Choosing The Right CRM For Your Advice Firm

Is technology making your life difficult?

If information is held on fragmented systems, it can mean checking several different files when you’re preparing for a meeting, rekeying information from fact-finds, or discovering you’re chasing documents that have already been received.

Viewed separately, each of these little irritations can feel insignificant, but across an advice practice, they start to build up and disrupt your workflow. Staff might try to compensate, but it soon becomes evident that the more clients you serve, the greater the burden of administration becomes.

Choosing a new CRM is an opportunity to address these problems. However, a long features list tells you little about how the system will improve your business. You need to understand how the features work together, whether you will actually use them and what happens when a case becomes more complicated.

Where is your business going?

Before arranging demonstrations with CRM providers, take some time to think about what you want your firm to look like in a few years’ time.

·        Do you want your existing team to be able to serve more clients?

·        Do you want to give clients greater access to their financial information?

·        Do you want to build a specialist retirement proposition?

·        Do you want to recruit additional advisers?

All of these ambitions have practical implications. A growing team needs clear workflows and a retirement specialist wants planning information and client objectives readily available. Likewise, if you wish to enhance your digital experience, it needs to feel consistent with the service your staff currently deliver.

Start by identifying the processes that require a disproportionate amount of effort. Ask colleagues where they are entering information twice, maintaining separate spreadsheets or depending on the knowledge of one person. This information will then allow you to build a more useful brief than a generic list of software requirements.

Complete client records

A good CRM should give you so much more than names, addresses and diary entries. Your team needs to understand a client’s finances, objectives, relationships, conversations and previous decisions.

Let’s think about a typical couple who are approaching retirement. When you are building their next recommendation, their pension values, expenditure, mortgage commitments and attitude to risk are important, but so too is the note explaining why one partner wants to stop work early. AdviceObjects brings all this information together by linking the adviser CRM to fact-finds, risk profiling, cashflow planning, documents and communications. This means everyone can follow the case and its supporting evidence.

When you have a CRM demonstration, ask the supplier to show you how a paraplanner finds the information behind a recommendation. Then question how you would prepare for the same client’s review. A connected record should make both tasks easier, without someone needing to explain where everything has been saved.

Stress-test everyday tasks

A CRM system can look impressive when you are being shown a perfectly prepared example, but in reality, cases pass between advisers, administrators, paraplanners and reviewers. Progress depends on everyone knowing what has happened and what’s next.

Our platform supports different case types and can be set up to suit the work being undertaken. You can create checklists, automated tasks and reminders, set due dates, monitor progress and seeing outstanding items or compliance sign-off status.

Ask a potential CRM supplier what happens when information is missing, a client takes longer than expected to respond, or a case reviewer requests a change, as they will reveal whether the platform can help you manage these situations. When the workflow is visible, you can identify where progress has stalled and support the colleague responsible, before the client calls for an update.

Your team might be using the platform every day, but it’s clients who experience the consequences. They notice how easy it is to provide information, understand next steps and how quickly they receive a response to queries.

You can brand our client portal and use it to share documents and relevant financial information securely, exchange messages and obtain electronic signatures. This allows you to incorporate these interactions into the wider advice process.

Always try the client journey yourself on a phone and think about how a busy person will interact with the tasks. Technology that requires less effort can make a firm feel more accessible and organised from the outset.

Connect planning and suitability documents

Entering the same financial information into planning tools and suitability letters consumes a surprising amount of time and creates opportunities for human error, leading to inconsistency.

We believe a platform should make use of the information it has already collected, so AdviceObjects includes a suite of pre-populated suitability report templates, giving the author a structured starting point.

Your team can refer back to associated meeting notes, fact-finds, risk profile and cashflow data when completing and reviewing a report. A quality result still depends on your oversight and ability to explain the recommendation, but by reducing the preparation time, you can give more attention to the reasoning for that specific client.

Ask potential CRM suppliers to show you what a complete suitability report will look like using representative client information. Check how missing details are completed, wording can be adapted and how you can review the final document.

The devil is in the detail

The usefulness of any new software depends on its fit with your business, so bring your actual provider list to any discussion about a new CRM. Ask which valuation connections are available, what information they supply and how your team will handle anything outside that coverage.

Apply the same scrutiny to the price. Consider how many colleagues need access, plus planning, reporting, portal features and any optional services you require. We offer an unlimited user pricing model, allowing you to include as many team members as you wish in your agreed package.

Don’t forget to calculate the wider costs of your existing arrangement too, so you have an accurate benchmark. Multiple subscriptions, paid connections and time spent reconciling records all affect the economics. Only by measuring your own processes can you establish where a new platform could realistically reduce costs. For example, saving 20 minutes per client review would release 100 working hours for every 300 reviews.

Before reaching the end of the procurement process, make sure you ask about migration. You need to agree which records will be imported into the new system, how documents and history will be handled, who will check the results and how your staff will be trained.

We offer full support during the bulk import of client data and provide a sample migration so you have something to inspect before the move takes place. This gives you an opportunity to improve workflows that have been developed around the limitations of your old system.

Finally, the due diligence process should cover security, permissions, hosting, backups, support and data access. Be sure to ask how exports work and what assistance or charges may apply if you decide to leave. Understanding these arrangements is essential if you are to invest in new software with confidence.

Making a decision

When you’ve shortlisted a few platforms, select an anonymised client journey and ask each supplier to demonstrate it from first enquiry to review. Invite the people who do the work to assess the results and record where information flows, where it must be re-entered and whether outstanding actions remain visible.

The right platform should give you and your team a clearer working day and greater confidence to grow your business. Similarly, clients should feel it reflects the attention and professionalism they already receive from your firm.

If you are looking for a CRM that does so much more than record client data, don’t hesitate to contact us for an initial discussion or demonstration. Alternatively, email: contact@adviceobjects.com