Compulan salvages failed CRM implementation

International Planning Group (IPG), which provides financial planning services to global companies and high-net-worth individuals, has successfully applied Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to improve the performance and efficiency of virtually every department within the firm.

Through the implementation of Saleslogix CRM software – now the cornerstone of IPG’s business – the company has eliminated paper files and inefficient faxing and scanning of records for an electronic system that provides immediate access to important estate-planning information. By gaining a central repository for all customer information and the ability to replicate information in remote offices, IPG can demonstrate:

• Accelerated processing of complex cases and, subsequently, faster closing of business;
• Better customer service and the ability to manage and update customers’ financial and retirement portfolios; and
• Improved auditing. IPG has dramatically reduced the time and paperwork needed for IPG’s Compliance Officer to audit every sale.
• Improved sales forecasting;

“Today, we have offices in Boston, New York, Toronto, Mexico City, Zurich, Hong Kong and Singapore,” explains IPG’s Chief Financial Officer, Steven Lamb. Distances and time zones make it very difficult to communicate between offices and complete processing for lengthy and involved cross-border estate planning, Lamb says. Each country and insurance company has its own rules and regulations for fiscal compliance and medical exams required for obtaining life insurance. “Faxing forms back and forth is often, or at best, a 24-hour turnaround and with paper records it becomes very challenging to determine the status of any case.”

IPG’s need to obtain consolidated views of customer information has grown with the complexity of its cases. “We might have a customer who owns a company and real estate in Japan, yet he has children in the United States and plans to move there himself in a few years. I don’t see how we could manage the sales process, and subsequent servicing with our old paper-based system.”

IPG’s first attempt at automation – a home-grown database – failed. “There wasn’t enough in it to be useful, and updating it and checking for accuracy was time consuming and awkward,” Lamb explains. “It wasn’t current, it wasn’t relevant, and it wasn’t being used.”

From that experience, IPG realized that it needed an off-the-shelf system. The company selected SalesLogix “because it had the basic fields and functions we needed and appeared to be the easiest to customize for our business requirements.” Yet the CRM consultant who IPG hired to supply the software and implement the system “couldn’t get past basic technical issues and synchronization of data at remote offices,” Lamb notes. Disgruntled, IPG turned to Compulan, a veteran integrator of CRM systems.

"We had a failed implementation of SalesLogix and were ready to discard it,” Lamb says. “But Compulan reviewed the existing design and convinced us to stay with SalesLogix - that it would more than meet our requirements. They guaranteed us that they could salvage it and improve both the functionality and reliability. Rather than throw away all the money we had spent so far, we were willing to take the chance. That was two years ago. Today, the functional design of our SalesLogix system is so different from our original one, it's difficult to believe it's the same application. We have expanded our use of the system worldwide and it has been a major success. We learned that choosing the correct implementation vendor is as important as the technology.”

Compulan helped define and document the sales process that the system would accommodate, revamped the database, implemented the software, converted existing data, created numerous reports, and trained the IPG personnel to enter information and utilize the system.

Today, four principal groups use the system:

• All sales agents, from IPG’s Hong Kong office to its Wellesley, Massachusetts headquarters.
• Implementation teams responsible for processing cases, scheduling medical exams, and passing information to underwriters. (“The implementation teams love the system, because it lets them see exactly what needs to be done at any moment to get a case approved.”)
• Service staff, who monitor approved customer cases and make ongoing changes and updates, as required.
• The Chief Financial Officer, Steven Lamb, who studies case reports and also serves as the Compliance Officer, responsible for auditing sales. “I can now perform compliance and internal audits without taking time away from sales people, who once had to gather all sorts of information, which is now directly accessible from the system.”

Reports built by Compulan allows sales to view pipelines, forecast revenues, and identify obstacles in the sales process, while helping management keep close tabs on business. For example, exception reports show managers all cases with medical-exam results recorded for 14 or more days, but have not yet gone for underwriting.

The SalesLogix system is constantly being refined and upgraded and sales agents are brought to the Wellesley office twice annually for training. “We tried some online training, but found that they have much better focus and retention from live training,” Lamb says.

For all the benefits that IPG has obtained from its CRM system, Lamb estimates that they still only use 60 percent of the system’s functionality. IPG intends to improve event scheduling and monitoring and allow salespeople to synchronize their appointments and calendars between SalesLogix and hand-held devices. New functionality will be introduced at subsequent training sessions.

“We’ve come a very long way in a relatively short time and we intend to go a lot further. This has been a real turnaround success for us.”

For more information about this or other success stories, contact Compulan.

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