May
31

By CommenceCRM

What’s The Best CRM For Financial Advisors And Insurance Agents?

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Customer relationship management is crucial for a financial advisor and/or an insurance agent since it directly affects customer loyalty and insurance sales. When the biggest asset to helping your business grow may be less of the financial service or product that you provide and more on how your customer experiences engaging with you, you need to have nothing less than the best CRM methodologies and tools at your disposal.

But what makes the best CRM for financial advisors and insurance agents? Ideally, your CRM system should be able to streamline your business operations, personalize your services to the needs of the client, collate and interpret data, and scale with your business. Combined with the right CRM tool, a successful insurance agent or financial advisor can greatly improve customer relationships with potential and existing clients.

Why CRM Is Crucial For Financial Advisors And Insurance Agents

One significant hurdle that’s always faced in the financial services industry is the relative difficulty financial professionals have with marketing their services to their sales target. Even for existing clients, it can be difficult to explain the ins and outs of the insurance industry, and why its services are needed.

This is why creating good client relationships is crucial to making sure that targets are met and clients are happy. If a financial institution can leverage methodologies, software, and tools that can improve customer relationships, it becomes easier to increase customer satisfaction.

There are three areas in particular where the need for excellent financial services CRM is so important:

Improving marketing to potential clients

To reach a sales target, a successful insurance agent or financial advisor needs to understand what client data says about their target audience. This is especially crucial for financial professionals like wealth managers or insurance brokers since market research is what can lead them to clients that will actually need their services.

By using tools like a CRM platform, an insurance sales agent or an insurance agency can easily keep track of how their marketing efforts are having an impact compared to other competitors in the insurance industry. CRM software for financial service has developed rapidly in the last decade, allowing for staff members like an advisor’s assistant to create new client relationships with easy contact management options and social media integration.

Keeping engagement with existing clients

Another benefit of a robust customer relationship management strategy is improving customer relationships with the clients you already have. An insurance sales agent or financial planner has the potential to lock down a lifetime client if their service is exceptional, and the best way to do that is to ensure that the needs of your customers are met.

A relatively straightforward way to do this is to simply keep client data on hand at all times. By using a CRM system that can help you keep your workflow organized and relevant data accessible at all times, you can easily work on customer satisfaction and build on pre-existing experiences with your client to ensure customer loyalty. A successful insurance agent will understand what their client wants as their partnership progresses.

Differentiating yourself as a financial services business

A financial planner or financial advisor needs to differentiate themselves from their peers in the financial services industry, and the best way to do this is to ensure those client relationships are always prioritized. It can be easy for both the advisor and the advisee to get lost in the fine print of a financial service, but it’s taking that extra step to pay attention to what your client wants that can make you stand out.

This is especially crucial in the case of an SME insurance agency, since they may not have the client base or reputation that a large financial institution has. By building on their customer relationship management, it becomes easier for them to distinguish themselves as a financial services business that puts the needs of their client alongside getting them results.

A financial service business needs to leverage its CRM system to make sure that they manage customer satisfaction while also reaching their sales target. Always ask yourself how can you make sure that your services have a personal touch that makes your client feel like they’ve taken care of, and customer loyalty will do the rest.

Four Best Practices Of CRM For A Financial Advisor Or Insurance Agent

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But how exactly can a finance professional leverage a CRM platform or CRM tool to make sure that they have the best CRM solution for their clients? While the specifics may vary depending on the size of the insurance agency or the experience of the agent, there are four best practices that you should follow to ensure that you get the best use out of your CRM strategy.

1. Improving operational efficiency

Operational efficiency and workflow management are possibly the two greatest assets that a CRM platform or CRM solution can offer you. Because so much of an advisor or agent’s time is spent on just bookkeeping, CRM can be used as a useful tool to make sure that everything relevant to the job at hand is easily accessible and usable when you need it to be.

There are several ways that you can do this, but the easiest solution is using a CRM tool or CRM software that can help organize everything in one place, from contact management to social media engagement. These tools often have the marketing automation required to improve your customer relationships without much effort aside from correctly inputting the data required.

This is particularly useful for an independent agent or insurance broker who operates on their own since it eliminates the need to outsource or hire someone else to do the bookkeeping for you. Not only do you get a CRM solution that you can easily use yourself, but it can also allow you to keep pace with a bigger financial institution if you leverage your data correctly.

