How Nelson Money Managers uses SalesLogix from Interact
Commerce to build and manage relationships with its corporate contacts,
identify prospective investors, and convert these into profitable Nelson
clients.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the hottest areas of
activity in business today. Not surprising given the fact that customer
relationships are increasingly viewed as an extremely valuable business
asset.
That’s especially true for service companies such
as Nelson Money Managers. For this company, developing and maintaining
strong customer relationships is absolutely pivotal to business success.
Managing these very different types of customer relationships
is central to Nelson’s business and to underpin its efforts, it
is currently implementing a brand new CRM system — SalesLogix
from Interact Commerce — across its entire organisation.
Based in Chester and Northwich with over 240 staff and
with a network of regional offices, Nelson Money Managers runs a thriving
investment services business, tailoring and managing bespoke investment
portfolios on behalf of its clients. Operating in this specialist niche,
Nelson Money Managers currently manages client assets approaching £1bn
for over 16,000 private clients. It also provides tax advisory services,
such as self assessment and managing maturing share options in the most
tax efficient manner.
Nelson’s clients tend to be professional people
approaching retirement — with thousands rather than millions to
invest — wishing to secure their future finances to maximise income
and growth.
By far the majority of these clients are actually recommended
to the firm by their employers as part of retirement planning activities.
So as well as building healthy relationships with the people whose money
they ultimately manage, Nelson Money Managers must also focus on nurturing
links with the HR and pensions managers of blue chip corporations and
public sector organisations, such as police authorities.
DEDICATED TO CUSTOMERS
Clive Lovering, IT Project Manager, explains the importance of high
quality customer relationship management to Nelson’s business
success: “Our goal was to implement a dedicated CRM application
— instead of continuing to rely on a variety of disparate manual
processes and some limited customer service functions available via
our Investment Management application.” By implementing SalesLogix,
a key spin-off benefit for Nelson will be to free up the Investment
Management application. A complex, bespoke system that handles a large
volume of transactions, it was increasingly being used by sales and
marketing staff just to check customer contact details and so on.
“Of course, it wasn’t designed for this purpose.
So by implementing SalesLogix, we have not only introduced a dedicated
and powerful CRM tool with a full range of functionality, we will also
take the pressure off the Investment Management system,” said
Lovering.
FAST TO CUSTOMISE
Nelson has chosen to run the CRM application on a totally separate NT
operating platform, with a Microsoft SQL Server 7 database and Dell
server hardware. It has worked closely with Datel Computing, a certified
Interact Commerce partner, to customise the SalesLogix package according
to its own operating model.
“We’ve opted for a three-phase implementation
of SalesLogix as the simplest and most logical approach for our business,”
Lovering said. “Under Phase 1, which went live last April, we
effectively customised the product for managing relationships with our
corporate clients.”
In fact, Nelson deals with a select corporate account
list of more than 3,000 individuals from over 500 employers, who could
potentially refer their pre-retirement employees to Nelson for financial
advice. With no online information about existing corporate accounts,
Nelson literally had to start from scratch to build a database —
manually loading all the associated account and contact information
into SQL Server.
It was a huge undertaking but well worth the effort judging
by the enthusiasm of marketing staff who are now using SalesLogix to
manage their day-to-day activities.
Now all corporate account information and contact reports
are kept and managed in the CRM system, with detailed records for each
account. Marketing staff can simply and quickly access corporate details
using an individual company home page, and drill down for contact notes
or record any developments and activities. SalesLogix is also synchronised
with Outlook to facilitate e-mail and the sharing of calendar information,
and with QAS to capture address information. All marketing staff are
using the online calendaring as their main office diary, enabling the
tracking of key people’s schedules in a matter of seconds.
Using the online customer information now available via
the CRM system, Nelson has already organised a selective mailshot to
corporate clients with positive results. The company has also recognised
the potential for data analysis, opportunity management, and sales forecasting,
which it hopes to exploit in due course.
IMPROVING CUSTOMER CONVERSION
The development of Phase 2 deployment of SalesLogix has recently been
implemented. The aim is to extend the use of the software to managing
prospective investment client information. With the expertise of Datel
Computing, Nelson Money Managers has developed a bolt-on application
for handling the management of events and seminars it runs in association
with corporate clients. Phase 2 extends the CRM application to manage
potential clients attending these seminars.
With development work complete to customise SalesLogix,
this phase went live in December 2000. Early in 2001, the objective
is to commence Phase 3 work to extend the system to handling Nelson’s
actual investment clients.
“The idea is that we are tightening up and automating
Nelson’s end-to-end process for managing the entire customer relationship
lifecycle — from building and managing relationships with our
corporate clients and identifying prospective customers at retirement
planning seminars, right through to converting these prospects into
Nelson clients and serving their needs effectively,” said Lovering.
During Phase 3, Nelson plans to integrate the CRM solution
with its Investment Management system, which runs on a Sun server and
Informix database platform.
FAST TO IMPLEMENT — COST EFFECTIVE TO RUN
“So far we’ve been really impressed at how quick and easy
SalesLogix is to implement and the fact that we can customise it to
suit our business as a service rather than product-oriented company,”
Lovering observed. “We’ve found it to be highly user friendly
and the software was flexible enough to fulfill many of the significant
customisations required to meet our business needs.”
Given the sheer simplicity and speed of implementation,
Nelson fully expects a rapid return on its investment in SalesLogix.
Another major benefit, according to Lovering, is that the system is
proving very cost effective to run. “In cost of ownership terms,
we’ve been really pleased that the introduction of SalesLogix
hasn’t meant higher support overheads. In fact, when we went live
in Phase 1, our helpdesk wasn’t deluged with problems and queries
at all, as is often the case with new projects. We hope to lighten some
of the pressure on our Investment Management system so that the support
overhead is assisted by the introduction of the CRM System.”
For the future, Nelson is keen to complete the next two
phases of SalesLogix deployment so that the entire business and all
Nelson customers and prospective customers can reap the full benefits.
“Beyond this we are keen to explore how we might leverage the
web integration capabilities of SalesLogix and use the analytical tools
to boost marketing and sales activities,” Lovering concluded
.
This information has been extracted
from the web site of SalesLogix. For more detail please visit "Customer
Successes" on www.saleslogix.com
