Top Five Salesforce Best Practices for the Financial Industry

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Why Salesforce?

In this era of rapid technological change, business leaders need to be aware of the latest software offerings to take advantage of important new functionality. A key platform for business users is the immensely popular Salesforce. Like any other enterprise software, however, Salesforce needs to be configured, customized, and administered properly for optimal function and a maximum return on investment. In addition, there are best practices that are unique to each industry.

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In a series of blog posts, we’ll be taking a look at important best practices for some of the industries that Korcomptenz specializes in. This post focuses on the financial industry.

Top Five Best Practices in the Financial Industry

The financial industry includes a wide-variety of organizations from investment firms, to banks, and insurance companies. These companies come in an equally wide-variety of sizes from behemoths like Bank of America to smaller, boutique advisory firms. While each sector has it’s own unique needs, establishing positive relationships with customers based on trust is a critical success factor independent of size or specific market.

Fortunately for Salesforce users, Salesforce Clouds are designed from the ground up to support the kind of positive relationship management across all touch points that builds trust—and understanding. Here are five key best-practices that will help you maximize your relationships:

  • Choose the right Salesforce edition-Salesforce offers a customized solution for the financial services industry, known as Financial Services Cloud, but many organizations use the traditional Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds. Neither choice is right or wrong. Smaller companies can usually benefit from the features bundled into the Financial Services Cloud such as marketing automation and pre-built templates and reports for common financial products while larger organizations are likely to need to heavily customize for their specific objectives and will receive little benefit from the package.
  • Build relationships with your customer and prospects:- Independent of the Salesforce Cloud you choose, Salesforce empowers you to build relationships in two key ways. First, it centralizes all of your data about a person (and their family where applicable) to provide personalized recommendations, strategies unique to their demographics and financial position, or just plain human contact like wishing a customer happy birthday or congratulating them on an important milestone. Second, it enables you to visualize all of the financial products purchased by a customer—and the value of those products—in one location, enabling you to cross-sell, up-sell, and re-sell with ease.
  • Leverage automation and self-service features-While Salesforce is often considered an internal system, forward-thinking organizations leverage tools like Community Cloud and Visualforce to improve customer experience, operational excellence, and return on investment. For example, Visualforce can be used to deploy online forms for account applications, payments, etc. Community Cloud goes even deeper, enabling you to deploy a self-service portal for your customers to manage their financial products, report on their results, and request help when needed.
  • Segregate Your Client Segments-Most banks or financial services institutions have multiple client segments based on the type of product, level of investment, demographic, or other data. Salesforce gives you the tools to analyze your customer base at a very granular level, enabling you to better target under performing segments, better service higher value customers, and generate additional insights about your business.
  • Focus on Visualization-The financial industry has never been short of metrics, and Salesforce enables you to better manage your performance with a wide-variety of analytics, charts, graphs, and dashboards, all available without any programming. For example, you can visualize the progress of your individual Wealth Management Accounts for optimal performance or better manage your sales funnel, helping you improve the performance of your individual investors and the overall company.

Contact Us and Keep Reading to Learn More

We hope the Salesforce best practices in this blog have been helpful to you. Please visit Korcomptenz to learn more about our Salesforce solutions for the financial industry or to schedule a complimentary consultation. Also, be sure to check back in the future for best practices for other industries.

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