Having addressed the questions of the first steps of starting your brokerage, platform provider choice and liquidity provider choice in our previous articles, we now move on to another core element of your business - your CRM.
Customer Relationship Management system - “CRM” is a software tool that collects your customers’ personal information, including emails, phone numbers and even personal preferences across multiple sources and channels, helping you coordinate your sales team towards a more complete client relationship, easing the process of finding new customers, as well as collecting and storing KYC/AML documents.
Nevertheless, in a pool of CRM solutions available, picking the right CRM for you may be a challenge. What are the things to look out for?
CRM components
Despite all the additional CRM features available, the core ones to pay special attention to are:
- Lead Management - granting you the ability to easily look through your lead list and get all the information you may need, including demographics, lead score, conversions etc. The more details your CRM can capture - the better.
- Pipeline Management - a visual sales pipeline, appropriately grouped to save your sales team the time.
- Built-in Capabilities - the ease of placing calls in a few clicks, a simple way of assigning leads to your team, ease and speed of operation, as well as a degree of automation for sending out reminders to your clients.
- Reports - essential to measuring performance by month, quarter and more, as well as the ability to customize and create in-depth reports for your advanced business needs.
- IB Program - to efficiently manage your affiliates. A fluid IB program is something you should definitely keep an eye out for. If you are using cTrader, however, an intuitive partner program comes built-in already, so you are free to choose the most convenient option for your commercial needs.
Pricing
CRM typically has either a modular or a scale-up pricing model.
Scale-up/tiered pricing means that you get a choice of multiple monthly/annual packages, each comprising a different set of features, with prices scaling upwards as the feature offering increases.
Modular pricing, on the other hand, means you pay for the different modules (functions) that you need, customizing the number of users and other aspects of your offering, and building your personalized CRM.
Regardless of what you opt for, a CRM is an important investment that may greatly pay off in the long-term. Many brokers would agree that going for a cheaper CRM solution from the very start did their business somewhat of a disservice.
Your business expectations
Technically, the perfect CRM would be an all-in-one software, allowing you to manage data, client interactions, affiliates, marketing activities and staff performance in one space, while remaining easy-to-use for anyone in your organization, saving you the trouble and cost of lengthy training.
Needless to say, however, the larger the offering, the contact storage and the number of users, who can join a CRM - the more pricey it’s bound to be. Hence, it’s essential to establish that the CRM responds precisely to your business needs. Often less is more.
Integrations
Your CRM system isn’t a separate entity from your business and your platform. Impeccable integration is not only of essence for fluid functioning, but is also a way to save your sales team time when conducting their activities. A poorly-integrated CRM leads to many issues with an end-result of client frustration and money loss.
This is why cTrader comes equipped with an API ready to integrate any CRM provider of your choice and remains there for any potential technical issues at no extra cost. Further, with transparency at heart, hidden costs are not an issue, so you are safe from falling into unexpected budget losses, as in the case of some white label providers with a pre-packaged CRM that may charge a revenue share on all incoming deposits.
In conclusion, it’s clear that the choice of a CRM is one that takes time and research. cTrader is not a CRM provider, but we are integrated with a large selection of systems you can view here.
If you want to start your own brokerage don’t hesitate to reach out to us today!
