People buy from the people they like- It’s the plain truth! In any role in investment management, thinking about the client’s need is of utmost importance. Client relations in investment management are in high demand and multi-dimensional, investment management companies are constantly challenged to deliver responsive customer service across multiple communication channels. Bigger investment management companies might have made it within their years of legacy relationship with their customers but, one internal shakeup can have your clients start looking elsewhere. Winning new clients is an ongoing grind and the more consistent your business development habits are, the more skilled your business becomes at earning and keeping clients for the long haul. So how do you establish client relationships and maintaining it? CRM for investment management companies help businesses meet their challenges and enables institutions to excel in areas of customer relationship management.
Why Focusing on Clients is Important for Investment Management Companies?
Without any explanation, it is clear that the more customers an investment management company has, the more money it makes. Ultimately investment management is nothing but a customer-driven business that derives a large portion of revenue from selling financial products and services to market participants. Not all team members might be leading client relations for the institution but is important to focus on customer satisfaction when you are interacting with a customer. Unless you know what exactly your client wants, you won’t be able to deliver the services the company is selling.
How Every Team Can Build Good Relationships in Investment Management Companies?
Utilize every opportunity to get to know your clients and what they want. Grab every opportunity you have to get to know your clients’ requirements. When you are going for a client meeting where your project is being discussed, interact with customers, responds to their questions, be helpful and follow up with the interaction via email or a call.
Put Your Best Foot Forward, Every Time
Having great clients and not using that opportunity well and having no clients are the same. Whenever you have contact with clients, try to make the most out of that chance by being well prepared, knowledgeable about the products and services and be prepared to help clients with their needs by offering the best information or service you can provide.
Get to Know People at all Levels
Regardless of the level, client relationships can be built anytime for better business. Try building relationships with people at your client’s organizations and people who are at the same level of seniority to you. You can bold great relationships and many of them might move to different companies in the finance sector at some point in the future and finally, you will have an amazing network within the industry.
Impactful Ways Investment Management Companies Can Bolster Client Relationships with a CRM
Pursuing Effective Client Intelligence
Creating a consolidated view of costs, revenue and risk associated with each customer is a vital step towards client centricity. The results would be surprising. These insights can be captured by good CRM software that is tailor-made for investment management companies with unique functionalities and features for the same. Many businesses are aware of the direct cost associated with research, sales, and trading etc. but not many can track indirect service costs associated with technology, finance, and compliance. Why? It is just because it is hard to capture these data in a fair and accurate manner. Indirect cost varies widely with services, business types, and clients, making tracking tricky. However, with a proper CRM, you can easily capture an accruable measure of client profitability which reflects the entire cost of a relationship. By segmenting customers into different categories based on their contribution to organization and value (Like low-value customers, tail customers, and high-value clients), you can have a clear understanding about who is dragging or boosting the profitability of your organization.
Simplifying Operations by Automating Processes
Identify and deepening value client relation contributes well to the growth of any investment management company. A CRM helps to simplify operations by reducing manual tasks and automating processes and restructuring your workforce for behavioral changes that gives results. Using CRM data and insights, you can redesign your workforce by aligning resources to client value leveraging low-cost resources to serve clients with less value. You can also re-engineer your client data model which in turn increases simplicity and deepens your understanding of customers and their needs.
Offering Tailor-made Client Services
Based on the client data obtained from the CRM, you can take a different approach to offer tailored client services to enhance profitability. To treasure high-value clients, contemplate creating a senior team to deliver bespoke services and personalized customer experiences to special clients. You can explore cross-sell opportunities as well. When it comes to low-value clients, try swapping different service offerings to turn them into your loyal clients who buy from you often. Consider adjusting the price of the products or services, provide offers and special deals or switch up the product mix to suit their needs.
Conclusion
Client relationships in investment management companies are highly important and a client-centric approach has the potential to unlock exciting opportunities for new services in the future and improve sales and profitability. However, there is no easy path to build and improve client relations, but pursuing client intelligence and tailoring client services based on CRM data are great places to start.
Every investment management company has a team of experts working in a collaborative environment that always comes up with a thoughtful response to solve client problems. But the real challenge is getting the client to explain to you about the problem. That is exactly why building client relationships are challenging. Using a CRM tool, you can automate the process like scheduling client calls, sending reminder emails for follow up, providing on-time updates on offers and deals, automate SMS marketing etc. and get to know their activities to understand the client in root level. Maximizing the profitability of client relationships sounds quite simple but is a daunting task. An organizational switch to a client-centric model leveraging the powerful features of a CRM is a sensible way to manage an investment management business.