Winning the End Game: Client Follow-up
We’re wrapping up the week with our fourth and final installment of MaxTips for Financial Advisors – a series with key insights for Financial Advisors who are looking to a CRM to build their book of business. Today we cover what is perhaps the most important piece of the client communication puzzle – establishing a solid process for ongoing communication. Simply put, client ‘follow-up.”
The journey of moving away from spreadsheets and implementing a CRM can indeed be time consuming. But like any other worthy investment, dedicating the resources will pay off in spades for operational efficiency and revenue growth. If you are at the stage now where you’ve completed a clean import of your data, optimized your client profile settings, and have your client communication working in lock step across the firm, then it’s time to commit to the end game!
“The life-changing power of a CRM, especially for financial advisors, is truly in the follow up,” explains Brad Hartfield, Financial Solutions Manager at Maximizer. “When my clients discover just how much automating their follow-ups can sharpen their focus and skyrocket their productivity, they can’t imagine life without it,” he says.
Having full shared and transparent access to client data across the company is, of course, invaluable for team environments. If you’ve got a solid sales process in place, all those general but time sensitive admin tasks can be confidently delegated to junior members, leaving business development folks the bandwidth to chase the big leads.
Tried and True Tactics
Financial Advisors, more so than most sales professionals, are event- or calendar-driven. Milestone birthdays, retirement runways, contribution deadlines – everything revolves around dates. The beauty is advisors can effectively “outsource” each and every reminder they would ever need to the CRM. The magic of course is that those reminders – and the associated action items – are not only catalogued but also fully automated.
“When advisors can log onto their CRM each morning and, at the click of a button, see their a full list of their required follow-ups for that day or in days to come, it not only ensures those tasks are completed on time, but it also frees up literally hours in the advisor’s day to focus on chasing new business,” Hartfield added.
It lies with the advisor, however, to manage the best way to communicate with any given client. Some clients prefer email over calls, some prefer calls over in-person meetings. And (drumroll) your CRM can help you track this as part of your client profiling. What is most important here, however, is that regardless of how or for what reason you are connecting with a client, every interaction is archived now archived. From calls made, emails sent and meetings held to proposals delivered and documents signed, an ever-growing and comprehensive client history at your fingertips becomes a golden goose.
As discussed in our “Connecting With Clients” segment, Maximizer has long partnered with platforms familiar to and loved by financial advisors including MailChimp and Outlook. No need to switch away from the amazing productivity tools you may already be using, just bring them into the CRM fold and take your client communication game to the next level!
Read more in our MaxTips for Financial Advisor Series:
From Spreadsheets to CRM: Ensuring a smooth & successful transition
Client profiling: How a CRM makes it easy, purposeful, and profitable
Connecting with Clients: Productivity for compelling and results-driven rep-client conversations
