Insights
CRM for financial advisers and financial services firms
Most of the network that would make an adviser's prospecting time productive was never written down. A CRM is, first and mainly, a way of recording relationships you already have so that somebody other than you can act on them.
Published
What is the actual problem a CRM solves for an adviser?
That the firm's most valuable asset, its relationships, is stored in the heads of the people least able to spare the time to write it down.
A figure that circulates in the advice industry puts prospecting at around nine per cent of a typical working week. Whether the number is exactly right matters less than the shape of it: the time is scarce, so it should be spent on people you already have a reason to call. That only works if the reasons are recorded somewhere.
What should go in it besides clients?
Everyone. Introducers, accountants, solicitors, people met at events, former colleagues, clients' family members.
The instinct is to keep a CRM to people who pay you, and it halves the value. A referral network is a network precisely because it is not yet transactional, and the moment to record someone is when you meet them, not when they become relevant. Tagging by how you know somebody makes it retrievable later, which is the entire point.
How does it help with proposals and pipeline?
By making the wait visible. Advice work generates a lot of documents that go out and then sit.
A pipeline built around the real stages of an advice process, initial meeting, fact find, research, recommendation issued, decision, implementation, tells you how many recommendations are outstanding and how long each has been out. Firms are routinely surprised by that number the first time they see it. Recording why a recommendation was declined is worth more again, because the reasons cluster.
Where does marketing automation fit?
Behind the data, not in front of it. Automation applied to a poor contact list sends poor emails faster.
Once the records are trustworthy, the useful applications are unglamorous: an annual review reminder, a note when a client's circumstances change, a segmented update when legislation moves. The temptation is to start with campaigns because they are visible. It is the wrong order.
Does the same apply to pension advisers?
Yes, with more contacts and longer horizons. A pension book is unusually long-lived, and the value of a written record grows with the gap between conversations.
The specific thing pension advisers gain is continuity. When a review happens every year or two and the adviser may change in between, the file is the relationship. That is an argument for recording more than feels necessary at the time.
When is a CRM not the answer?
When the firm's data is spread across systems that disagree, and no one has decided which is authoritative. A CRM will inherit the disagreement and give it a nicer interface.
It is also not the answer to a capacity problem. If advisers are at capacity, improving the flow of opportunities to them changes nothing except how visible the backlog is.