Customer and client relationship management systems have come a long way, says Sarah Dobek of Inovautus Consulting — and it's time for firms to give them a second look.
Transcription:
Dan Hood (00:03):
Welcome to On the Air With Accounting Today. I'm Dan Hood. For all that accounting is a relationship business, the profession is often not very sophisticated in how it manages those relationships. For instance, there've been customer relationship systems or CRM systems around in accounting for some time, but they're often not used to their full potential. Here to talk about how to leverage all that potential and why you might want to get a CRM system if you don't already have one, is Sarah Dobek. She's the president and founder of Inovautus Consulting and a well-known consultant to accounting firm. Sarah, thanks for joining us.
Sarah Dobek (00:29):
Thanks Dan for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Dan Hood (00:32):
Yeah. This is an interesting topic because CRM systems, they said they've been around for a long time, but I'm not sure everybody even knows what they are. So maybe for the uninitiated, can you give us a quick description of what ACRM system does?
Sarah Dobek (00:42):
Yeah, well, I mean you described it well, we call it a client relationship management system. Customer is the more common term, but we change it all to client here in the accounting profession. But the gist of it is it's a system that's helped meant to help you manage communications in relationships with your clients. I think it gets a bad rap because so much of past CRM use in accounting firms has been all about sales. And while there is absolutely a sales component to this, it is so much deeper than that, especially with the advancement of technology today. There is so much value that it can add and solve so many of the disparate data problems that are occurring in the accounting profession. It's something that we are seeing a massive investment in over the last few years by firms, and they're getting it right this time. Most of them are getting it right. They're looking at it through the right lines.
Dan Hood (01:39):
Excellent. Maybe we should talk about, just before we dive into this, should every firm have ACRM system? Is this a thing that everybody needs to have or is there a certain size point at which you start to say, oh, now you really got to start having a system to manage? Is it number of clients? Is it size of firm?
Sarah Dobek (01:56):
I don't believe it's size of firm. I think at one point in time it used to be because there was a lot of systems that just weren't affordable. But absolutely, I think with the marketing technology that's out there and the other systems that are available, it's accessible by every firm. There are so many different CRMs at different price points. It's manageable by any firm these
Dan Hood (02:17):
Days. Got you. You can find one that works for you for your size, whatever that may be. Excellent. Alright, so let's assume now we know every firm should be looking at one. Every firm should have one. What are the key elements they should be looking for in ACRM system?
Sarah Dobek (02:30):
So this is broad and I think there's a few things that we think are important for firms to be able to scale. And let's start with the client relationship piece of this. So in order for this to work really well inside of firms, we have to think about a few features that help with adoption. One of those key features is how do we get data into the system? And this is a big pain point for a lot of firms.
Dan Hood (02:56):
Yes, very much.
Sarah Dobek (02:59):
We can't get data anyway, and I hear it every time we even broach the subject of ACRM system with a firm. It's like, well, nobody fills out our client acceptance form or a new client form or whatever it is already, and nobody gives us the information to go into practice that we need. So why would that change with ACRM system? And the answer to them is always, well, it has technology that's going to actually help enable that. So one of the things that you want to look for is some level of outlook integration where it will track your emails that a very big brotherish, but it's actually really important. One of the things that it will do depending on the system that you're utilizing is it will pull the domains from those emails that will actually allow you to create contact records. And this is important because we've used other tools for years to capture this information out of Outlook, to get lists together.
(03:46)
And on average, every partner we work with has somewhere in an annual basis between 1500 and 2000 contacts. When you start to take out the newsletters and personal emails and some of those things, it's generally between seven 50 and 1200 contacts. Those are never making them into any system. Those are prospects, those are referral sources, those are other key contacts at our clients. Those are their advisors. So have a lot of contacts that need to get into the system. And on average when we look at it, we may have one contact, possibly two per record in our system. So we need a way to get that information in and get it in a way that doesn't require the individual to forward an email address, fill out a form, or do something else from there. And so that Outlook integration is important, but the tracking of emails is really important for client relationship.
