It’s time to ditch the Excel spreadsheet. Let’s talk about CRM systems, why they’re important and how they’re beneficial to help build relationships with advisors.
The Purpose of a CRM System
Your CRM system should hold all the information you need about your prospects and your clients to build your relationship and track interactions. Personal information, trade information, sales interaction information, marketing engagement information, meetings. All of this should be right at your fingertips and easy to navigate to provide an overall picture of each advisor.
Go Beyond an Excel Spreadsheet
Gone are (or should be) the days of tracking advisor contacts and activity in an Excel spreadsheet. Adopting a CRM adds efficiency to both the sales and marketing processes. And the choices for CRM systems today have increased. While Salesforce is still the leader, there are many other systems available that can be equally effective – like Hubspot for example.
CRMs Can Enhance Marketing
Today, CRM’s are integrated with email marketing systems so they capture the emails you’re sending out and an advisor’s interaction with those emails. Did an advisor open the email? Did they click on a link? Which email topics do they tend to open more frequently? What does that say about their propensity to invest clients in your fund? In your CRM, you’ll get a really good picture of advisor activity and you can start nailing down what types of activity indicate an advisor is a top prospect for your firm so you’re not spending valuable sales time on advisors who are not strong prospects.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
An important aspect of CRMs is the quality of your data: “Garbage in, garbage out.” So be on top of putting high-quality information in your CRM and keeping it updated and clean. This goes for mass updates you may make to the CRM as well as updates the sales team makes one-off on individual advisor records. When did sales meet with an advisor? What did sales talk about? What were the results? When should the advisor be contacted again? What did sales learn personally about the advisor? Did they provide any personal tidbits sales should come back to? This helps build trust and rapport – for example: “Hi, John, how’s your son doing? Last time we talked, he just had surgery.”
Advisors are in the relationship business themselves and love personal touches. Your CRM system can make it easy for you to record personal information and drive personable conversations. This will help build trust, and build relationships.
