Join NAIFA's Business Performance Center for a webinar on Wednesday, April 26 at 12 pm eastern as partner AccuPoint Solutions will help ensure you maximize your ROI when using data to brand, market, recruit, analyze, or update your CRM.

Gary Weber, Founder and CEO of AccuPoint Solutions, will share his expertise from over 35 years in the industry, where he has been both a user and supplier of data to help you increase productivity, and learn how to leverage data to maximize your results.

In the past, I have written about lead generation solutions as well as tracking clients on customer relationship management tools (CRMs) and marketing programs, but there hasn’t been a focus on lead conversions. At an industry conference this year, I learned about Phonexa, the company working to bridge the gap to generate more sales from leads. It’s important that advisors, especially those who run agencies and invest heavily in lead generation through marketing, learn about maximizing those leads.  

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of “Client Relationship Management Systems” CRMs in the marketplace. I am selectively going to talk about some of the more popular or industry CRMs, yet not purposely excluding any specific vendor or CRM product. You can identify CRMs in 1 of 3 categories: Generic, Industry Specific, or Home Grown. The CRM companies that are Generic like the big names: SalesForce, Microsoft, and Oracle for example are powerful products. These Fortune 500 companies have figuratively unlimited resources to setup their software to fit your practice. Typically this can be a little more on the expensive side, but makes sense with a larger agency that has many advisors. I would be wary about a generic CRM solution from a small vendor because even though you can license it at a lower cost, you may find them to be problematic for a many reasons like incompatibility for integrating data and limited functionality. There are some new popular generic CRMs from middle size companies like like Zoho and HubSpot that are really easy to use and setup with a lot of functionality. It is easy to gravitate to Industry specific CRMs because they are practically ready to use right out of the box. See information on some industry specific CRMs below.