CRM for Financial Advisors: The Definitive Guide

Keeping track of your financial advising firm’s clients can be challenging, especially if you need to coordinate across a team of advisors. But knowing your clients inside and out and consistently communicating with them is key to ensuring they feel confident in your firm.

That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software can help. CRM software (also simply called ‘CRM’) provides a digital record of all your interactions so you can personalise every interaction and keep in close touch with your clients. The software also helps you manage leads so you can pitch your services to more potential clients and grow your business.

In this guide, we explain how a CRM for financial advisors can help your firm and what to look for in a CRM platform. We also highlight the three best CRMs for financial advisors today.

Key Takeaways

• CRM software helps financial advisors communicate with existing clients and market to prospective new clients.
• A CRM enables advisors to offer more personalised customer experiences, grow their business by reaching new clients, and reduce the time they spend on sales and marketing.
• When choosing a CRM software solution, consider whether you need it primarily for sales, marketing, or customer service.
• Also, consider the automations you need, the customisation options available, the platform’s integrations, and the software’s price.
• We recommend Wealthbox as the best CRM for financial advisors. Other top options include Pipedrive and Freshsales.

What Is a CRM for Financial Advisors?

A CRM for financial advisors is software designed to help advisors and other providers in the financial services industry contact prospective clients and communicate with existing clients.

CRM platforms enable you to take notes on client meetings and track your interactions with clients through emails and phone calls. They also typically offer various tools for email marketing and customer service. Additionally, many top CRMs support automated workflows to enhance productivity and incorporate AI to help you land new customers.

The ultimate goal is to provide better, more personalised service to clients while reducing the time financial advisors spend on sales, marketing, and customer service.

Benefits of a CRM for Financial Advisors

Using a CRM can make a huge difference in the success of your financial advising firm, whether you have a one-person shop or a growing firm with dozens of advisors. Here are some key ways a CRM can help your business:

Provide more personalised client experiences

A CRM makes tracking all your interactions with your clients easier—whether by phone, email, online chat, or in face-to-face meetings. When a client comes to you with a question about their money, you can quickly look up your entire history with that client and personalise your response.

That can be huge for your firm’s customers, who want to know you’re attuned to their needs. Delivering personalised experiences is a great way to satisfy your clients and reduce churn.

For larger financial advising firms, CRMs can also help you automatically target and tailor your firm’s communications to customers. For example, you can use a CRM to send an update to customers who haven’t booked an appointment in several months and customise the update with a message from their advisor. This level of personalisation, especially from a large firm, can significantly boost customer loyalty.

Grow your business with advanced marketing tools

CRM platforms typically offer advanced marketing tools to help you reach more prospective clients and encourage them to sign up for advising services. For example, many CRMs include email marketing so you can reach out to potential clients and let them know what your firm offers.

In addition, sales-focused CRM platforms can rank prospective clients based on their likelihood of signing up for financial advice or the size of their portfolios. This enables your sales team to focus on the highest-value customers and maximise your firm’s revenue generation.

You can also use these tools to encourage existing clients to sign up for add-on services like insurance planning, which can drive even more revenue for your business.

Save time with automated workflows

Modern CRMs include automation features that can put your marketing, sales, and customer service on autopilot.

For example, you can use a CRM’s email marketing tools to automatically respond to prospective clients requesting information on your website or update existing clients about their portfolios every few months. That saves a lot of time you would otherwise spend on repetitive tasks and ensures your team doesn’t miss any client communications.

Even better, these automations are highly customisable to suit your firm’s needs. So, they can save you time whether you’re running a solo advisory or a large firm with dozens of advisors.

How to Choose a CRM for Financial Advisors: What to Consider

There are dozens of CRM platforms for small businesses, so it’s essential to know what you need before deciding which option is right for your firm. Let’s look at some key features to consider when choosing a CRM for financial advisors.

Sales, marketing, and customer service tools

Broadly speaking, CRMs can be divided into three categories:

• Sales CRMs prioritise features to help you turn prospective clients into customers. For example, they can include tools to track a prospective client’s likelihood of signing a contract or the size of the portfolio they would bring.
• Marketing CRMs offer features to help you find prospective clients. They typically include tools like email and SMS marketing platforms, landing page designers, and social media integrations.
• Customer service CRMs include tools to help you provide service to existing clients. They can include live chat integrations for your website, call centre management features, and customer support ticketing systems.

