Small Private Investment Firm Completes CRM 2016 Online Implementation to Track Business

The Client

Our client is a small Midwest based independent investment advisor that provides separate account equity portfolio management to institutions and private clients. The firm was incorporated almost 40 years ago and is 100% employee owned. They focus on Large Cap Dividend Growth and Large Cap Growth style investing. This client also provides equity management services to a variety of taxable and tax-exempt clients, including Taft-Hartley funds, public funds, pensions, foundations and private clients.

The Opportunity

Earlier this year, this investment firm hired an outside consulting company to help with business development. With the economic climate being quite stable compared to years’ prior, their investment strategy has been working well and the client was in the market to grow the business. The contracted consulting company provided the client with a trusted and proven business development manager to bring in additional clients to invest in the firm’s products.

Now that the client had a growth strategy in place, they were in need of a customer relationship management system to keep track of this new business in an organized way. Until this point much of the client’s contact information and data was kept on excel spreadsheets, outlook contact information, and on business cards. To find the phone number for a specific account the client might have to check a few different places and often times the account information might not be up to date.

Additionally, the business consultant and sales team were planning to be on the road quite a bit pitching to prospective clients, while the investment and admin teams would be in the office. All teams would be using the same client data which caused an even greater need for a relationship management system to keep track of all data in one place in a highly organized way.

The Solution

After contacting Logan Consulting and expressing the firm’s particular needs, they decided that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Online would be the appropriate fit for their needs. Because of their small user base and the capability to access Dynamics CRM 2016 Online anywhere, this CRM system would be highly efficient in organizing their account data and quickly accessing their information.

By highly customizing the Account, Contact, and Opportunity form, Logan Consulting was able to streamline the client’s process for entering and viewing data. While meeting with the client and understanding their business and process flows, we were able to add specific industry related fields to these forms. By adding fields pertaining to investment types, funds, and financial products the client can also organize their accounts in a way that is not available straight out-of-the-box with CRM 2016.

Logan Consulting was also able to simplify the CRM system for the client by removing superfluous and unneeded information from the forms and entities. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is a robust system with many capabilities, but often times clients can be burdened by too much navigation and icons in their system. We were able to hide unneeded icons, fields, and navigation so that only the necessary data and buttons were showing and easy to access.

The Results

  • Improved business processes by going through ‘client-type’ classification exercise and breaking down account types into four main sub-types. By entering new accounts into these sub-types the client was able to better classify and organize data in a way that they had not prior to implementation.
  • Created ‘Connection’ sub-grids on accounts, contacts, and opportunities to create relationships between records which is critical in this investment business. Customized these sub-grids to provide additional detail on the relationships.
  • Connected CRM Outlook Client on each user’s computer to easily track emails, meetings, and tasks between Microsoft CRM and Outlook.
  • Provided user training at beginning and end of implementation process so that users were comfortable entering, viewing, and searching for data while transitioning to ‘Go Live.’ Also provided Admin training to high-level users so that basic customizations could be done at the client level.
  • Customized multiple records and entities based on individual team needs. The client’s business development manager had specific Opportunity structure needs, while the admin/investment team needed the Account structure fit to their specifications for easy classification.