(04:39)
Right. When we think about serving the client, it's very hard to sometimes just remember to pass information along. And so if we have things like meeting notes, I use an AI tool that helps me take notes. I review and massage those, but they actually get posted to our CRM and our record and we don't post everything. We can choose whether that note taker takes notes or not. But it will literally summarize a conversation that I am having with you, Dan, if I had it turned on into our CRM record. And so that's really powerful because if somebody's working with a client and they're doing their tax work and they know there was a mid-year planning meeting or a year planning meeting, the parter doesn't have to recreate everything. If there's a good summary that's in the CRM system, we can go and look at that. If we're trying to figure out whether our operations team has followed up on the open items list, we can go in and see when the last communication was with that client. So those types of things are really powerful and all of a sudden that big brother feeling feels like, oh my gosh, this is going to help us do our job a lot better. So Outlook integration is absolutely the first thing that I would look for.
Dan Hood (05:53):
Excellent. It's fascinating, that whole big brotherly feeling at some point it was made clear to me that really, really important people like the CEOs of major corporations and stuff like that, when they get on calls, often their executive assistant would be on the call muted or whatever and taking notes so that anything they promised and you start to think of it, you think of it less as sort of oversight, big brotherish oversight. And it's like having your own personal executive assistant. A rich person would have to take the notes that you may have forgotten to take so you can fulfill all the promises you made in the call that you forgot. So that makes a lot of sense. It's something we want to have that kind of integration and that kind of control. And it's probably not something people should be afraid of. Any other elements that should go into a system like this.
Sarah Dobek (06:34):
So the other would be, I think it's really important for our firms to make sure that they have a system that can also tag on or include marketing automation. So most systems out there CRM systems are either built as a true pure CRM system and you can overlay marketing automation or vice versa marketing automation that adds on ACRM component, which is the client relationship contact record management system piece of that. So we want to make sure that we have that. And the reason we want automation is that's what's going to allow you to create workflows and triggers and that's going to allow you to use technology. So for example, and one of the ways that we maintain data and one of the systems that we use, we're a HubSpot shop. So we have all of these triggers and workflows set up. So if there's a new contact record that goes in, it goes into a particular list and that's automated.
(07:25)
And that enables our data management team to go in and make sure that we have all of the fields filled in for the records. And it's not just a loose email address. If it creates a duplicate for some reason, we have a whole nother workflow set up for that to review and merge records, all the pain points that we have that nobody's paying attention to because it requires so much manual effort to look between those things. Inside of accounting firms, you can create automations that automatically trigger, like if we've got a form or a new client form set up, instead of having to manually email that, depending on what's selected on that form, if we're doing an audit, a tax return and a cass engagement is probably a bad combination, but any combination of those, the information that they need gets automatically routed and they're notified with one submission of a form that information can go where it needs to go.
(08:16)
And if you have any kind of APIs, that information can get pushed over into, in some cases practice. It's not integration by the way, it's a one-way push, but it could get pushed over and say all of a sudden when we take that contact name and we take that account name and ACRM system and that becomes the client name in practice or wherever it needs to go. So I think making sure that you've got some sort of automation capabilities to be able to build is going to help you enhance the experience of what you're doing and make it that much more powerful.
Dan Hood (08:52):
Gotcha. So it's pretty, obviously it sounds like a lot of the you're looking for are making that data collection easier, making that data integration easier, that's going to go to make sure that information gets shared in all the different places and with all the different people it should get shared with. And that begins, I think, to get to the sense of one of the things you really want to CRM system for, you don't just want it just to collect all this information, but to make it easier to use. What other things are we using ACRM system for once we've got all this data in and shared to the right places and populated in the right places and everyone has access to it? What else? I mean, is that the main purpose of the system or is there more to it or,
Sarah Dobek (09:24):
Yeah, there's absolutely more to it without going way deep in the weeds, but we want to make sure we can customize that CRM system and that customization can look like a lot of different things. I've seen so many different versions and there's different tools. We've worked with Dynamics, we've worked with Salesforce, we've worked with HubSpot, we've worked with, I think Zoho, we've worked with tons and tons of, we've probably worked with a desert or more different CRM systems over the years. And that customization is so important for accounting firms because of the disparate systems. We need to be able to have consistency in things like client numbers and records and other things that allow us to join data because we can't fully integrate it in this profession. The software doesn't enable us to do that, the technical software that we use. So we've got to be able to do some of those things. And so enabling that is really important and making sure that you shouldn't need to pay $50,000 to have somebody customize the setup of your system.
