The well-known and socially followed business influencer Simon Sinek, made one of the most shrewd and true (certainly from our experience at Ilex), observations about our interaction with technology and building relationships.
To paraphrase he suggested that you cannot build long term successful relationships of any kind with technology alone, because technology only facilitates communication, it does not replace human interaction. This is because he argues that technology cannot pick up all the non-verbal cues associated with physically meeting someone.
These cues are important because they form an informal template from which we can develop and evolve our interactions and significantly make decisions and judgements about people and their anticipated reactions and associated behaviours.
Therefore, looking at this from an asset/wealth management business perspective, (dating apps try and do this too!), the clever use of technology can facilitate this by providing relevant data and trend analysis to identify having the right conversation, at the right time about the right subject. Coupled with the appropriate degree of personal interaction you can begin to see how this powerful combination can work in tandem to improve the effectiveness of the sales and client service activities.
This is especially powerful to the sales process and getting the intersect of the technology within a firms CRM system and the physical interaction with a salesperson right, is critical. This is increasingly relevant where asset management providers are having to do more with less yet still achieve better results in terms of asset flows and new clients.
This is an area where Ilex has undertaken a number of assignments, and the following general observations should be considered.
- Not having a recognised CRM system is the equivalent to having a car without Satnav.
- Rubbish in, rubbish out still applies so the quality of data is important.
- If it is not on the CRM system, it did not happen.
- Working towards making the CRM system the” golden source” is vital in order to optimise fully the data enabled (not driven) sales and client service proposition.
- This entails the broader connectivity of other seemingly remote data such as assets under management by client, invoicing, third party and internal flow data and performance data.
- Asset/wealth managers need to have a uniform way of recording client interactions such as meeting notes and correspondence, with internal standards in respect of timeliness.
- Internal data champions/interpreters are essential, it also provides a good training path for future sales and client service roles.
- Training sales and client personnel to write effective key word notes on the CRM system dramatically improves the outputs, key words can include investment areas, products, innovations or business and process changes.
- A live and dynamic new business pipeline with a suitable framework for recording opportunities is essential.
- Categorisation of the different client types is useful as is the ability to slice and dice the associated data.
- Never assume sales and client service personnel know how to use the CRM system optimally, they are usually too shy (or embarrassed) to admit a lack of a working knowledge in this area.
- Basic sales skills training with associated roleplay can also be very helpful in honing the awareness of the non-verbal signals projected in a meeting (even over teams).
Such a process is data enabled because it still relies ultimately on a good degree of human relationship intervention and judgement to achieve the desired successful outcome. Working in this way dramatically improves the chances of success and reduces the time often spent by expensive salespeople in less useful meetings and/or pouring over irrelevant or incomplete data or chasing rumour-based rainbows.
Salesperson and CRM machine in perfect harmony!
