IBM Prospecting Hub
Designing for advisors who'd rather be on the golf course
Prospecting Hub was IBM's lead-generation tool for financial advisors. Offering Management came to us with a clear request: help us design a workflow that gets advisors to qualify and contact more leads.
We ran a one-day design workshop with their team and the advisors they were building for. By lunchtime we'd realized the brief was wrong.
Financial advisors do not want to qualify leads. They want to be on the golf course. They will do the work that has to be done to keep the practice running, but no advisor we talked to has ever opened a tool labeled "prospecting" on a Friday afternoon and felt anything but tired.
So we shifted the design from "help advisors do the work" to "do the work for them." That single move changed the product strategy and the visual direction of the Hub.
What we learned
They're not motivated by prospecting.
Active conversations with eight advisors, plus a handful of listening sessions with the IBM Offering Management team. The pattern was clean. Advisors are motivated by the relationship after the lead, not the work to find the lead. They want qualified prospects placed in front of them, not a tool that demands their afternoons.
Personalization is the leverage. Personality matching between advisor and prospect raised conversation rates by roughly a third in IBM's tests.
Friction at first contact kills good leads. Email and social presence on every page. No "where do I find your address" moments.
Social signal beats demographic data for prospecting. LinkedIn behavior was a stronger predictor of an opening than firmographic match.
The product had to do the work the advisor wouldn't.
What shipped
A workflow that works while you look elsewhere.
A Hub that surfaces qualified leads, ranked by personality and social fit, with the advisor's preferred outreach copy pre-drafted.
Default views that show the next ten conversations to have, not the next thousand records to clean.
A reframe of the offering's value prop, away from "more leads" and toward "the right ten."
A workshop deck the IBM team kept using to align downstream conversations.
The right ten conversations beat the next thousand records.
Outcome
Sometimes the design is to listen long enough to realize the feature you were hired to design isn't the feature anyone wants. Then go back, and design the one they do.
Takeaways
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