4 Ways Your CRM Is Limiting Business Growth

February 28, 2020

By Adrian johnstone

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are designed to help businesses build stronger ties with their clients, but are they enough?

Your clients have complex needs, but it can be a challenge to ensure that they all receive the support they need to progress toward their financial goals. Traditional CRM solutions may not offer the features required to uncover new business opportunities within client data. Additionally, their limited functionality can prevent you from taking a more proactive approach to compliance. Overall, these shortcomings can affect how your firms grow.

Not sure if your CRM is limiting business growth? Here are four signs to look for:

1. Your client data is trapped in silos

Siloed legacy systems prevent you from fully leveraging your client data across all lines of business. When your data is trapped, it’s harder for your team members to uncover new revenue opportunities and spot new sources of referrals. Without complete data visibility, your team members may struggle to meet client expectations, let alone exceed them.

Solution: 360° relationship insights

To gain more value from your client data, you need technology that can help you visualise every client, partner and provider across your network. For example, when you can see which advice services you’re providing each client at a glance, you can more easily spot opportunities to grow those relationships.

2. Your team members are forced to manually complete routine tasks

All the time advisors and their teams spend moving documents and sending internal emails could be better spent on creating value for clients. However, traditional CRM technology limits how much work advisors can accomplish because they’re not specifically designed for advice firms. This means they’re not designed to handle the workflows and tasks most relevant to your business. And tedious manual tasks, though necessary, do very little to support business growth.

Solution: Workflow automation

In 2020 and beyond, automation will continue to change the way businesses in every industry perform their functions. Advisory firms in particular, can benefit greatly from improved workflow efficiency. For example, technology that automatically assigns tasks to team members reduces the need to send numerous emails and reduces the likelihood that team members will forget important tasks.

3. Your workflows are spread out across multiple platforms

Switching between technology platforms reduces efficiency and increases the chances of data becoming corrupted as it moves around. For example, if advisors need to move data from one advice tool to another, a single mistyped entry could have severe consequences.

Solution: Platform integrations

Technology that brings your tools together under a single platform provides many benefits including the power to fully trust your data. In addition, integrated tools like document delivery technology can help you keep track of client interactions no matter where they occur. Plus, marketing integrations can help you understand how new clients find you so that you can optimise your outreach efforts.

4. Your compliance efforts are reactive, not proactive

Compliance mistakes can be very costly. Once they’ve occurred, it can take a lot of work to undo the damage to your reputation. Off-the-shelf CRM technology may not have the compliance capabilities that advisors require.

Solution: Detailed business reporting

To be proactive in your compliance efforts, look for technology with compliance built in. Likewise, don’t settle for technology that has been designed for a broad spectrum of industries. When it comes to legal compliance, you’re better off choosing technology developed by people who understand the ins and outs of an advisory firm and the financial services industry.

More than a CRM

To grow, your advisory firm needs more than a standard CRM solution. Having a more holistic and integrated management platform can help you leverage client data, streamline your workflows, integrate your digital tools and become more proactive about compliance.