Eight of the 10 brokers profiled in the 1992 book “The Winner’s Circle” got started by cold calling, or pitching stocks and bonds over the phone to strangers. One describes it as “dialing for dollars -- that dreary process every broker must endure during the initial stages of his or her career,” according to the book.
Don’t Call
“It’s a numbers game,” said Chris Gardner, whose struggle to make it through the training program at Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. while homeless and raising a son was the basis for the 2006 movie “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
“You just sit down and you start making the calls, 200 phone calls a day,” said Gardner, who closed his brokerage Gardner Rich LLC last year and is now a motivational speaker. “That’s not going to be effective anymore. Everything now is done electronically.”
That’s been made more difficult by the popularity of the National Do Not Call Registry, established by the Federal Trade Commission in 2003. The list has grown to 217.6 million telephone numbers in the U.S., which has a population of about 315 million people, according to the agency’s website.
“Cold calling is certainly challenging given the advent of no-call lists,” said Tom Allen, who helps run Wells Fargo’s 800-person training program, where trainees are 36 years old on average. “Everybody’s got caller ID these days, and everybody screens their calls.”
Pitching Stocks
Advisers need more experience now because they spend the majority of their time helping clients with retirement and estate planning rather than pitching stocks, UBS’s McWilliams said. The Swiss bank this year will place almost half of its 200 trainees into salaried positions helping established brokers rather than starting them as commissioned salesmen, he said.
Wall Street’s training cutbacks have left Edward Jones, a 91-year-old St. Louis-based firm with more than 12,000 advisers, as a bigger employer of would-be brokers than Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch combined. It hired 2,682 trainees last year and plans to add a similar number this year, according to Steve Kuehl, a partner who helps run the program.
“Rather than growing our financial advisers through acquisition, we have an organic-growth model,” Kuehl said in a phone interview. “We try to help them learn how to present their value proposition in terms of helping people meet their financial goals. The core is face-to-face.”