Our CRM Review for Advisors – 2021 Edition

Drum roll please! Our highly anticipated CRM Review is finally here!!

If you’re going to work with a team, virtual or in-house, and you want to stay on top of tasks and know that things are getting done, you need a good CRM.  It is what we at Total Office, Inc. (TOI) call “The HUB” for all things task, workflow, note and information related. It’s also the most requested “recommendation” question that we get asked by advisors. While there are plenty of CRMs to choose from, in our opinion, there are really only three CRMs for Advisors that we’d recommend considering.

There are also a lot of CRM reviews out there to read, most are either written by someone who doesn’t work in them day in and day out, OR they are written by the CRM company themselves.  Ours on the other hand, is from an administrative perspective working with CRM’s every day in a variety of ways with a variety of different advisors who all tend to use their CRM differently. A review from the trenches so to speak. You can say that having the right CRM makes the difference of staying up at night pulling your hair out or getting a good nights sleep. We hope you’ll find it helpful!

TODAY’S CRM

Today there are a TON of cloud-based CRMs for every budget and industry with new ones cropping up all the time. However, not all CRM’s are the same especially if you’re using it for task management and workflows.

Features that make us say “YES!” are:

• A robust task management system.
• The ability to add notification alerts.
• Transparent task visibility so an advisor can easily see what their team is working on.
• Easy to review client history, and essential information all on one page.
• Flexible workflow options.
• Intuitive to use or an excellent support system to show you how.
• Ease of pulling reports and pulling data from the system.
• Ease of being able to update items on the system.
• Works well with systems that it integrates with.

As we suspected in our last review, WealthBox CRM has come a long way in the past couple of years and in our opinion, is neck and neck with Redtail. In fact, our team is divided on which they like best between the two. Choosing often comes down to an advisor’s work style on which one works best.

REDTAIL TECHNOLOGY
www.redtailtechnology.com

Redtail Technology’s CRM is celebrating its 15th year in 2021 and has always been a favorite of ours. It was one of the very first online CRMs that we started working with and the CRM that we use in our office today.

Why we like it:

Redtail is intuitive, feature rich, and integrates with many popular software and services. We like that client data and personal information is readily available on a single screen making client servicing an efficient process. Tasks and notes are easy to update and flexible notification settings keep everyone in the loop. Workflows keep things consistent across the team.

PROS:

• Easy learning curve.
• Easy to setup, work in, and train new users.
• Tasks can be assigned to multiple assignees, linked to multiple contacts, and/or linked to client notes and documents for greater content.
• The ability to add notification alerts.
• Workflows allow for moderate complexity – including multiple outcomes, multiple assignee’s, target date driven due dates, etc.
• Mail merge options ensure continuity of communication.
• Compliance tracking.
• Ease of pulling reports from the system, if you know what you are looking for. Including the ability to run a client report for gathering personal and account information.
• The new feature, Speak, is a texting feature that allows you to text clients and maintain a record of your communications within their Redtail record.
• Good tutorials, help information and their customer service is very helpful.

CONS:

• While Workflow steps can be easily rearranged, the subtasks within them cannot. (We recommend writing your processes outside of Redtail first, then building them out).
• Workflows are linear – even with multiple team members assigned, workflow steps must be completed in a specific order – no jumping ahead.
• Workflow notifications show up in a separate section, not in daily tasks. You’ll need to be diligent about checking the workflow sections to make sure you don’t miss anything.
• Reporting functions are not very robust outside of the provided templates – customization is limited.
• Integrations aren’t always reliable.
• Mobile app leaves a bit to be desired.
• As of late, there have been more service interruptions and system has been lagging.
• Automatons work but haven’t always been completely thought out. Could be better.

WEALTHBOX
www.wealthbox.com

Since our last review, WealthBox has quickly become a real contender in the CRM arena. The developers have been quick to improve and add new features that cause us to like it more and more.

Why we like it:

WealthBox has an easy-to-view layout where everything about a client is all on one page including the ability to keep track of phone calls, email, tasks, and financial data.

PROS:

• Easy to use.
• Easily manage contacts, tasks, emails all in one place.
• All of the information related to a contact is all on one page.
• Easy to find and reconcile duplicates.
• Can run reports on clients and prospects.
• Easy to use workflows, tasks can connect to WealthBox, Outlook or Gmail calendar.
• Workflows options have greatly improved in the last few years – adding options for outcomes, and choices between a linear process or concurrently completed steps. For added flexibility you can customize an individual workflow by adding or removing steps once assigned to a contact.
• Ability to view basic individual contact details without leaving the household or task screen makes for efficient work.
• Custom (reportable) fields that appear right on your contact’s main profile (Individual or household) helps you keep track of the details that are most important to you.
• WB integrates with Google mail, eMoney, Google Drive, social media platforms, newsletter programs, TD Ameritrade, Schwab, Orion and Dropbox, just to name a few.