(10:25)
Yes, that's not, so there are some firms that are leaning towards some systems and some of it has to do with integration. We see the top three CRM systems in the profession right now are dynamics Salesforce and HubSpot Dynamics being because it integrates in with the Microsoft products. And we have a lot of firms that have technology divisions that are customizing dynamics. In fact, I think your VAR report, almost all of those people when I read through are Dynamics implementers, but we are seeing massive adoptions of HubSpot as well because of that user friendliness. Oftentimes CRM is being started by marketing, but it's not the sole purpose of why we should have something in place and that Salesforce has just been around for a really long time. So there's still a lot of holdover in Salesforce and it's a great product, but it comes with its own suite of services and tools that will work with it as well.
Dan Hood (11:21):
And I think it's also, it's just a name that everyone goes, oh yeah, Salesforce, I've heard of that. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Whereas some of the other ones you mentioned, even though many of them have been devoted to accounting for a while, people may not necessarily recognize the name. Excellent. I want to dive into, talk a little bit more about, obviously some firms have been using these for a while. Other firms will be new to it, but I want to talk about what they can do to get more out of them. But we're going to take a quick break before we do that.
(11:48)
Alright, and we're back with Sarah Dobek of Inovautus Consulting. We've been talking about CRM systems, why you should have one, what it should look like, what you're going to get out of it, but I want to take it to the next level. As you said, some firms have had these for quite some time and may not be getting as much out of them as they may be can. Some of that, as we talked about is the getting that data in there and getting everybody use it. I think that was an initial problem for a lot of CRM systems firms. People were just like, no one will fill in the information. No one will share their information, no one will share their clients. That's all separate issue, but no one just wanted to put the data in. The more you make it easier for them to get it in, and it sounds like CMM systems are getting on top of that and solving that problem or making it easier for people to put information into it. What you really need to get the full value out of it is to have all that information available. Then you can start doing all kinds of things with it. But let's talk about that. What can you do with it and what aren't firms doing with it that maybe they should be?
Sarah Dobek (12:37):
Yeah, another great loaded question. You're always going to be,
Dan Hood (12:41):
I'm going to go away now for 20 minutes and you just talk and I'll,
Sarah Dobek (12:45):
Sounds good. Sounds good. So I think what are firms not doing with it, right? I think one of the things that they're not doing it is probably using it to help better manage the interactions with clients and tracking some of the things that I was describing earlier, right? We tend to rely on CRM just for sales and marketing, and so I even know firms that it's only going to house our sales and marketing information, but that's a huge mistake because we have a ton of client data, and I don't care which system you're using, but these practice management systems are billing systems at the end of the day. And while some of them have evolved to allow more than one contact, it's not user-friendly, not intuitive. Logging calls is not automated, it's not integrated with Outlook. It's not easy to get to. So while they do have some of the capabilities to track contact data, it's not always the easiest to do.
(13:42)
So I think firms will see a great deal of benefit from being able to pull those conversations in. It doesn't change your workflow, it doesn't change where your project management is, but having some of those records of conversations can be really, really powerful to have everybody's fingertips at those and be able to log in and see everything in one place. It can add transparency. So if your firm has an initiative around holding mid-year and year end client meetings with, say, your a and B clients, you can log all of that in the system. The notes can be there from those meetings instead of buried in some document management system that's not really searchable that nobody's really going to go and find to be able to pull up that information. The other thing that I would say is reporting. There's lots of great reporting and most of these tools are pulling in AI components that can pull your data out pretty easily.
