Industry playbooks
Financial Services sales call playbooks
Your buyers run firms where every tool that touches client data goes through vendor risk, InfoSec, and communications review before anyone talks price — and where a wrong number in a client statement is a books-and-records problem, not a typo. Practising against a buyer like that teaches you to lead with the SOC 2 and the audit trail instead of the time savings, and to keep a deal alive through a six-month compliance queue without losing the sponsor who championed it.
Every call type for Financial Services
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Financial Services, the people who pick up are wealth and asset management operators — the COOs, compliance chiefs, and advisory platform leaders who own advisor productivity and the risk register. The titles you will actually reach:
- Chief Operating Officer, Wealth Management
- Chief Compliance Officer
- Head of Advisory Platform / Practice Management
- Director of Wealth Management Operations
- Chief Technology Officer / Head of Advisor Technology
- VP, Third-Party / Vendor Risk Management
- Head of Client Reporting & Performance
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Advisors are doing operations work instead of sitting in front of clients
A senior advisor carrying 90–120 households spends a large chunk of the week on account paperwork, ACAT/transfer chasing, meeting prep decks, CRM notes, and quarter-end reporting. Every hour there is an hour not spent on the review meeting that keeps a $4M household from taking a call from a competitor. Firms feel it as flat organic growth and rising AUM-per-advisor pressure — they're being told to grow the book without adding headcount, because comp is 40%+ of the expense base.
Quarter-end reporting is a manual, error-prone fire drill
Performance data comes out of portfolio accounting, gets stitched to held-away assets and alternatives marks in spreadsheets, then goes into client-facing decks that someone reformats by hand. Reconciliation breaks, stale custodial feeds, and a wrong return number in a client's statement isn't an embarrassment — it's a books-and-records problem and a potential restatement. Ops teams routinely burn two to three weeks per quarter on a cycle they can't shorten.
Compliance review is the bottleneck on every initiative
Any tool that touches client data, generates client-facing material, or produces electronic communications goes through vendor due diligence, a DDQ, SOC 2 review, InfoSec pen-test evidence, legal redlines on data-processing terms, and then advertising/communications review under FINRA 2210 or the SEC Marketing Rule. Six months is normal. Business sponsors lose momentum, budget cycles roll over, and good projects die in the queue — so leaders stop proposing them.
Supervision and archiving obligations turn every new channel into a liability
Under FINRA Rule 3110 supervision and 17a-4 books-and-records rules, if an advisor communicates with a client through it, the firm has to capture it, archive it in WORM-compliant storage, and surveil it. The off-channel communications enforcement sweeps — nine-figure fines across the street — made this personal for CCOs. Anything that generates client-facing output without a clean audit trail and pre-review workflow is a non-starter, no matter how much time it saves.
Fragmented advisor tech stack that nobody can rip out
CRM, portfolio accounting, financial planning software, the custodian's advisor portal, a rebalancer, an e-signature tool, a document vault — and the data doesn't move cleanly between them. Advisors re-key the same client information four times. Every vendor conversation starts with 'does it integrate with what we already have,' because the last platform migration took eighteen months and the advisors still complain about it.
Recruiting and retaining advisors in a market where they can leave with the book
Breakaway teams and RIA aggregators are actively recruiting the top quintile. Advisors leave over payout grid, but they also leave over 'I spend my Sundays doing admin.' Platform and practice-management leaders are measured on advisor attrition and on whether the tech stack is a recruiting asset or a recruiting objection.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Anything that touches client data goes through a six-month compliance and vendor-risk review. I can't shortcut that.”
- I'm not asking you to shortcut it — I'm asking you to start it on something that's already been through it. We have the SOC 2 Type II report, the completed standard DDQ, pen-test summary, our data-flow diagram, and our sub-processor list ready to send today, before you commit to anything. Most firms your size tell us the six months is really four months of waiting on the vendor to answer questions. If your third-party risk team gets a complete package in week one, you find out in week three whether this is even reviewable. And I'd rather be told no in week three than string you along.
- “We're regulated. I can't just try a new vendor because it looks good.”
