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Financial specialists dedicate their time and knowledge to helping their clients achieve long-term financial goals. Quite often those goals are less about the numbers and much more personal for their clients. They create plans for clients so they have a comfortable retirement and a piece of mind that should the unforeseeable happen. As a result, they know they are adequately insured and protected.
Obviously, ensuring the client makes the best decisions involves a lot of pressure. By helping the client identify individual needs and goals, good decisions can be made. The stakes are high, the business is dynamic, and the need for learning and adapting never stops. What kind of tools can help an advisor with this seemingly daunting task? I’ve outlined some of the top 3 must-have tools for financial specialists below.
1. CRM
Relationships are important when you’re evaluating the details and future of someone’s finances. Advisors know that the more clients they have the more difficult it will be to build a strong relationship. That’s where strong Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) software comes in. Advisors use a CRM to manage their clients and contacts, keep up with principles, practices and guidelines, and access platforms and tools needed to assist their clients. Software such as Salesforce and Pipedrive are among the more popular and highly rated. Offering security, customization, and accessibility these solutions help advisors find more leads, improve customer relations, connect through social media, make predictions on individual customer needs, and essentially improve their business from start to finish.
2. Financial Planning Software for Financial Specialists
Having the right financial planning software is vital to the success of all financial specialists. This is because it helps the advisor and client assess possible consequences of a proposed financial decision. Therefore, plan must be set into place and they can either be “goal-based” or “cash flow-based”. The main difference between these options are the complexity and detail. With goal-based planning, you start at the goal (i.e., saving for retirement, college) and use an estimation of income and investment returns to determine what you will need to reach the goal. As a result, it’s the most flexible option.
Cash flow-based planning will dig deep into managing all income and spending. Some of the top financial planning software options available that support either planning analysis style are eMoney, Envestnet Finance Logix, and Money Tree. eMoney has their own software called emX that they boast as “the most advanced planning and practice management tool in the industry”. It’s a fast-growing firm with more than a million clients and offers unique features such as their video newsletter. Envestnet Finance Logix puts a heavy emphasis on client participation and is more economical. Money Tree offers two primary software programs to choose from. These include Silver Financial Planner and TOTAL Planning Suite. The Silver being more basic, affordable, and easy to use and the TOTAL offers a considerable amount of options best suiting large financial planning companies.
3. Social Media Tools
Leveraging social media is a powerful way for financial specialists to connect, gather intelligence, and grow their business. Using LinkedIn to connect with colleagues, clients, and potential clients will help provide a platform to share and connect in unlimited ways. Having a presence on social media such as Twitter allows the advisor to engage with a broader audience, share information, articles, or blogs and lets the advisor’s personality show. Also, just like on LinkedIn, adding a profile picture that is both professional and warm helps humanize the person behind the profile. Furthermore, it’s possible for the advisor to share content and engage in conversations that are professional, compliant, and creative at the same time. Really getting social media to work for you professionally, without taking valuable time away from clients, is easy with HootSuite. It enables the advisor to schedule posts, collaborate, grow revenue, manage marketing, and review analytics.
Unfamiliar with the tools listed above? Click here to find out how we can help.
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