Raghav Sharma on Creating an Outstanding Online Presence

Steve Wershing:

Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor your clients want to tell other people about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we will be talking with Raghav Sharma, who is President of GuideVine, which has been described as sort of a Match.com for financial advisors. Raghav is a former financial services specialist at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company and we’ll talk about how his experience there lead him to discover the need for a service like GuideVine. We will talk about the importance of video as part of your digital footprint. We will talk about how video helps build trust and helps prospective clients feel like they know you a little bit better and want to talk with you. So, on with our conversation with Raghav. So, Raghav, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us on Becoming Referable.

Raghav Sharma:

No, thanks for having me, guys. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Steve Wershing:

Well, we are really excited to talk with you today because you have a platform that is really innovative and really interesting, and you describe GuideVine as kind of a Match.com for advisors. Could you tell us a little — for the people who are listening who aren’t familiar with it, can you tell us a little bit about how it works?

Raghav Sharma:

I wish I was the one who had coined Match.com. I really can’t take credit for that; that was CNBC and Bloomberg and I’m eternally grateful to them for that. So, for a consumer, it’s exactly what it sounds like. We’re there to help them find the best financial advisor for them and their unique circumstances. So, they can come in, they can go through our matching algorithm which will show them people who are closest to what they are looking for. Or, they can, if they are a little more self-directed, we have different directories that they can browse through, so if they are looking for a socially responsible investing — or maybe they have a particular — they’re a high net worth client and they want different needs, they can kind of go through the advisors that way, and for people who are truly at sea and aren’t sure where to begin, we have a concierge service which will ask the questions and help people narrow down what types of advisors they should be looking for.

Now, for a financial advisor, we are a digital marketing partner. One of our most important functions is exposing them to the users of GuideVine, so the consumers who come in looking for a financial advisor, but over and above that, what we really want to help advisors do is differentiate themselves online and maximize their digitals footprints, so we spend time getting to know them, figuring out what makes them tick, and then drawing that out into a series of videos that they can use to show how they are different from other advisors so that the right types of clients find them, and they then use those and all their other digital properties in the right way.

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