Ever feel like client acquisition is a black box: fundamentally unpredictable and impossible to decode?
Many advisors we talk to believe organic growth is an anomaly. Sure, it happens. But they feel powerless to generate, forecast, or replicate it at scale.
The problem is they often haven’t mapped their sales and marketing funnels. Client behavior seems erratic; marketing feels like alchemy; and AUM growth becomes near-impossible to forecast—all because they don’t track the journey their prospects go through.
This article explores how funnels work and how mapping them can drive more reliable growth.
Expect to learn:
- The basic definitions and stages of sales and marketing funnels
- The role these funnels play in predictable AUM growth
- The best way to map your funnels in 2026
Sales and Marketing Funnels for Advisors: An Overview
Funnels are a systematic way to map the buyer journey, allowing you to visualize how prospects become clients. While they are inherently imprecise—nobody behaves exactly as simple models predict—these funnels are remarkably effective at predicting how leads act.
The traditional funnels are split into two distinct sections:
- Marketing Funnels: Moving from awareness to interest to consideration
- Sales Funnels: Moving from qualification to proposal to closing to loyalty
But for our purposes here, we’ll discuss them as a single funnel that has three distinct stages:
- Top of the Funnel (ToFu): Focused on lead generation and broad research. The prospect is becoming aware that they have a problem and learning more about it.
- Middle of the Funnel (MoFu): Focused on consideration and competitive differentiation. The prospect is researching specific solutions and learning how your firm compares to others.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu): Focused on decision making and reaching out to advisory firms. The prospect is ready to book a consultation and perhaps even become a client.
Sales and marketing funnels are not optional. And they are not purely imaginary. Your prospects already move through a set of broadly predictable stages, regardless of whether you decide to formally systematize or track them.
The question is whether you want to know what those stages look like—and how you can ensure your firm is there at each stage, giving clients what they need,
3 Reasons Financial Advisors Should Map Their Sales Funnels
Long Sales Cycles
Wealth management is a high-trust industry; the average journey from first touch to signing a contract takes several months—and a lot of lead nurture. Even referrals often require significant engagement before they convert into clients.
The process is also highly non-linear: prospects often shop around for a new advisor on-and-off for many months before they start seriously considering a change. Rather than making a clear, rational decision, they are influenced by everything they’ve seen and read during that long period.
Many advisors excel at one phase of this journey. You might be great at developing lead magnets, but offer almost nothing to help prospects choose between your firm and a rival. This creates nurture gaps where prospects must go elsewhere to find the information or support they need to make a decision.
Structured sales and marketing funnels help you fill those gaps. You gain a clear view of the sales and marketing cycle; then you develop content that speaks to prospects at each stage of the journey.
Fragmented Digital Channels
Those long sales cycles also take place across multiple separate channels—often including both in-person and digital interactions. This fragments the sales cycle; how do you build a unified view of prospects when they’re engaging differently across several disparate channels?
Funnels make it easier to keep tabs on these complicated omnichannel journeys. Rather than treating interactions on each platform as distinct, you can map content onto specific funnel stages. Your email, LinkedIn, and website can work in tandem to move prospects through the funnel—and toward signing a contract.
Time and Budget Limitation
The average advisor has a few hours per week to focus on marketing; even large RIAs we work with generally feel they are time-poor and stretched thin budget-wise. So every piece of marketing must serve a strategic purpose—and actually help generate revenue.
Funnels help allocate resources more efficiently and optimize your ROI. You can quickly identify where the gaps in your funnel exist and prioritize fixing them. You can also map your unique prospects’ behavior to tailor your marketing strategy to increase conversions.
This is the key to creating scalable processes that help you keep driving AUM growth over time. But how exactly do you do that?
4 Steps to Map Your Marketing Funnel
While the basic stages of marketing and sales funnels are universal, every firm has its own unique clients and marketing approach.
Our experts recommend four basic steps to map and optimize your funnels:
Review Historical Data
Your best insights about conversion aren't in marketing blogs or competitor analysis—they're buried in your own CRM data. But most firms treat historical data as an archive rather than an instruction manual.
Start with what you already have: objective data about how clients really engage with your firm. Every subsequent step will then be based on reality, rather than conjecture.
Action points:
- Pull conversion reports from your CRM for the past 12-24 months and identify where leads drop off
- Map the average time between first contact and closed deal—this tells you how long your nurture sequences need to be
- Identify which lead sources convert best and which ones waste your time (spoiler: not all referrals are created equal)
- Look for patterns in deal velocity by service type, AUM size, or client demographic
- Find your surprise conversions—those leads that came in cold and closed fast. What made them different?
Develop an Ideal Client Journey
Most funnels aren't designed—they're inherited. Duct-taped together over years of "let's try this" campaigns. They leak because they were never complete to begin with.
A real funnel is reverse-engineered from the decision moment backward. You need to know exactly what information, proof, and reassurance someone requires at each stage of the journey. Then build the path that delivers those things in the right sequence.
Action points:
- Sketch out the ideal journey from first touchpoint to signed agreement, including how many touches each stage requires
- Define what nurture actually means for your firm—is it weekly emails, quarterly webinars, personalized video messages, or something else entirely?
- Build content around the questions prospects ask at each stage (awareness needs education; decision needs proof)
- Create specific conversion events that move people forward—not just "contact us" but "download our guide," "attend this workshop," "schedule a portfolio review."
- Design multiple entry points into your funnel, because not everyone starts at awareness (some people research for months before ever raising their hand)
Identify Gaps in Your Existing Marketing
The gap between your ideal funnel and your actual funnel is your growth opportunity. Most firms discover they're excellent at one or two things—such as a strong LinkedIn presence or solid webinar content—while entire stages of the buyer journey are held together by hope and manual follow-up.
The wins don't matter if prospects fall through the cracks between them. Find where people get stuck or disappear, then fix those breaks before you build anything new.
Action points:
- Compare your ideal process map to what you're currently doing and circle everything that's missing or broken
- Identify which gaps are causing the most revenue leakage (focus there first—not everything is equally important)
- Look for "orphan stages" where prospects get stuck because there's no clear next step
- Find content gaps where you're asking people to make decisions without giving them the information they need
- Spot automation opportunities where manual follow-up is creating bottlenecks or inconsistent experiences
Build Content and Automation Systems
Mapping your funnel is strategic; building the systems that execute it is operational. Plenty of firms do the first part, get excited, then never finish the second.
The single factor that makes AUM growth scalable is process. Automate everything you can. Build reliable systems to forecast growth and optimize results. Build funnels that won’t need an overhaul in 6 months.
Action points:
- Prioritize the 20% of content that will drive 80% of conversions (usually: one strong lead magnet, three nurture emails, one clear CTA)
- Build email sequences that automatically deliver the right message at the right time based on prospect behavior, not just arbitrary timelines
- Create "if/then" workflows in your CRM so leads automatically move to the next stage when they hit certain triggers
- Develop a content calendar that ensures consistent touchpoints across all active funnel stages
- Set up monitoring dashboards to track funnel performance—you can't optimize what you don't measure, and you won't measure what you don't see every week
Get Less Funnel Leakage and More AUM Growth
ProperExpression is the only marketing agency that offers RevOps specifically built for financial advisors.
Using proven frameworks and creative problem solving, our team has helped leading firms unlock unprecedented AUM growth—while spending less time and money on marketing and sales efforts.
