What is a CRM for investment and how do you choose the best one?

For any financial services company, building relationships and establishing trust is vital. After all, you’re asking clients to trust you with their money and assets.

When you’re managing multiple clients and trying to attract new business, staying on top of customer and investor relations can be tricky.

A CRM allows you to track your customer interactions, manage your leads and visualize your performance in one location.

In this article, we’ll walk you through what a CRM for investment is, why it’s helpful and how to find the best CRM for your financial services business.

What is a CRM for investment?

A customer relationship management platform (CRM) for investment is a system that helps investment firms and financial professionals manage relationships with clients and prospects. Features vary from platform to platform, but most investment CRMs allow you to generate and nurture leads, manage client interactions and use reports to track performance.

CRM software lets you centralize all of this information. As a result, you can visualize the entire customer journey, manage all your leads from start to finish and streamline your business processes.

They allow you to organize valuable information about your clients, including their investment preferences, contact details, communication history and other relevant data.

How a CRM can help you grow your financial services business

Let’s take a look at the benefits of using a CRM solution as an investment banker, financial advisor or other financial professional.

Generate high-quality leads

With a CRM tool, you can identify your ideal customer (including their demographics, behaviors, pain points and more). Then, you can use the software to target prospects that fit all of these criteria.

Consider Pipedrive’s LeadBooster add-on. With our CRM, you can use this add-on to find your target customers and capture high-quality leads before they go elsewhere.

Say you’re targeting high earners with disposable income. You can create a buyer persona that fits this ideal customer. You can then search LeadBooster’s Prospector feature with access to a database of over 400 million profiles and 10 million companies to find leads that fit that persona.

You can also use the tool to capture warm prospects who visit your site. Create custom forms with the Web Forms tool to automatically sync the data to your CRM for easier sorting and qualifying. Use Chatbot to engage with prospects and send ideal leads directly to a live chat with a sales team member.

You can even route new leads to the right person or team at your organization using automatic assignment, Pipedrive’s automated lead distribution software.

Manage client relationships

Client relationships play an important role in encouraging investment. Prospects need to feel like they can trust you to make that leap.

Implementing a CRM can help you build trust with your clients by offering them a personalized experience.

All the customer data you store in a CRM platform can help you learn a lot about your prospects. You know what their concerns are, how they make decisions and what they’re looking for from an investment firm. This puts you in a good position to tailor your messaging and offers.

You can also segment leads by key attributes (this is known as lead scoring). You can then personalize your communications for each segment.

Let’s say you have a group you’ve categorized as high-value leads. You know the prospects in this group are looking for information about the type of investments you manage and who your current partners are.

You can create messaging around your offerings and your partners and send it directly to the prospects in this segment.

Improve internal and external processes

Using a CRM system is a great way to visualize all your processes, both internal and external. You can see how prospects move through the buying journey, how your financial team nurtures leads and how you manage investments.

As a result, you’re able to pinpoint areas for improvement.

For example, say a prospect reaches out to your investment firm from an online form on your website.

When you’re reviewing the customer journey, you notice that there’s a big delay between when the prospect submitted the inquiry and when a team member sent follow-up communication.

In the current process, inquiries are landing in your CRM, but they’re not assigned to an advisor directly. Instead, advisors have to review the information manually to see which prospects need to be contacted.

To overcome this bottleneck, you can use workflow automation. For instance, set up an automation that triggers a task to assign inquiries to an advisor as soon as they come in. That way, prospects receive prompt communication and no one falls through the cracks.

Features to look for in the best CRM for investment companies

The best CRM for any company depends on their business needs.

For example, a small business with team members who do multiple jobs might want a platform that’s easy to use so it doesn’t overwhelm busy employees. They might be best served by a simple CRM.

A larger company that wants additional functionality and the ability to thoroughly analyze performance might need something more robust, like a CRM solution for enterprise teams.

Whatever your business needs, here are some key features to consider to help you find the right CRM for your investment firm.

Pipeline management

Pipeline management involves managing and tracking leads through various stages of your sales pipeline. It can help you understand how prospects move through the buying journey and what you can do to encourage them to invest.

For example, say a prospect’s communication goes cold. You need to know how to engage with them and encourage them to move along the journey.

With pipeline management, you can see where the prospect is in the pipeline and determine the best way to engage them from there.

You see they had a consultation with a financial advisor. You can take the appropriate action to re-engage (e.g., offer a follow-up call or send an email to address their specific investment concerns) and move them through the sales funnel.

Here are some pipeline management tools that can be especially helpful in investment banking, wealth management and other financial services:

• Lead tracking. Pipeline management involves capturing leads from various sources, assigning them to the right financial representatives and updating their status as they progress through the pipeline.

