Insights
CRM for insurance brokers and accountancy firms
Both businesses run on renewals rather than one-off sales, and most CRMs are built for the opposite. What matters is knowing which client is up next, who has not been spoken to, and what was said last time. That is a different shape of system.
Published
What does a broker need from a CRM that a sales team does not?
A calendar view of the book, rather than a pipeline of new business.
A sales team asks which deals will close this quarter. A broker asks which policies renew in the next ninety days, which of those are at risk, and which clients have had no contact since the last renewal. Those are queries about existing customers, and a CRM configured purely for new business answers none of them well.
How do you build a pipeline around renewals?
By treating each renewal as a record with a date, and letting the date drive the work rather than a salesperson remembering.
In practice that means a renewal date field on the policy or the engagement, an automated task raised a set period before it, and a stage list that reflects the renewal conversation: review due, contacted, terms requested, terms presented, renewed or lost. Lost renewals are worth recording with a reason, because the pattern in those reasons is usually the most useful report the system will ever produce.
What does a CRM do for compliance?
It gives you a record, which is not the same as making you compliant.
The genuine benefit is that advice given, documents sent and consent captured all sit against the client with a timestamp, so reconstructing a file does not mean searching three inboxes. What a CRM will not do is make a judgement about suitability, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling something. Your compliance function should have a view on what goes in the system before it is configured, not after.
Does it help with marketing?
It helps most by telling you who not to contact.
Segmenting a book by product, by renewal month, by sector or by how long someone has been a client is straightforward once the data is in one place, and it is the difference between a relevant email and a general one. The constraint is data quality: a broker with three overlapping contact lists will produce three overlapping campaigns.
Does the same apply to accountancy firms?
Closely. The cycle is different but the shape is the same: recurring work with known dates, a client base that grows slowly, and value in knowing who has not been contacted.
The difference is that accountancy firms tend to have practice management software already, and it usually holds the compliance deadlines. In that case the CRM's job is narrower: relationships, advisory opportunities and referrals, rather than the statutory calendar. Duplicating what practice management already does is the most common mistake we see.
When is a CRM the wrong answer?
When retention is falling because service is stretched. A system that reminds you to call the client will not create the hour to do it.
It is also the wrong answer when nobody has agreed what a client record is. If one person means the business and another means the individual, the reports will disagree with each other and everyone will stop trusting them.