Struggling to keep up with leads and enquiries?

By Vladimir Briskin | 20th December 2017 | 11 min read

Developing long term relationships with clients is of crucial importance to all businesses. However many practices become ‘stuck’ providing the same service to their clients year after year.  The real challenge is to evolve from a single transactional relationship to one with an emphasis on customer retention, satisfaction, and lifetime customer value.

Analytics and reporting is an essential element to business success, without it business leaders are prone to make assumptions based on an emotion or a feeling.  Analysing historic and live data places leaders at the front of the curve and gives a deep insight into the data. The Client Engagement Matrix is one of many reports that can be produced within IRIS CRM. This powerful and informative visual interface helps identify the white space and gaps in the services clients take from a business. The easy way to upsell services to clients IRIS CRM collects the fee data from Time & Fees on a nightly basis, providing CRM with up-to-date fee data on each service line.  From this report it’s possible to identify the total Gross Recurring Fee (GRF) per client.

The report is also capable of filtering across client grades if selected.  With this valuable insight readily available it’s possible to deliver personalised, targeted email campaigns to clients with pin point accuracy, creating new sales opportunities and informing clients of valuable services they are missing.   Another benefit of the Client Engagement Matrix data is the high and low performing fee analysis. The report highlights average service line values which can be compared against other firms or across industry sectors.  

The Client Engagement Matrix helps business leaders to make more informed decisions, target the ‘underperforming’ clients and service lines allowing for speedy resolution.  It can:

  • Analyse data across all elements of your business
  • Trigger campaigns directly from reports
  • Identify gaps and weak points in your business and service

Plan for the future and respond to changing events, fast! Provide instant data reporting… No time-consuming data-mining involved Ill-informed decisions can have a negative impact to a business with serious consequences to finances, reputation and future growth.  IRIS CRM allows business leaders to collate meaningful information, make better-informed decisions and take steps to successfully develop their business. Are you struggling to keep up with leads and enquiries? Concerned that you or your team are missing opportunities? Are your processes long-winded and manual? Lost in a quagmire of spreadsheets? Lacking visibility of your opportunities? Does this scenario look familiar? Lead to client journey – the challenges When dealing with new leads there are quite a few processes to manage - sending emails, booking meetings, calls, creating notes, tasks, or storing contact details; all of which tend to be predominantly stored within Microsoft Outlook.  Then there is managing the opportunity, such as, deciding which email marketing list to add them too, updating a sales pipeline tracking form, or even creating a quotation for the required services. It takes a lot of time and effort to keep these records up-to-date and shared across departments.  In larger firms, opportunities are managed by more than one person, where individuals tend to have their own unique way of working and processing leads. This inconsistency of disparate working practices and lack of visibility can be of great detriment to the firm, and information remains underused.   For busy accountancy practices, new opportunities can easily slip through the net and become lost in a quagmire of spreadsheets and multiple systems. If the customer journey is not managed and nurtured correctly it can lead to lost business.    Delays in responding to opportunities can leave the prospect with the wrong impression.  This becomes even more frustrating and embarrassing when the lead has been referred by one of your networkers, many of whom are clients themselves. However, it is not all doom and gloom. IRIS CRM provides a simple, easy answer to the problem with a powerful centralised hosted cloud solution to manage the whole lead to the client journey.   Centralise leads and track their progress With IRIS CRM you can manually add new opportunities to the Leads module of the CRM, capture enquiries via a contact form on your website, or even by scanning a business card with our smartphone app.   The moment the lead is entered into the CRM it is securely stored in your hosted cloud server.  Workflows can be set to trigger alerts and notifications of new leads to action. Timely reminders are sent to managers if a lead has not been progressed.    Once you have engaged and qualified your lead it is now ready to convert to a prospect.  During this conversion an account is created, contacts applied, meetings, calls and tasks diarised and quotes produced for each service line.   New services can be created and their values applied, whether it’s a fixed or ad-hoc fee, the opportunity will be tracked along with any expected closing dates. Workflows can also track the status of all opportunities and powerful reports can help you to analyse the values by partner/manager, timeline (year/month/day) and by service. These are all invaluable analytics to help you budget and prepare accurate pipeline forecasts. Prospect to client onboarding workflows  The client onboarding process can also be a challenge,

especially when collating the necessary information and associated documentation. However, with IRIS CRM the process is far more streamlined and controlled, providing you with a checklist of actions at the click of a button.  

Each stage of the onboarding process, such as obtaining a signed copy of the Letter of Engagement, Anti-Money Laundering (AML) documents, take-over confirmation etc. can be graphically reported, highlighting any delays and weaknesses across the whole process. Thus, helping you avoid potentially damaging situations and protecting you, your clients and your business.

Lead to client journey - summary

IRIS CRM helps you centralise your important client information, securely on a hosted cloud server, along with a record of the related onboarding processes and completed check lists. Allowing you to systemise the lead to client journey. 

Providing employees with a central location to process leads and workflows that track both client and staff progress, not only increases productivity but provides your firm with greater insight into the service being delivered to your customers. 

To identify weaknesses and inefficiency in processes requires an element of knowledge. A powerful business analytics and insights tool allows you to extract information from the CRM to produce reports giving you a whole new level of business intelligence. This insight will help you make the necessary changes to your business strategy.  

With IRIS CRM you can say with confidence that you have a unified system ensuring you deliver the best possible customer onboarding experience.