Partner perspective: CRM decision essentials for financial advisors

Choosing a CRM, or any advisor technology for that matter, can be a hard decision for any growing RIA.

To help firms understand how to navigate the process, we're embracing a new level of transparency, beginning with our ongoing series, “Partner perspective.”

In the spirit of learning and partnership, we'll briefly walk through our market experiences and share them with you in each segment. Our hope is you'll gain insights into how firms like yours work with vendors to achieve the best tech outcome.

Each week our sales team will deliver a few notes from the field to provide perspective into firms that partner with AdvisorEngine®'s technology to scale, and those that don’t. Here’s Kathy Crowley with this week’s CRM insight:

The firm 

Here’s a little background, demographic info about this particular prospective client:

• Who - 20 person firm, founded in 2002
• Where -  Pennsylvania
• What - CRM software

The team 

This firm’s director of IT was the point person who conducted the vetting process for all of the CRM technology vendors. He sized up each offering for best fit based on their desires. The COO and Director of Wealth Management also played a part in the selection process.

The strategy

What was this particular firm looking for in a CRM? What were their desired outcomes? Here’s a breakdown of their wish list: 

• A CRM that can host not only client data but also information on other companies they work with. Essentially, one true source of information to keep track of all interactions.
  
  
• Email capture and functionality - they wanted to be able to capture and send emails out straight from a CRM, including mass emails.
  
  
• Another priority function was restricting IP access. They wanted the ability to determine how much access groups of employees (interns for example) would have from particular IP addresses.
  
  
• The ability to get granular within their data. They wanted a CRM that offers multiple ways to view data, so staff in different roles could find the most relevant insights to them. And greater search abilities too, such as the power to review data by “user” or “client,” or search in the action note itself and the subject line.

The review

The firm matched AdvisorEngine against its needs. AdvisorEngine's CRM is able to keep track of all interactions, including clients and firms. It also has Outlook templates to set email functionality.  AdvisorEngine CRM offers not only IP restriction, but also multi-factor authentication. It also gives a user the ability to customize data insights.

The outcome

Our CRM checked boxes and delivered on all of their strategic desires. I’m happy to report that we decided to work together to achieve this firm’s CRM goals. We are excited to partner further with this firm on some of its other initiatives.

I’d welcome the opportunity to talk with you about what you want most out of your CRM.