2. Personalizing your services to your client

With client data centralized in one place, it becomes easier for an insurance sales agent or financial advisor to personalize their services to their client. You can check at a glance what actions your client should take that can benefit them long and short-term, advise them on essential protections to get for themselves and their property, and overall offer more relevant solutions to the problems that they bring to you.

One thing to keep in mind while using a CRM system is that you need to make sure that the system, tool, or software that you’re using is tailored exactly to you and your client’s needs. Financial services CRM solutions can often catch insurance agents unawares who put too much faith in marketing automation to get the work done – and this can result in them giving terrible advice and substandard results for their clients.

This is particularly critical with clients who come to you for wealth management, as it’s an aspect of the insurance industry that relies heavily on taking the client’s personal circumstances. Wealth managers can use CRM tools to make sure that their handling of their client’s finances is in line with what the client wishes.

3. Collate and interpret data

The insurance industry faces a lot of challenges with the amount of customer data it has to process daily. Merely noting down or keeping this data isn’t enough – an insurance agent or a financial adviser needs to see how all of the data they’ve gathered plays a larger role in the needs of their clients, and how they can leverage these results to make them happy.

Proper CRM strategies and tools can easily cut through the massive amounts of data you gather from your industry, the client’s demands, and the factors that may affect their results into a format that can quickly show critical insights, information, and other relevant pieces of information at a glance. CRM software in particular can help narrow down gaps in your workflow and make the data you generate more relevant to the task at hand, with the ability to do this semi-autonomously with minimal input required.

More than just making sense of the now, CRM can also help you predict events that are likely to happen to your client or to your industry. By keeping an ear out for the needs of your target market, you’re able to easily anticipate the best course of action for your client to take with their current finances. This also comes with the bonus of making sure your data can be understood even by your client.

4. Scale and grow as your business changes

Finally, CRM needs to change as your company changes. Whether you’re making the jump from an independent insurance agent to an independent advisor, your CRM solution needs to grow and adapt to the new challenges, clients, and work that you’ll be facing.

Choosing a methodology or a tool that can be scaled up, tweaked, or completely rebranded for your needs is essential to making sure that you stay ahead of your competitors in the insurance industry. An excellent way to see if your tool or method will work is to simply ask yourself this question: “is this CRM tool/strategy/plan going to work for me as my business grows?”

The very best CRM tools and software can accommodate the growing changes (or growing pains) that a financial advisor or an insurance agent will encounter when upscaling their businesses. For small-to-medium enterprises looking to start out, this ability to adapt in the face of change is crucial to your success. Given enough time, patience, and proper management of your CRM methodologies and tools, you can still carve out both a niche and client base among bigger financial institutions.

Keep in mind that while financial services CRM may vary depending on your exact position – an independent insurance agent will have different priorities compared to insurance brokers – but these core principles should apply to how you handle customer relationship management in general.

CRM Software: A Powerful Tool For Financial Professionals

While methodologies can carry you a long way, choosing the right CRM software can complete your journey. Packed with the latest features to make customer relationship management easier, with the ability to change itself according to the needs of your specific industry, CRM software is an excellent investment for financial professionals looking to leverage their experience and existing client base into a more robust marketing and sales strategy.

By providing you with a clear and concise system to keep everything you need to know and track about your customer in one place, CRM software can help you attain partnerships with clients that can last long after your contract has ended. Using CRM software can bring all the advantages of marketing automation to your operations while still leaving room for a personal touch – an essential component to making sure that your client has full confidence that they’re being taken care of.

Aside from the software itself, forming partnerships with your software provider can also be fruitful for your long-term prospects. Not only are you getting top-notch customer support with your product, but you’re also privy to the latest developments and innovations with their software that you can use to improve your CRM strategy further. 

Commence CRM: Providing Accessible CRM Software And CRM Systems To Insurance SMEs

Commence CRM has extensive experience with providing tools and software that can help insurance agents, financial advisors, and other financial professionals increase customer satisfaction, improve workflow, leverage client data, and make marketing more efficient. Whether you’re an independent advisor, a financial planner, a small-to-medium insurance agency, or simply someone part of the financial services industry, we can provide you a CRM solution that makes your job easier while giving your client the results that they want.

For more information or a free trial of the product, contact Commence Sales at 1-877-266-6362.

Learn more: Why CRM Software For Insurance Restoration Companies Is A Must-Have

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