Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are, as the name suggests, intended to help you manage and get the most from your client relationships. But they are also great tools for helping you find more prospects.
Advisor-specific CRMs contain robust, tailor-made features to help you figure out the type of prospects you want to attract, build systems for finding those people, and manage all of the activity necessary to make your efforts pay off.
Read on to learn 4 ways a good CRM can help you fill your pipeline with great prospects.
Using a CRM solution to fill your pipeline #
Use a CRM Solution to create a system for obtaining introductions #
Physical meetings between you, your client and the prospect they want you to meet are much more powerful methods of finding potential new clients than referrals. Rather than just getting a name and a number or email address that you need to follow up on, introductions help to directly transfer confidence and trust from your current client to you.
Seminars and lunch-and-learn events are two awesome ways to obtain introductions. In each case, you schedule an event with a speaker who will present on a topic of interest to your top clients. Then you invite your ‘A’ and ‘B’ clients and ask each to bring a guest who would be interested in the topic as well. These guests become prospects once they are introduced to you at the event.
Your CRM can make it easy to run these events. You can lay out all the steps involved in the process (booking a location, booking a speaker, sending invites, following up, etc.) and capture them as activities in your CRM. Assign each task to the person who must complete it, and when the time is right, they will be automatically alerted about what to do next. Nothing falls through the cracks, and you get a consistent process and effective outcomes each time you run the event.
Automate your direct mail campaigns for better results #
Your CRM can enable you to find more prospects by automating the process of preparing, delivering and following up on email campaigns. Since all prospects you contact go into your CRM as contact records, all of the activity around the campaign can be managed from within the CRM—and that’s the big win.
Traditionally, almost half of all advisors fail in the follow-up phase of the campaign. Follow-up activity gets forgotten in the bustle of day-to-day work, and, even if a follow-up attempt is made, many advisors only make one attempt to interest the prospect. By scheduling repeated follow-up activities in your CRM you can ensure that you bring consistency and persistence to the campaign—and turn weak leads into true potential clients.
Export contacts from your CRM to LinkedIn #
LinkedIn is a powerful networking solution, and the easiest way to get the most out of it from a prospecting point of view is to export your entire contact base from your CRM so that they all appear as connections on LinkedIn. From there, LinkedIn will do the hard work of finding connections between the people you already work with and the broader group of people they know. These new connections become a wide audience of potential prospects—who are likely to share many commonalities with the people you’ve already had success with.
The best part about LinkedIn is that you can also use it as a way to showcase your personal brand and services directly. LinkedIn allows you to curate a profile and posts that demonstrate your credibility and services. After you connect with prospects on LinkedIn, they are likely to view your profile, which serves as a standing resume of your value proposition, capabilities and offerings.
Increase follow-up efficiency #
Your CRM can help you increase your prospecting productivity by scheduling your follow-up emails and calls. You assign a block of time in your day devoted to reaching out to potential new clients. And, if you template call scripts and follow-up emails, you’ll make those follow-up steps more effective and easier to undertake. Because emails are sent directly from your CRM and calls are tightly scheduled, you’ll be able to reach many more prospects more easily than ever before.
Wrap up #
Advisor-specific CRMs make prospecting easier and more effective. CRM tools like activity managers, opportunity trackers, filters, fillable forms and templates mean you can more easily create targeted campaigns and build robust systems for obtaining introductions. And, CRMs help you ensure consistent and effective follow-up—which is the key to turning all those new contacts into clients.
