Are you an independent financial advisor wondering if customer relationship management (CRM) software would really help you? No matter the size and scope of your business, automating your communication efforts, optimizing your workflows, and bringing all your customer information together in one software would likely be an advantage. It's not only a way to attract and nurture your long-term relationships with your customers, it's also a way to save time so you can better focus on the rest of your business.
You don't have to take our word for it. A survey by Forrester observed that a financial advisor could expect to increase their lead conversion rate by 300% by using a CRM.
Here are 6 aspects of CRM software that can help you
manage everything:
- Instant access to customer data to better manage contacts
- Impactful communications through email canvassing
- Effective Customer Engagement Using Automated Communications
- Better collaboration within teams thanks to automatic workflows
- Strengthened customer relationships
- Detailed forecasts
How many hours a week do you spend working for your business?
Financial advisors work hard, maybe harder than they realize themselves.
Think about everything you do in a week: Meeting clients (and prior preparations) You carry out all tasks related to client support (financial strategies, investment planning, bank reports and analyses, and all actions agreed during meetings.
Besides working for existing clients, you're likely to spend several hours a week nurturing new leads. For example, you may be offering a free initial consultation over the phone to try to attract new prospective clients. And you may create and manage communication campaigns such as seminars or webinars, among other lead generation activities, all of which require time.
And of course, the main asset of your profession remains the search for investment strategies that you can use to manage your clients' portfolios according to their needs and objectives.
Have you ever figured out how many hours all of this
is each week? According to this study, it takes an average of 53 hours per
week.
A CRM would save you a lot of time.
The good news is that with a CRM you work smarter instead of working longer. The best CRMs chosen by financial advisors are those that also help you automate day-to-day tasks, schedule reminders, and quickly identify new opportunities. And most importantly, some software adds automated marketing features to those of contact management to allow you to create and personalize your communication campaigns according to the demographic or commercial profile of each client. For example, you can choose to invite families with young children to talk to them about mortgages or savings plans. Or to stimulate parents of adult children who are thinking about their retirement.
Whatever your goals, financial advisor CRM software
will give you the features you need and help you pick up the pace. We show you
how...
Instant access to customer data to better manage
contacts
Too often, financial advisors use multiple apps and software to store their information. Customer contact information is usually found in Outlook or Gmail, accounting and banking information in Excel, and the rest scattered in finance-specific apps or cloud storage spaces.
With a CRM, you can bring all this important data together under one interface. This allows a colleague to quickly access it if he has to answer a question or replace you during an appointment. This is not only a way to work more efficiently, but also to always be up to date. In the financial services sector, deadlines are often tight and it is unthinkable to miss an investment opportunity simply because you do not have access to the data of the customer concerned or his telephone number.
In the era of social networks, he is keen to do without canvassing by email and to be satisfied with sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube. However, canvassing by email remains very much in the news. It is estimated that the global email prospecting market will reach a value of 17.9 billion dol. lars by 2027, compared to $7.5 billion in 2020.
Many professionals and financial services are already using email marketing software to create campaigns for their prospective or existing customers. But today's CRMs go further: they integrate communication tools that take advantage of demographic data and use the contact details of your customers in order to automatically generate and send personalized emails to your leads, your prospective customers and your regular customers.
And the best ones even give you a catalog of email
templates and landing pages to customize to suit your needs or branding. You
can thus prepare, modify and save all your campaigns within the same program.
Effective Customer Engagement Using Automated
Communications
Email canvassing is often confused with automated marketing. The two activities do have elements in common, but there are notable differences between the two, and between what they can bring to your financial advisory business.
Basically, automated marketing goes far beyond simple canvassing that does not take into account the needs and preferences expressed by a customer or his buying behavior. Email marketing remains an essential communication tool, but automated marketing allows you to capture and store every interaction between a customer and your business. These fragments of information provide essential information to feed your future email campaigns, but also on your web pages, your social networks and even your customer support.
