Prudential Advisors is leaning harder into data science to solve a problem every advisor knows well: too many leads, not enough context.
While the firm's retail distribution engine was able to produce more than one million leads for its field force last year alone, leaders at Prudential Advisors – one of the big names sponsoring this year's InvestmentNews Awards event in June – conceded that even a strong pipeline can fall short if the contact details are thin or the timing is off.
“We’ve had advisors that have actually built their entire practice on leads – that’s how powerful our leads program is,” Chief Technology Officer Mike Falzon told InvestmentNews in an interview. “But in some cases the leads could be better.”
Those instances where contact information “didn’t pan out,” or advisors didn't have enough to go on for an effective first outreach, became the starting point for Prudential Advisors’ latest push to embed artificial intelligence and data science across its lead lifecycle.
Historically, many of the firm’s leads came from basic touchpoints: a website form fill, a booth interaction at an event, or a simple internal flag that an existing product holder didn’t have an active advisor relationship. Those records tended to offer little beyond a name and one or two ways to get in touch.
Prudential Advisors' technology team, which Falzon described as “very advisor‑centric,” kept hearing the same message in surveys, emails, and focus groups: Advisors wanted deeper context if they were going to convert more prospects.
“We really could use more data about these leads if we’re going to effectively convert them,” he said.
Especially with AI on the scene, the days of the "Glengarry Glen Ross" approach to business development – where a head office might have sent down a David Mamet-type figure to reinforce an "always be closing" mindset – are well and truly over. With that in mind, Prudential Advisors made enhancements to the Advisor Leads programs inside its Prudential Advisors Connect platform.
Officially unveiled in January, the system taps existing Prudential data to surface “actionable insights” and uses third‑party data to add hundreds of attributes on each prospect, from household makeup and professional history to wealth‑related triggers such as home purchases or new jobs.
To bolster that enrichment, Prudential Advisors chose external data provider Aidentified, which Falzon said stood out in an internal product evaluation. Advisors can also import contacts from LinkedIn and the firm’s CRM to see one‑ or two‑degree connections that might help them get introduced to a prospect.
What once arrived as “maybe a name and a number,” Falzon said, is now a fuller profile plus ideas for “opportunities for you to reach out and make a connection.”
The enrichment is only one layer. Prudential Advisors is also using a proprietary machine‑learning model to route leads to the advisor most likely to have success, based on geography, client type and historical performance with similar opportunities.
On top of that, the same AI capabilities are being applied to advisors’ existing books, not just net‑new prospects. The firm is scanning for life events – new jobs, home purchases, marriages, children, retirements – and firing off alerts that can prompt outreach at moments when clients may be most in need of guidance.
“Now the advisors can have a heads up that that’s happening,” Falzon said. Instead of discovering a major life event mid‑review and asking for time to “look into some options,” he added, the goal is for advisors to come into the conversation already armed with ideas: “Tell me about that, and here’s some things you should be thinking about from a financial perspective.”
Mike Klein, head of marketing and communications for Prudential Advisors, framed the effort as an extension of the firm’s long‑standing focus on the advisor‑client relationship.
“Leads are really [an] important part of our value proposition as a whole,” Klein said. “We provide them free of charge and it helps both the advisors and the clients, because it leads to more robust conversations.”
As the firm pushes more AI into Prudential Advisors Connect, Klein said leadership is trying to keep the emphasis on usefulness rather than novelty. The goal is to help advisors and clients “achieve better outcomes” by bringing the right context into the right conversation, not to replace the human advice that drives retention and referrals.
“Generally clients don’t want to be spending hours on the phone with anyone, let alone their advisor,” Klein said. When advisors show up with better background and a concise summary of what’s changed, he added, “you’re more prepared for the conversation, [you] can get to the point, [and] can hit exactly what the client’s looking for.”
Klein said early conversations with the field suggest strong interest in the extra context.
“As our advisors have learned more about this and we’ve been around talking and getting feedback, they’re really excited about the additional insights they’re going to get,” he said. “I think it’s going to just add a lot of value to the work that they do and to our business as a whole.”
As Prudential Advisors doubles down on its wealth push through AI work, it has also taken on a higher‑profile role in the InvestmentNews Awards. Backed by Prudential's 150-year history as an institution, the firm is the title sponsor for this year's event, which Klein said raises the bar “for professionalism, for client service, [and] for innovation.”
"It's somewhat of a rare opportunity for us to all come together and recognize peers, celebrate success in a very professional setting," he said. "we're very client‑focused in this business, which we should be. So I don't think we really do enough kind of pausing and taking a moment to celebrate the great work that we do."
Nominations for the InvestmentNews awards are ongoing, and will close on February 27. For more information on the categories and nominations process, click here.
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