looking to target advisors. We've onboarded fund managers looking to target advisors, um, we've onboarded marketing firms that are looking to target advisors. It could also be used to target, frankly, any profession. So to answer your question, yes, uh, it could be used in a B2B sense. We are also able, we have tons of insurance topics. So we've onboarded several insurance firms looking to target property and casualty topics or life insurance. Um, we have tons of topics focused around that. And then the other vertical we've seen some interest in as well as real estate. Um, so we have a lot of great real estate topics as well.

SPEAKER_00:

So, just lastly, for anyone listening who wants to find out more or see a demo, uh, where should they go? Where's the best place to contact you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yep, you could go on our website, it's wealthreach.ai. You could go right on there, hit contact and book a demo with us. Our demos are typically 30 minutes long. Um, no pressure situation. We just love showing people the tools. So uh go to wealthreach.ai and uh and book a demo with us.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, I've really enjoyed this. And thanks to everyone for watching. Be sure to like, share, and just subscribe for more episodes of Heat Leg Live.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me, Melanie. It was a pleasure.

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Michael A. Gayed, CFA

Host