Automating your marketing is a key initiative for
independent financial advisors because it can stimulate prospective and regular
clients through a multitude of media (social networks, email, mobile apps,
etc.). Another equally important advantage of a CRM is the time it can save you
by simplifying a large part of your daily manual tasks, such as posting on your
social networks or sending communication campaigns. It is estimated that using
an automated marketing tool can generate an average increase in productivity of
20%.
Better collaboration within teams thanks to automatic
workflows
A CRM doesn't just simplify your advertising campaigns. Some CRM software helps with the day-to-day management of your entire business, including the leads and sales process that feed it. For example, a CRM focused on the user experience can accelerate the integration of new subscribers, but also new employees. You can collaborate with your team members from the office or remotely.
Automating your workflows with a CRM is one way to simplify your sales process and improve the customer experience. For example, imagine that a new client uses your portfolio management services.
A month later, the consultant in charge of the account
goes on maternity leave… With a CRM, any other member of your team can take
over without risking losing the client. Reminders and notifications make it
possible in particular to schedule phone calls, appointments or other essential
steps to stay on course towards the objectives formulated with the client.
Strengthened customer relationships
As a professional in the financial sector, you already
know that the relationship with a client goes far beyond investments and
results. Rather, it is about putting in place solutions to help people achieve
personal goals: accumulating a pension to supplement retirement, saving to pay
for children's education, obtaining a favorable home loan, or simply making the
right financial decisions. . It's not just about counting, but really about
establishing a long-standing relationship based on mutual trust.
Your services must therefore be as personalized as possible.
You have to start by knowing and understanding the markets you are targeting in order to adapt the message of your communications to them according to needs and interests.
A CRM system can help you obtain and analyze data from customers who fill out your online forms, observe the behavior of your Internet users and of course, maintain your relationship with your existing customers. Drawing on this real-time data, your CRM helps you identify current and emerging trends to personalize your communication and loyalty activities as you go.
Not only does a CRM make it possible to optimize your communication campaigns, it effectively stimulates all your individual or commercial customers. It informs you maps the progress of each account along the customer journey and generates the appropriate content at each stage. This is how your company can send a congratulatory email on the birth of a new child or invite a prospective client to your online webinar on how to fund their education well.
Financial advisors use their CRM to collect, store and
analyze data from their existing or prospective clients in order to send them
highly personalized communications, messages and promotions. A well-configured
CRM can also help you prepare an informative blog on various topics: “Financing
your studies well”, for example. You can even add reminders for your customers'
birthdays to help build a long-lasting relationship.
Detailed forecasts
Financial investments are always focused on the future, and that's true for you too. But when you work in the financial advisory industry, you are so focused on client needs that you forget about growing your own business. A CRM will not only be useful to you to serve your customers well. It can also help you use your database to drive future sales.
In particular, it is an excellent tool for viewing sales, analyzing historical sales or studying the markets in order to identify the sectors in which your company is most successful, to forecast tomorrow's trends, to adjust your sales forecasts and communication strategies to better advance towards your objectives.
A good CRM software must be able to precisely analyze trends, but also individual sales. It must be able to provide you with data related to lead generation, the value of your projected sales (pipeline), or the probability of conversion of your prospective customers. Perhaps there are customers among your disqualified leads who are worth contacting again later. All of these opportunities can be identified and captured through your CRM software. And most importantly, it allows you to focus your efforts where you can make a difference in terms of conversion rate and revenue.
Act! Premium meets all the needs of financial advisors.
Act! gives financial advisors all the CRM management and marketing automation tools they need to sign client relationships and move towards their business goals. Learn how simple customer relationship management tools can transform your business communication, and how data tracking features can help you select, convert, and retain prospective customers.
Act! Premium is easy to customize and includes integration with many apps to fit the way you work. We are committed to meeting your most unique needs, regardless of your budget or the size of your organization.
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