By : Quinn Bingham | June 3, 2022 | 4 min read

How to Define a Pipeline Strategy for Financial Services Using CRM Software

With more and more organizations investing heavily in online services, AI-driven technologies, and self-service digital solutions, prioritization around operational efficiency and user experience has never been higher. For financial services businesses, this has meant a renewed focus on improving all areas of client engagement while tracking the success or shortcomings of new digital strategies for acquiring and retaining new customers.

Organizations can streamline their business processes while optimizing their acquisition strategy by relying on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions to feed their sales pipeline. Below, we’ll cover a few key ways financial services organizations can lean on CRM, helping to drive efficiencies in their pipeline while improving various aspects of their business.

Gaining a Better Perception of Customer Needs

Whether in sales, marketing, customer service, or accounting, every member of a financial services organization plays a role in helping to diagnose and address client challenges. While features or costs are essential elements of any financial services offering, the perceived value and competitiveness of financial solutions, especially digitized ones, are based primarily on improving the overall user experience.

When properly configured, CRM helps financial services organizations gain deeper insights into their clients’ needs by tracking key metrics designed to help make better-informed decisions regarding the improvement of financial services or support.

Recognizing the Importance of Pipeline Velocity

While financial services may not seem like the most relevant industry concerned about pipeline management and optimization, this couldn’t be further than the truth. A well-configured sales pipeline that tracks overall velocity can be invaluable, especially when helping sales representatives prioritize their initiatives while closing more customers.

CRM solutions are a great way to track pipeline velocity. Pipeline velocity measures the number of leads currently being tracked multiplied by the amount of revenue they equate and overall win rate percentages. When these figures compare against sales cycles, organizations can track the overall success of the campaigns they run, ensuring they’re able to pivot their efforts to maximize return on investments while positively impacting the bottom line.

Woman happy on phone - Pipeline strategy

Creating a Powerful Ecosystem for Employees and Customers

Many financial services organizations face similar challenges when optimizing their sales pipeline. These challenges are typically associated with lengthy application processing windows, lack of or poorly executed referral programs, inadequate services standards, and disconnected financial solutions. CRM solutions help eliminate many of these challenges by creating robust financial ecosystems from which employees and customers benefit.

CRM solutions give external clients and customers more on-demand, self-service options for handling many of their financial services needs. This can include giving current or potential customers the ability to review and track their pending applications, manage their open support tickets, and resource new services or solutions as needed without waiting in a lengthy cue. All of this plays a significant role in customer acquisition while helping to avoid time-sensitive escalated issues.

From an operational perspective, CRM can add a significant amount of efficiencies in day-to-day processes for employees. A significant benefit that CRM provides is creating a unified source of truth for providers and lenders, presenting a much more streamlined way of handling multiple tasks at once. In addition, with integration capabilities into agency management solutions, loan origination tools, human resources, and financial investment systems, CRM can help simplify all client onboarding and management processes, positively impacting sales pipelines.

Moving Forward

Maintaining a healthy sales pipeline is one of the defining features of most successful organizations. And this is absolutely the case when it comes to financial services businesses.

Today’s modern digital landscape means that organizations need to be responsive to the needs of their clients and customers, especially when looking to remain competitive while avoiding unnecessary customer attrition. CRM can be an invaluable resource when defining and executing an effective pipeline strategy by simplifying client engagements while helping to remove bottlenecks in operations processes. Doing so will help to maximize sales conversions and overall pipeline velocity.

When it comes to creating an effective pipeline strategy for your business, there is no shortage of CRM solutions available to help your organization scale. However, when it comes to choosing the platform that’s right for you and your customers, it’s crucial to team up with industry professionals who can help you decide on a solution that’s right for you, maximizing the value of your investment.

Faye is a business and strategy consulting firm specializing in simplifying IT and business-related processes for financial services organizations, including deploying CRM solutions. If you need more information on how you can improve your sales pipeline by sourcing the right CRM solution, contact us today.