- Understood — and a free trial with live client data would be the wrong thing for you to say yes to. What we do instead is a sandbox with synthetic or anonymised data, no PII, sitting outside your production environment, so nothing in scope for your supervision or books-and-records obligations moves. Your ops lead and one compliance reviewer can see exactly what output it produces and what the audit trail looks like. That's an evaluation, not a deployment, and it's the artifact your CCO needs to make a real decision instead of a hypothetical one.
- “Everything client-facing has to go through advertising review. This just moves the bottleneck, it doesn't remove it.”
- Agreed, and we don't remove the review — we change what shows up in the queue. Output is generated from templates your compliance team pre-approves once, with locked language blocks, mandatory disclosures, and no free-text field that can invent a performance claim. Every item carries a version stamp and a reviewer log. Firms tell us the win isn't fewer reviews, it's that reviews go from 'read every page' to 'confirm it came off approved template v4' — and the exception rate drops, which is the number your CCO actually reports on.
- “Our client data can't leave our environment. Full stop.”
- Then let's talk about deployment before we talk about features, because if we can't satisfy that, nothing else matters. We support single-tenant hosting in your cloud region with your own encryption keys, and there's a configuration where the data never leaves your tenancy at all. What I'd want is thirty minutes with whoever owns your InfoSec architecture — not to pitch, but to have them tell me which of those two is acceptable and which is dead on arrival. If neither works, I'll say so.
- “If you get breached, my firm's name is in the enforcement action, not yours.”
- That's the right way to think about it and it's why our contracts carry cyber liability cover and an indemnity that survives termination, plus breach notification inside 24 hours to your named incident contact — not 72. We'll also sit for your annual vendor attestation and give your internal audit team read access to our control evidence. I'd rather your legal team push on those terms now than discover them at renewal.
- “Our advisors won't adopt it. We rolled out a new platform two years ago and half of them still work in spreadsheets.”
- That's the most honest objection I get and it's usually right. Which is why I'd rather not launch firm-wide. Pick eight advisors — ideally including two who complained loudest about the last rollout — and run one quarter-end cycle. If it doesn't change their hours, you've spent a quarter and learned something. If it does, those eight become the reason the other ninety try it, and that's a much better internal story than a mandate from ops.
- “Budget's committed. We're mid-way through a custodian conversion and there's no tech spend until next fiscal.”
- Then this is a next-fiscal conversation and I'm fine with that — but the vendor review is the long pole, not the money. If we run diligence during the conversion, you've got an approved vendor sitting on the shelf when budget opens instead of starting a six-month clock in Q1. Also worth asking: how much of the conversion pain is your team hand-building reporting during the cutover? That's usually where the first case gets made.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- AUM / net new assets (NNA)
- fiduciary duty vs. suitability, and Reg BI
- RIA, broker-dealer, and dually-registered hybrids
- custodian and the ACAT transfer process
- books and records / 17a-4 WORM archiving
- FINRA Rule 3110 supervision and 2210 communications review
- SEC Marketing Rule (formerly the Advertising Rule)
- Form ADV Part 2A / 2B
- GIPS-compliant performance and time-weighted vs. money-weighted return
- held-away assets and outside business activities
- TAMP, model portfolios, and rebalancer
- DDQ, SOC 2 Type II, and third-party risk management (TPRM)
- revenue on assets (bps), payout grid, and the comp grid
- breakaway advisor and RIA aggregator
- ASIC best interests duty and the FAR / RG 175 obligations (AU firms)
Metrics they are measured on
AUM growth and organic growth rate (net new assets as % of beginning AUM), Revenue on assets in basis points (bps) and blended fee compression, AUM per advisor and revenue per advisor, Households per advisor and average household size, Client retention / household attrition rate, Advisor attrition and time-to-productivity for new hires, Quarter-end reporting cycle time (business days from period close to client delivery), Compliance exceptions, audit findings, and reportable events per period, Operating margin / cost-to-serve per household
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Financial Services buyer
A live AI prospect with Financial Services context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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