Overview
The client, which specializes in fixed income, liability-driven investment (LDI) solutions, and index capabilities for the US institutional market, serves pension plans, foundations and endowments, unions, and public funds.
When the firm implemented Salesforce ten years ago, it adopted the same data model as its UK-based parent. After a decade of using Salesforce, the firm engaged client-facing experts at Cutter Associates to reevaluate its use of the system, and recommend industry best practices and ways to improve CRM use across the distribution function, including prospecting, sales, client service, and marketing.
In order to provide the firm with industry best practices and forward-looking strategic recommendations for Salesforce use, we performed a current state evaluation by interviewing key employees from Sales, Marketing, Client Service, and IT to understand their processes, gaps, and pain points.
Then, using a proprietary functional matrix, we peer-ranked the organizational structures, processes, systems/tools, and data across sales, marketing, contact management, communications, document tracking, and others. We also provided detailed industry best practices for these functional areas and documented prospect lifecycles for existing and targeted client types.
Cutter Solution
We found that the client’s existing organizational structures and systems were in line with or better than similarly sized peers, but the firm fell short of peers for processes and data quality used to manage the sales lifecycle. The firm’s Sales and Client Service teams did not use Salesforce consistently across teams and did not treat CRM data as a strategic asset.
We made the following recommendations for the client to reach the optimal future target state:
- A proprietary CRM Capability Model that leveraged Salesforce for residual functions
- Recommendations and high-level information on additional Salesforce functionality that would streamline current sales and marketing processes
- Integration opportunities with third-party client and prospect data vendors to help improve data accuracy and completeness
- A comprehensive project plan to reach the target state, taking into account the client’s skills, expertise, budget, and timeframe
At the conclusion of the project, the client was armed with a pragmatic and implementable target state for the most effective use of Salesforce with a corresponding systems architecture, as well as a revamped Salesforce data model to support the manager’s particular current and future business needs.
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