The power of cloud based contact management for financial services

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is there a recommended client relationship management software system you need a CRM it's obvious role is that it's you know keeps track of client contact information but it's got other elements uh most all it should have a notet taking capacity I like to make sure if you're kind of making a list of things that I like about crms that I always look for uh I look for something that when you search it will search through the notes as well as the client Conta information so that if for example let's say you have a problem with a client on a specific account that you've been uh kind of following through on you could put the last four digits of the account number uh in each note related to that problem and then you could go into the CRM uh search box and type those last four numbers of of that account and then all those notes would come up so many crms don't do that so I mention that to you I I mean and there are also calendar components comp task components so assigning tasks to members of the team maintaining your own task list uh most crms do not do this very well uh most crms allow you to create task lists that um are have a deadline date so you have a task of something that's due on a certain date and then it creates a task list for you of all these things that are due on certain dates uh that's very inefficient uh that's that's what Stephen cvy talks a lot about in the the tyranny of the Urgent where you know you're so busy working on tasks that you know have deadlines that the the things that don't have deadlines which are often the more important things never make it onto your task list but uh you you you're looking for the capability of being able to prioritize your task list in ways other than the due date so if you could just you know be able to look at your task list and maybe Drag and Drop Like drag the most important thing to the top of the list or somehow move it up there uh that's something that many CRM are unable to do and uh and I don't like that but um you know so calendar contacts task task requests and then last but not least uh what I would call Action sequences which is automating uh processes so like uh you know Auto automated autoresponders Auto automated sequences of emails or just automated task lists of things where you're trying to take a best way process and actually automate it only look at cloud-based systems at this point uh if you're not using a cloud-based system it's really going to you in the uh years ahead and I would say right now uh but what you're really dealing with here is a kind of a a tradeoff between Simplicity and capability so we use a CRM you know we looked at like 110 crms and U we decided we wanted one a a CRM with tremendous capability and the trade-off for that is it's not simple uh so we use a CRM that you may not hear often in our industry but it's called infusion soft and I would say if you're going to choose infusion soft uh it's got everything that you want uh it's it's particularly automating processes so the problem is if you're getting started with infusion soft you're going to need to hire a consultant so this is a financial decision uh this is I would not try to implement infusion soft into your business without hiring an infusion soft certified consultant which there are jillions of them all over the place uh certified Consultants many of them are also virtual assistants uh so you know it's not that they don't exist or you know that they can't help you and fusion soft itself has coaches that you can hire to help through this uh but the point is it's not cheap Salesforce is you know probably the most commonly that's the one that I hear most commonly this day this these days it's was one of the very first cloud-based CR RM and it has a lot of capability specific to our industry you hear red tail quite a bit um they right on their loo logo I notice here it says celebrating 10 10 years so they've been around for a little while but that is focused pretty much on on uh Financial Services as is juncture so uh juncture is you know kind of used to be the gold standard uh but for the fact that they weren't in the cloud I I'm assuming they're in the cloud now they have a product called juncture Cloud so I don't really have a horse in this race I just tell you that it should be cloud-based uh you got to decide on the state of your team right now you've got to think ahead a year or two you want to make sure that your system is capable of you know doing everything that needs to be tracked outside of the meeting plans because those are tracked on the toolkit but the more complex and more capable CRM you get uh the more the more complex it is to implement and the more likely it is is that you'll need to hire someone to to come in and help you implement it I would tell you one thing to avoid when it comes to CRM are these um there are some systems uh that are Holy Grail they hold themselves out to be holy grail in the US there's one called IAS interactive uh advisory systems I think and uh we we used it at our firm for several years put we sunk hundreds well over a 100 th well over 150,000 I I think it was closer to 200,000 we sunk in to that trying to customize it to our system but but it was it's a system and and you'll come across these where it's a client relationship manager and financial planning and uh you know performance reporting and you know it claims to do everything and what the what it ends what you'll find and in Australia you have xpl my experience with these and I've worked with xpl and I've worked with IAS and I'm a I'm a familiar with several of these other holy Gra software programs is they do a lot which is that's the big benefit it integrates everything but it doesn't do any of them at a very high level so or at the highest levels necessary for what we're doing for our clients so I think if you're gonna if you if you've made a huge investment in a Holy Grail Software System and you want to continue using it just lower your expectations and just realize that a lot of advisers have sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into these systems only to find out that that you need to you know do a lot of things just just give it up in thinking that it's going to be all done in one place and get used to the idea that you're going to have to have your subject matter experts create reports and certain analysis and certain things that they're doing outside that system uh even if you keep the the end result the the document created as a result of your subject matter experts efforts uh even if you store that in your Holy Grail software program your CRM and so forth um just get used to the idea that that system's not going to do everything