• Stage progression. Effective pipeline management involves tracking customers and leads at every stage of the buying journey. Different stages include initial contact, lead qualification, proposal, negotiation and closing the deal. Keep an eye out for a CRM that allows you to track these progressions so you can make sure you’re taking the necessary actions to move them forward.

• Forecasting. Pipeline management can give you a clear overview of all the investment deals you have in progress. By analyzing the number and quality of these deals at each stage, you can forecast your potential revenue and growth to make data-driven decisions about business development, resource allocation and more.

Contact management

Contact management is automatically gathering and tracking useful data from prospects, leads and customers. It allows you to learn more about your audience and prioritize qualified leads so you can move them through the investor’s journey more quickly.

This data includes:

• Contact information. Contact management involves capturing and maintaining accurate and up-to-date contact information for individuals or entities. This generally includes details such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and social media profiles.

• Communication history. Storing communication history involves keeping track of customer interactions, such as emails, phone calls, meetings and any other relevant correspondence.

• Relationships. Contact management tracks the nature of the relationship, important milestones, preferences and other relevant details that help you build and nurture strong connections. This builds trust with prospects and leads.

Let’s use Pipedrive’s Smart Contact Data as an example.

This feature helps you gather valuable information about leads with just one click. Information includes web data, demographics and any other public data. From here, you can tell if a lead is worth pursuing. You can then offer a personalized experience to start nurturing them through the customer journey.

You can also use this information to categorize leads and identify which forms of communication are the most successful. For example, maybe your low-value leads prefer email, but high-value leads prefer phone calls.

When you’re on the hunt for a CRM for investment, take a look at the software’s contact management capabilities. With these features, you’ll learn more about your ideal customer, how to communicate with them effectively and how to personalize their experience.

Automation

Automation is when technology steps in and performs tasks without you having to manually do them. It saves you time, allowing you to streamline your processes and offer a better experience for your customers.

For example, sending an automated follow-up email when a prospect submits an inquiry. You prepare the email in advance, and the software automatically sends it out so you don’t have to. Instant customer support keeps prospects engaged and improves their experience.

There are two types of automation to look out for in an investment CRM.

Workflow automation

Workflow automation involves automating parts of your internal processes to make them more efficient.

For example, instantly moving prospects through the sales lifecycle when they perform certain actions. Workflow automation can save you a lot of time – particularly for repetitive tasks like data entry, scheduling follow-up meetings and scoring leads.

Marketing automation

As the name suggests, marketing automation refers to automating any marketing-related tasks. This includes email campaigns, social media posts and more. Marketing automation is a great way to nurture your leads and show them the right information at the right time.

For example, if your prospects are at the top of the funnel, you can send out emails that provide them with general information about what you do and how you can help them. As they move down the funnel, you can send automated emails that focus more on converting them into customers.

Integrations with third-party tools

Integrations allow you to incorporate third-party data sources and investment management tools and apps into your CRM. They let you create a seamless, centralized platform that manages all areas of your work.

For example, let’s say that you use Pipedrive’s CRM. If you use a platform like Dryrun for financial modeling and cash management, you can integrate this software with Pipedrive. As a result, you have all your key financial information in one location.

Here are some common integrations to look out for in a CRM for investment:

• Portfolio management software. If you’re managing investment portfolios for clients, it can be helpful to integrate this software with your CRM. That way, you can track active investments in real time and keep customers up-to-date with performance.

• Email marketing software. Integrating email platforms like Mailchimp, or even your email provider like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, allows you to send, track and automate customer communication. As a result, you can track email communication in real time.

• Phone solutions. ​​As a financial services company, chances are you and your team spend time talking to clients and prospects on the phone. With a phone integration like JustCall, you can make and receive calls directly from your CRM. This means it’s easier to track these communications and quicker for you to make the calls.

CRM integrations vary depending on the platform you use. Make sure you find a solution that works for you. A CRM’s website should have a marketplace that lists what integrations are available.

Insights and reporting

Investment reporting provides an in-depth analysis of investment and financial performance.

Stakeholders (including decision-makers, portfolio managers and financial advisors) can use this information to make informed decisions about investments, assets and other areas of business growth.

Here are a couple of tools that’ll help you access and analyze valuable reports and insights:

Dashboards

Dashboards are a great way to present key financial metrics simply. This is particularly helpful if you need to update stakeholders about performance. Instead of getting bogged down by the details, they’ll only see the core information.

Pipedrive’s sales dashboards have a customizable layout so you can choose which pieces of information to include. The visually simple layout makes it easier for people to understand the information they’re looking at.

Automated reporting

Instead of manually pulling reports, use CRM automations to do it for you. It’ll save you time and make sure you’re always up to date with the latest performance.

Final thoughts

A CRM for investment helps financial service providers manage customer relationships and track performance in real time. With the right platform, you can build trust with prospects, identify high-quality leads and provide existing customers with a better experience.