A Day in the Life of an IR: "Get Someone to Smile"
from March/April 2002
Becky Anderson knew in high school that she wanted to be an investment representative for Edward Jones. Her mentor, the supervisor of a local community-service group, was an IR himself, “and I admired that he was so successful and involved in the community.”Today, at 22 and after only 18 months on the job, Anderson is living her wish. She peddles investment products in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove like a grizzled veteran. New hands working for Jones are expected to contact 25 prospective clients a day. Most of those initial meetings happen at people’s front doors, and Anderson has the routine down cold.
Wearing a conservative business suit—nice, but “nothing fancy,” she says—she works her way, house by house, up one side of the street and down the other. “I always knock rather than ring the doorbell, so I don’t wake up kids who might be sleeping,” she explains. In the daytime, when she makes most of her calls, it’s usually a woman or a retiree of either sex who answers the door. Anderson introduces herself and asks if the prospective customer knows anything about Jones. Regardless of the answer, she briefly describes the company. “A lot of people confuse us with A.G. Edwards,” a rival brokerage, she says.
From there, it’s mostly small talk about general financial topics, the community, or even the weather. Anderson’s goal isn’t to push products during these doorstep encounters. Rather, she simply aims to establish rapport before setting the hook: “I tell you what,” she’ll say. “I do a lot of seminars here in the area. Are there any topics you’re really interested in?”
The closing she uses is right out of the Edward Jones handbook for IRs. “Oh, I feel rude. I didn’t even catch your name,” she says. With name, address, and phone number in hand, she promises to stay in touch. “If I have any good investment ideas,” she volunteers, “I’ll go ahead and give you a call.”
When she returns to the office, Anderson quickly fires off a handwritten letter of thanks for the meeting, and enters her impressions of the new prospect in a computerized contact-management system for later retrieval. In two weeks, she’ll make a follow-up phone call.
The key objective is to persuade people to attend her seminars. “If you get a prospect to come to a seminar, there’s a 95% chance they’ll become a client,” she says. To make the sessions more alluring, she holds them at two favorite spots: Nancy’s Tea Room, a local mom-and-pop restaurant, for the more mature crowd and Founder’s Hill Microbrewery for the younger set. Attendance varies, but she aims for 40 people. “Investing During Difficult Markets,” however, drew 52, and “Smart Women Finish Rich” 68. Typically, about 80% of those who show up are first-timers and some 60% are women, many of them widows.
Anderson likes the door-to-door routine, even if it sometimes gets a bit hairy. She’s caught people in various forms of undress, fended off sales-resistant dogs, and been recruited to help with small home-remodeling projects. She also gets subjected to sales pitches herself. One prospective customer sold her some vitamins—and became an investing client. Nothing seems to faze her. “If I can get someone to smile,” she says, “the barriers come down.”
It’s all part of a formula, played out tens of thousands of times a day across America. Such conversations typically last only about three minutes, but carry the promise of relationships that can benefit both sides. As Anderson says, “If you talk to enough people, you’ll be successful.”
In her first year, Anderson landed about 250 clients. One was a family setting aside $15 a month in a college savings account. Another was a widow who gave her a retirement portfolio worth more than $1 million to manage; the woman had been referred to the company by her daughter, one of Anderson’s first clients. Anderson now manages over $6 million in assets. She earned $62,000 her first year, significantly more than the average first-year IR’s take of $49,500, and aims to make $85,000 in her second.
The rewards are likely to be even fatter farther down the road, and Anderson says she has the patience to wait for them. “There’s a lot of delayed gratification involved,” she says. “But I don’t mind.” With that, she hangs up the phone. She has a dozen more calls to make before the day is over.
