- What is a CRM?
- But Does It Actually Help Your Sales?
- What Part of Your Work or Life Suffers?
- Brave New World: How it Affects You
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.“ – Steve Jobs
When you started a financial advisory practice, you took many things for granted. Things simply work a certain way. Let us take that all-important thing, the sales. Meaning how the practice actually acquires new customers. You were told that there is something called the CRM – Customer Relationship Management software.
What is a CRM?
A CRM holds data about leads, helps you create tasks, follow up and be a more disciplined advisor and a salesperson. Note that in today’s reality the CRM is never concerned with your actual sales process. Finding leads, talking to them, convincing them all these things take place outside of your CRM. Why? Who knows, it is just the way it always was.
When you have a lead, you can add it to your CRM manually. Or if you are good enough at technology, you can connect your lead generation process to the CRM. As a basic example, if a lead fills out a form on your website, he or she can be automatically added to your CRM and a task can be created for you to follow up. Great, that is big help. But even that basic step requires some bridge between your CRM and your website, something that takes time and money, with time being the more valuable of the two.
But Does It Actually Help Your Sales?
We always think of a CRM as intimately connected to the sales process. But, does it easily connect to your sales process? What if you now want to generate a new webpage to drive leads i.e. a landing page in the marketing lingo? Does the CRM help you generate that landing page? Nope, you are on your own.
Is the landing web page automatically linked so that the leads immediately appear in the CRM and you are notified to follow up? Not likely, you must connect those things somehow. So, every simple marketing step (and creating a new landing page is as simple as it gets) requires you to have several special skills and spend time. There is a range of advisors. Some are incredibly tech savvy and are willing to put in the hours. For others, this tech stuff is like pulling teeth…
What Part of Your Work or Life Suffers?
So, where do you get those hours to set up good online marketing? You take them away from doing the important client work i.e. what you get paid for. Or you take it away from the rest of your life i.e. family. So, there are hundreds of thousands of advisors who spend significant time and money performing the same tasks to grow their business. Should you be spending time on that? Some advisors rely on sheer force of networking, calling, referrals and avoid online marketing altogether (not a wise strategy today when 75% of all marketing is digital).
Brave New World: How it Affects You
Whether you like it or not (and we certainly do not), in the post-pandemic environment many people do not want take meetings. It is lamentable. But lament will not grow your business. You need to act and become a digital marketing pro. Am I suggesting that you spend thousands of dollars and months to learn online marketing strategy? Not really.
In the next email, I will tell you what a Lifestyle CRM is and how exactly it solves all of these problems…
P.S. Soon we will start a special Founding Member offer for the Lifestyle CRM. You will get a dramatically lower rate and you will get to keep it forever, even as we raise the price on it.
