A well-maintained client relationship management (CRM) platform is more than a data warehouse: it is a context-rich source of information about your investment bank's story. An ideal banking-specific CRM should be a single source of truth that contains accurate accounts of every interaction your team has ever had with every contact in your collective network, as well as a reflection of your past wins and losses, and an account of how you managed those opportunities.
Legacy CRM platforms don’t meet this standard. Manual data entry and a lack of relationship intelligence—the insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—create stagnant, unreliable datasets.
An intelligent CRM for investment banking not only keeps your data automatically up to date, organized, and easy to find, it also helps visualize that data via real-time reporting and analytics dashboards that your team can use to tell your story. Let’s look at a few ways you can target your story to different audiences using existing data and reporting dashboards, and how shaping that story can help accelerate your firm’s growth.
Optimize how your team spends their time
Your team’s performance is part of your story. In order to share the best version of that story, you need to understand how and when your team has been successful, and analyzing that performance helps identify gaps and make improvements. By visualizing the data from your dealmaking process, you gain insights into trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.
By breaking down the number of emails and meetings between your team and their prospects over time, for example, you can review exactly who is reaching out to whom and how often. By visualizing this outreach data, your intelligent CRM depicts the complete story of:
- Which types of opportunities your team is spending time on
- Which of those opportunities are most successful
- Where you may be able to make improvements to decrease the time from pitch to close
- The performance of each person on your deal team and the team as a whole
Turn your team’s everyday activities into your story to remove bottlenecks (or leaks) in your funnel and make the management changes needed to source the most lucrative opportunities.
Share pipeline progress and improve pipeline management
Comprehensive analytics dashboards can not only help visualize where in your pipeline mandates are getting lost, they can also help you create accurate KPIs and revenue projections based on historical and current performance that can be easily shared with your firm’s VPs and partners.
When senior leaders request updates on your team’s largest deals, team members who are missing valuable organizational insights provided by an intelligent CRM don’t have a complete story to tell. Intelligent CRM platforms are designed to make it easier to collaborate with external data partners to expand your access to industry data, including funding rounds, leadership changes, and company growth trends.
By setting benchmarks to compare present and future mandates against past closes and then combining your own pipeline performance with that data, your team gains additional layers of detail into your pipeline that will help you accelerate your dealmaking process.
Consolidating the mandate and relationship data in your CRM allows you to easily compile comprehensive reports for internal updates and offer transparency to your most important stakeholders, so you can showcase your wins and highlight places in your pipeline you are working to improve.
Demonstrate your successes and close more mandates
Visualizing and clearly communicating your story with your team can yield major improvements in your pipeline management process, but the benefits are not only internal.
With comprehensive reporting tools, you can show up to your next client meeting with an easy-to-understand dashboard of your experience with similar companies and prove to your new prospect that they can trust your team to manage the purchase or sale of their business.
An intelligent CRM is designed with transparency in mind, so you can share the most important parts of the story of your business and prove that your firm can meet and exceed expectations.
Rely on an intelligent CRM built specifically for banking
Increasing revenue and growing your firm’s mandate pipeline depends on collecting and analyzing the patterns and practices of client sourcing, client status updates, fees, and pitch success rates, and on actively reviewing and taking action to meet your team’s KPIs and goals. Framing how you tell the story of all of the data aggregated within your CRM is up to you.
Relying on an intelligent CRM gives you the ability to shape your firm’s narrative and support your narrative with data that an intelligent CRM will capture automatically. Viewing your firm’s story allows you to make better, more data-driven decisions about your present and future performance and close more mandates with prospects that align with the sales and marketing narrative you tell you about your business.
Explore how else your team can rely on relationship intelligence for closing more mandates by meeting a member of the Affinity team today.
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