When deciding which type of CRM is right for your advising firm, think about what you hope to achieve with the software. For example, if you want to grow your business by finding new customers, a sales or marketing CRM will be the most helpful. If you want to nurture deeper client relationships, a customer service CRM will be better.

You can also choose an all-in-one CRM that includes sales, marketing, and customer service features. These usually aren’t the most feature-rich in any of these categories, but they offer a single platform that will suit the needs of many financial advising firms.

Automations and AI

Most CRM platforms offer at least basic automations around sending emails and recording customer interactions.

However, more advanced tools can offer customisable workflows to automate your sales, marketing, customer service, and other business processes. These can be useful if you want to build custom triggers to send portfolio updates to clients or automatically forward customer service requests to the right advisor.

Some platforms go a step further, incorporating AI to write emails or even predict when you should reach out to a prospective customer with a sales pitch.

These advanced automation and AI tools typically cost more, so carefully consider whether your business needs them.

Ease of use

CRMs can vary widely in ease of use, so it’s important to think about how tech-savvy you and your firm’s other advisors are when choosing a platform.

More user-friendly CRMs are often lighter on features since they prioritise a streamlined user experience over offering loads of customisation options.

More flexible CRM platforms may require significantly more time to set up and get used to, but they can also ensure you have all the tools your firm needs to communicate with clients.

Integrations

CRM platforms typically offer integrations for various popular business apps, including email platforms, cloud storage platforms, internal messaging tools, phone and video conferencing tools, and more. Think carefully about what software systems your business already uses and whether a CRM offers plug-and-play integrations for them.

Importantly, most general-purpose CRM platforms don’t offer seamless integrations with portfolio management tools, making it more difficult to automate tasks like portfolio updates for your clients. However, some CRMs designed for financial advisors, like Wealthbox, offer integrations with popular advising tools.

Pricing

Some CRMs charge a fixed monthly fee for a given set of features. Others offer access to all features and charge on a sliding scale based on how many clients or advisors your firm has. With this approach, you could pay less initially and more as your firm grows.

So, think about how much your platform will cost now and how much it could cost in the future. While you can always switch CRMs down the road, doing so can be complex and time-consuming.

The 3 Best CRMs for Financial Advisors

Now that you know what to look for in a CRM, let’s explore the three best CRMs for financial advisors.

1. Wealthbox – Overall best CRM for financial advisors

Wealthbox is a sales CRM and one of the only platforms built specifically for financial advisors. It stands out for offering native integrations for popular financial advising platforms like Comply and eMoney and dozens of portfolio management tools. The platform also has built-in automations for financial advisors, such as a workflow for onboarding a new client. This makes it easy to hit the ground running.

Another notable feature of Wealthbox is its file storage system, which compliantly stores all your clients’ contracts and other key documents. Meanwhile, the task management system helps you stay on top of your to-do list for closing contracts with new clients, and the reporting dashboard shows you how effective your sales pipeline is.

Wealthbox isn’t the most affordable, as its plans start at $59 USD (~£47.50) per user per month, but this is far less expensive than other systems and provides plenty of value for money.

However, the biggest downside is that Wealthbox lacks marketing tools, so you’ll need to pair it with an email marketing platform or a dedicated marketing CRM.

2. Pipedrive – Best for growing financial firms

Pipedrive is a sales and marketing CRM that can help growing financial firms keep up with their expanding lists of clients, prospective customers, and marketing contacts. The platform offers a visual view of your sales funnel, making it easy to track your high-value customers from first contact to contract signing and beyond.

Pipedrive also includes powerful email marketing tools and highly customisable automated workflows to ease your advisors’ workloads. We especially like Pipedrive’s analytics tools, which do a great job of segmenting your clients so you can see which tactics are most effective at driving customer retention and add-on purchases.

Pipedrive starts at £14 per user per month. Several plan tiers are available, so you can add more features as your firm grows.

3. Freshsales – Best CRM for newly established financial advisors

Freshsales is a user-friendly CRM that can help newly established financial advisors market to clients and offer exceptional customer service. It incorporates AI to automatically write marketing and onboarding emails and rank prospective customers based on their likelihood of signing a contract. This way, you can save time on sales and marketing and focus on advising your existing clients.

Another thing we like about Freshsales is that it’s highly scalable. If you add a new advisor to your firm in the future, you can customise their permissions in Freshsales. You can also set up multiple sales pipelines, host voice and video conferences, and even manage a customer service team from the platform.

Freshsales plans start at only £7 per user per month, making this platform very affordable for financial advisors.