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Practice Management > Building Your Business

The Advisor’s Journey to CRM Success, Pt. 11: The Benefits to Firm Growth

By Spenser Segal

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Here we are at the end of the Journey to CRM Success blog series. If you’ve made it through everything we’ve discussed throughout this series, you’ve probably recognized that the journey never really ends because there are always refinements and improvements to be made to how you use your CRM. 

One success leads to another, so the journey continues and your business grows right along with it. Let’s look back at what you can achieve by leaving the chaos of “No CRM Land” and taking your team on the Journey to CRM Success… 

Support for Important Business Goals

Undertaking the Journey to CRM Success provides companies with the capability to fulfill a driving need to improve their current situation and achieve important business objectives such as growth, profitability and increased efficiency.

Increasing Levels of Sophistication

CRM programs are designed to grow along with your company. They will meet your immediate needs including the essential functions of Contact Management, 360° Client Management, and Activity Management. As you become ready, they will facilitate advanced functions including Process Automation (through Templates, Checklists and Workflows), Sales Management, and Mass Communication. 

Data Visibility, Accessibility, and Reporting

CRM gets your client data out of the chaos and disorganization of spreadsheets, Outlook, and people’s brains and moves you to a state of organization and transparency, which prepares you to run a more scalable, effective practice. 

Shared access to data and the ability to monitor what is going on make it easier for your team to collaborate. Reporting functions enable you to extract and evaluate various combinations and views of this important client and prospect information. This arms the team with the greatest ability to focus their efforts on the activities that matter most. 

CRM helps to ensure that no clients or commitments/tasks fall between the cracks without someone knowing it happened.

More Meaningful Client Interactions

You will always have contacts you need to communicate with and no two will be exactly alike. CRM helps your team make each interaction more personal by providing a mechanism for your team to see important client details.

Effective segmentation means that you can easily target messages to carefully selected people or groups and automatically customize and personalize messages down to the individual client or prospect level. 

Integrations, Automation, Consistency, and Improved User Experience

Integration between multiple software platforms and automation of repetitive tasks will help improve consistency, accuracy, and efficiency. In some cases, you can completely eliminate time that is be spent on an employee manually updating data.  All of these contribute to a significantly improved user experience by eliminating redundant data entry isues and improving the quality/reliability of data in the system.  

Revenue Forecasting and Organizational Effectiveness

CRM provides a means by which you can evaluate the pipeline and learn about timing and activity effectiveness. The business value of CRM as a sales process and pipeline management tool comes in the form of real-time visibility of what is happening, measurable data points, and a framework for team accountability. When the steps of your sales process are executed within the CRM, and current opportunities are regularly updated within the system, visibility on revenue, prospect status, and recent activity is immediately available and actionable. 

These are a few highlights of the benefits you can realize through solid CRM utilization. Your business is constantly evolving. You need to be able to keep up on what is happening, adjust for growth, and keep everything on your desired trajectory. CRM is the platform that can help you do that effectively.  

If there is one message that you take away from this series, it should be that the level of leadership commitment, preparation, and team communication you put in is directly related to the success that you are going to achieve. 

Thank you for joining me on this journey to CRM Success; may the rest of your journey be one of great accomplishment and amazing growth!

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See the complete series of blogs, Spenser Segal on CRM Success.

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