As the nature of financial advisory firms have evolved over the years, so too have the tools used to support them. In the past, when financial “advice” was mostly about product sales, having a “Contact Management System” was key to tracking all the activity with prospective and prior customers. As advisors have increasingly evolved towards actual advice, supported in an ongoing relationship, so too have the software tools evolved to a far more comprehensive “Client Relationship Management” (CRM) solution.
Yet the emerging problem is that the demands on software, from features and capabilities to integrations, to create productivity gains for advisors have resulted in solutions that are increasingly complex… to the point that now it’s actually become difficult to do effective due diligence on financial advisor CRM software solutions in the first place!
While some advisors will tackle this challenge by hiring a technology consultant, and others will simply invest an extensive amount of their own (or their staff) time to do the analysis, the practice management solutions firm ActiFi has produced a “CRM Selection Assessment Tool” to do the heavy lifting at a fraction of the (time and financial) cost. Leveraging what may be the most comprehensive series of advisor CRM software reviews ever, the ActiFi solution guides the advisor through an extensive questionnaire about the nature of the business, its needs, and some of its other vendor/provider relationships, to provide a personalized recommendation of which of the various advisor CRM tools is the best fit for that particular practice.