CONS:

• Once the task is assigned, you can only connect one contact to the task and tasks can only be assigned to one person.
• The dashboard has a ‘social media feed’ feel to it. While some advisors really love this, for new users it can be distracting or confusing.
• Reviewing client history is cumbersome and requires you to scroll through the client’s history for notes, tasks, etc. If you don’t know exactly what you are looking for it can be difficult and time-consuming process.
• Task and comment notifications are a manual process requiring you to click ‘notify’ and select the users that you want to notify each time you update a task. The receiving users also needs to configure their notification preference to make sure they receive the notification or be very diligent about reviewing their notification inbox.
• “Important Information” field is buried at the bottom of an additional information screen, which feels pretty low priority. We’d love to see a more prominent display, or at least an indicator on the main profile page that there are key details to be found in this section.

SALESFORCE:
www.salesforce.com

Salesforce is one of those CRMs that has been around for a very long time so a lot of advisors use it even though they aren’t always a big fan. The bottom line is that Salesforce is more of a “sales database” made for sales teams and NOT a true CRM. Even though it has an Advisor version and can be customizable (at a price!), in our opinion, it falls behind Redtail and WealthBox.

It’s pretty over-complicated, has a lot of features that Advisors wouldn’t use and unless you spend some big bucks to customize it, it lacks a lot of features that would make it more of a favorite for us. Here’s the rundown:

Why It’s Still On Our List:

It can be a great CRM, if you’re willing to invest some time and money into getting it customized the way you need too – But you’ll have to go through Salesforce for that.Most small advisors aren’t going to invest that kind of time and money, so the result is a poor CRM for advisors.

A note about Pros and Cons of Salesforce: Due to customizations, every instance of Salesforce we work with is like working with a different CRM. From the dashboards, task management, workflows, permissions and more. So, in many ways, it’s hard for us to nail down a true Pros and Cons list when comes to Salesforce, but here are a few general notes that we have come up with.

PROS:

• Can visually see all open tasks and dates on one screen.
• Synchronize contacts, calendars, and emails with Outlook.
• Follows leads all the way from start to finish and allows the ability to designate contacts as prospects and current clients.
• Records can be linked together to show how your data is related.
• Reports can be customized to your desired information.
• Notification of client birthdays and anniversaries along with the automatic email feature that allows the advisor to set the system to send the client an email on their special day.
• Advisors can rebalance their client’s accounts with the Portfolio rebalancing service included in Salesforce.
• Easily manage billing and reporting services with the Orion integrated billing software within Salesforce.
• Integrates with a wide variety of outside data sources, e.g., Black Diamond, WealthCentral, NetDocuments, Morningstar, BNA, Money Guide Pro, to name a few.

CONS:

• Don’t expect to hit the ground running with this one. As we mentioned above, you’ll need to invest some heavy time upfront working with Salesforce to customize it to work for your firm to get the most out of it.
• Can create workflows but you’ll have to contact Salesforce if you want to customize or make changes.
• When a client’s entity is updated, you also need to update the client’s contact information. The information does not automatically update each section, i.e., the entity and the contact pages would need to be updated separately.

ON OUR WATCH

One program that has been crossing our path is Advyzon. Primarily a Portfolio Management and Client reporting software, with a built in CRM. While it’s not ready to make our list, it could be a contender in a few years if they continue to make steady progress and listen to what their customers’ needs are as it refers to how they use their CRM, task management and workflows.

ADVYZON
www.advyzon.com

As previously mentioned, Advyzon’s primarily function is Portfolio Management and Client Reporting Software, and they do it well.  Their CRM however, has a long way to go as does their workflow creation. If you’re looking for a basic place to hold client data and that’s it, this RM will work for you as you’ll will find client’s information all on one page, which is a plus.  However, if you are looking for it to do task management and workflows, you will most likely be very disappointed. Their workflows are very basic to the point they are almost useless. When our Senior staff did a test run, it left them frustrated and disappointed.

With that said, on a recent phone conversation with their development team, we were told that they are aware of the need to build out a better task and workflow management system and that it is on their agenda to “better support the operations side of the advisor’s office”.  We hope that is true as the team seemed eager and helpful, which goes a long way in our book.

If you feel these CRMs are still a little more than you need, we suggest looking at smaller, less robust CRMs such as Insightly.com or LessAnnoyingCRM.com. They are not geared towards advisors but if you just need a general CRM to keep client contact in with a few features such as mailing lists and some light task management, they might work for you.

We hope you’ve found this article helpful. If you didn’t see the CRM you’re looking for, contact us, chances are we’ve worked with it and can tell you more about it. When we run across other CRMs worthy of our list, we will be sure to pass on the information.

Review Disclaimer: The reviews and opinions expressed in this article are purely those of our own. We do not and have not received compensation for our review. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the provider. We make no representations, warranties, or assurances as to the accuracy, currency or completeness of the content contained on this website or any sites linked to or from this site.

Copyright 2021 Sherry Carnahan

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Award-winning Author and Entrepreneur, Sherry Carnahan is the Founder of Total Office, Inc., located in Akron, Ohio. Best known for pioneering the Virtual Assistant’s industry for Financial Advisors since in 1992. Sherry has written extensively on subjects related to business growth, marketing, entrepreneurship, and virtual office concepts. To learn more about Sherry visit: www.sherrycarnahan.com