(14:37)
So make sure that you're reporting is set up, whether that's for your client experience onboarding or whether it's for your sales pipeline. There's a lot of great things that you can set up to add some information that's help you make better decision making around whether you're planning your goals for the year revenue projections. We're even talking to a lot of firms about adding into pipelines, estimated labor budgets. So we can start to figure out in our pipeline, when do we need to hire? How much capacity do we have and bandwidth do we have inside of the firm? When do we need to start hiring? So I think adding in that reporting and really honing in on what, not just what marketing needs, but what the firm leadership needs and being able to marry those things together. A lot of the integrations with CRM can be pulled in to different business intelligence tools as well. So if your firm has those dashboards that are set up, that integration can roll right in and talk about bringing value to something in the organization. All of that reporting is really important to being able to manage and run a business today.
Dan Hood (15:49):
Absolutely. It's interesting, I was talking or heard a group of people from AIM Association for Accounting Marketing, talking about the impact of AI on accounting firms and what was going to do, and one of their great examples, one of the things they said that they should be, people should be hoping for is the ability to unleash AI on ACRM system to tell you among other things how happy your clients were, how likely your clients were to stick with you and that kind of thing. And the ability to do that and tied in with all kinds of other things would allow you to decide whether you want to keep them or not or what you need to do to keep them if you want to move on. But the more integrated it is, the more data it has, the more able it is to say, this client's unhappy and that's okay, or This client's really happy, but we don't want 'em anyways. That ability to go through all that data if you have it in one place, has got to be enormous. You've given us a lot of examples of what else you can do with ACRM system. I think then people might expect you say, I think they normally expect it to be all about sales and marketing, but there's a lot of decision-making capabilities that just spring naturally from having all that data in one place. Any other things that people should be looking to do with their CRM system maybe that they're not?
Sarah Dobek (16:56):
Yeah, I think the other is tying into more of that marketing space, but when you bring in the marketing elements, and it's most often referred to as marketing automation, you can actually measure those touch points. We know we can look and see how many times a claim has engaged with our content. Are they reading our newsletters? Are they clicking on things? One that informs opportunities, and you can actually create a scoring system that will allow you to bring to light some of those engagements. But it'll also tell you the client's loyalty. I would have to venture and the data could probably tell you this over time, that there's a higher likelihood of clients that are engaging with your content and loyalty factor and how long they've been with you than clients that don't. It's probably how they think about the relationship. Is it transactional? Is it value add?
(17:45)
What are they looking for? How are they engaging with you on social? And when you have right systems in place, you can start to evaluate this, but you can also evaluate your marketing programs a lot better to know what's actually working and what's not working. And without the ability to track data, you can't start to even evaluate some of those things. And so everything we do on the marketing side ends up informing that client experience at the end of the day. And so we kind of look past that when we're thinking about it. But those two integrations play a really big role. And so most of the times today, part of selecting ACRM system is taking into account those other pieces that might play off of that CRM system, including marketing automation, because if you go with a certain product, you're going to be aligned with whatever that is. They use certain tools and resources, they're not totally plug and play that you can, it's not a universal adapter for marketing automation. So it's just something that you need to think about as you're selecting ACRM system, even if you don't want to use it today, if you're not ready or you're in the reverse, right? You're selecting marketing automation, but what's the impact going to be when the firm is ready to use that CRM system?
Dan Hood (19:00):
Gotcha. Excellent. There's a whole lot going on there that I think that even I wasn't aware of, and I just imagine many people in firms would going, whoa, I didn't know we could do that with that. And hopefully it's making the argument to a lot of people that they need to either get a system or if they have a system to make sure that everybody's using it. Any final thoughts on CRM systems and accounting firms before we
Sarah Dobek (19:18):
Go? Oh, I'm sure I have lots of final thoughts, but we'll leave it there, Dan.
Dan Hood (19:22):
Alright, excellent. Sarah do Nevada Consulting. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sarah Dobek (19:26):
Right. Thanks for having me,
Dan Hood (19:28):
And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Kevin Parise, ready to review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accounting today.com. Thanks again to our guest and thank you for listening.