As a Wealthbox consultant, I work with a wide variety of financial advisory firms. Some teams are one or two people while others are larger and more complex. Regardless of the size, clientele type, or business practices, I always start with three features of Wealthbox to build a CRM system that works. Let’s get into it.
1. A firm foundation of clean and clear contact records.
In my work as a Wealthbox consultant, I view a CRM as a pyramid. At the bottom supporting everything else, is the contact record. Here is where you have details about the client, meeting notes, dates, emails, and other information useful to your team. Oftentimes, contact records can become messy, outdated, or incorrect which makes everyone’s job harder. It is essential for contact records to be clean and organized.
Why It’s Important:
- Building Relationships: Your contact records aren’t just for facts and figures. You can use tags and keywords to note details about your clients’ hobbies and personalities. Knowing when their birthday or anniversary is allows you to send emails or notes to let them know you’re thinking of them. This connection builds trust – so important when you’re handling their finances!
- Staying Audit-Ready: Audits are a stressful experience enough without having to scramble to find data. If you’re taking the time to review notes, double check contact information, and ensure all communications are standardized and available, you’ll be more prepared when audits do occur.
- Making Informed Business Decisions: When your contact records are well-kept, you can make good decisions about how to approach each fiscal year, each account, and each meeting. You won’t have to second guess data, and you can move forward with confidence.
What Makes Wealthbox Different:
- Large Contact Record Pages: Wealthbox’s contact records group information in easy-to-see sections. The important details are at the top with easy access to a phone number or email to reach them. It’s simple to create a note, meeting, or task with one-click.
- Stored Emails: Never lose an email. Wealthbox allows you to store communication right in the contact record with a secure, private dropbox address.
- Customized Data Fields: Keep track of the personal details with data fields. What is important to your client can be easily noted for future reference.
2. Simplified and automated tasks for easy time management and delegation.
Once contact records are cleaned up, it is time to tackle task management. It is all too easy for tasks to pile up, get lost, and slow everyone down. In some cases, there are unnecessary tasks while in others, one person is doing too many things. Taking the time to examine your team’s responsibilities and the goal of your firm clarifies what needs to be focused on.
Why It’s Important:
- Save Time: This is perhaps the biggest benefit of automation and delegation. If you don’t have to do it yourself, don’t. Whether you hand a task off to an employee or automate it to take it off your plate entirely, you’re freeing up potentially hours of valuable time.
- Focus on What Matters: The client is the heart of financial advisory. If you are bogged down by menial tasks, your mental space for your clients is diminished. Your focus should be on client relationships, not
- Keep Your Team Aligned: When your team is clear on responsibilities, they can stay consistent. Confusion wastes time and effort better spent on supporting clients or increasing business revenue.
What Makes Wealthbox Different:
- Link Tasks to Contact Records: This is non-negotiable. Linking back to contact records is essential in every facet of client communication for auditing, but it also ensures nothing gets lost. When you need to know what is happening and who is involved, this step takes out the guesswork.
- Assign Tasks to Employees for Accountability: Easily delegate by linking team profiles to tasks. You can even add yourself to tasks to track when they are completed and follow any process.
- Add Tasks From Emails: Such a simple yet powerful tool. Adding tasks directly from emails to contact records ensures not only trackable responsibilities but also easy access to the additional context and task details.
3. Consistent and scheduled workflows to keep track of projects.
Workflows are a collection of tasks that lead to a specific goal. You can use them to onboard clients and team members, for yearly reviews, larger projects, or anything that requires more than one step. Having timed, standardized, and automated workflows takes some time, but it is well worth the effort.
Why It’s Important:
- Track Big Projects: A collection of to-do lists can easily get out of hand. With a workflow, you can lay out not only what needs to be done, but who is going to do it. Taking big projects step by step increases the likelihood of completion. No more letting things slip through the cracks.
- Take the Guesswork Out of Next Steps: Never wonder again what should happen when you get a new client. Simply start your workflow and do each task (or have someone else work on it).
- Increase Efficiency: When one task is completed, the next one falls in line. Keep your projects moving with workflows that are simple and repeatable. Any process that happens more than once should be a workflow template.
What Makes Wealthbox Different:
- Full Customization: From the name of the workflow to the number of steps to the people involved, Wealthbox allows you to fully customize your workflow experience. You can even adjust whether it is a checklist or a sequential set of steps.
- Dynamic Scheduling: If tasks in a workflow have to occur at a specific time, you can schedule it in Wealthbox. If a task needs to be completed a certain number of days after another one, you can – you guessed it – schedule it in Wealthbox. This is a game changer that provides you the flexibility to get things done when they need to get done.
- Conditional Logic: Let’s say you have a workflow that changes depending on what a client needs. This is possible in Wealthbox. You can set up your workflow to divert to a different set of tasks or even restart depending on what the situation calls for. Keep things simple with one workflow that works in multiple scenarios.
Wealthbox is a robust CRM with a huge amount of tools, integrations, and options for financial advisors looking to make the most of their system. However, even just these three features: contact records, task automation, and workflows, you can still get a lot of value.
If you’re ready to see what a Wealthbox consultant can do for your firm, schedule a call here. See how easy it is to take charge of your CRM system with just a few simple tools.
