The Advisor’s Journey to CRM Success, Pt. 7: Contact Info, To-Dos and More

Previous posts in this series have covered preparation for the journey, traveling from “No CRM Land” to “CRM Land” and how to bring your team along on the journey.  So here we are in the land of CRM.

Now that we are here, it is time to take a deeper look at the aspects of this journey that bring us the rest of the way to CRM Success. 

In this post we’ll focus on CRM’s role in managing contact information, tasks, reminders, and history. Utilizing CRM effectively on these fronts delivers clear and measurable benefits to the business. While there are some challenges to be aware of, this really is the easiest level of CRM utilization and will show value very quickly for most advisory practices.  

Managing contact information, tasks, reminders, and history are what we refer to as “Essential Functionality” for any CRM system. These are functions that are included in pretty much every CRM solution on the market today, and should be considered an absolute requirement.

• Contact Management: The management of contact information, history tracking, managing relationships (households, contact linking, etc.), and extending the system to meet a practice’s unique needs.  
• Activity Management: The creation, assignment, delegation, and escalation of tasks, calendar management, and reporting on this data. Integration with productivity tools such as email and telephony is also included.
• 360° Client Management: Access to client financial information, alignment of teams to clients, and management of segmentation and service models. Reporting on this data is included.  

Contact Information & History

While moving contact information and history into a CRM system is not an overly complicated endeavor, changing the behavior of the team to continually update and add information can be.  The difficulty at this point of the implementation is very low, the follow-through is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. 

The reason this area is important (when used diligently) is simple, it allows you to store nuanced information about your clients in a way that ensures everyone who touches the client has access to the information. We are talking here about the details that make each client unique and that can be leveraged to deepen your relationship with them. Examples include hobbies, children and education.  

The payback of using this information is developing deeper personal relationships with clients by not forgetting important aspects of their lives.