The Need for Customer Relationship Management and Analytics in Your Business with Ed Garry

In part 8 of the Masterclass Series on How to Build a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business, host Eric Dickmann talks with Ed Garry. Ed is an experienced CRM strategist and consultant who specializes in helping financial services firms unlock data, elevate customer experiences and uncover the insights they need to transform. He is a leader within Huron’s Salesforce team and has worked with global Fortune 500 clients and financial services leaders to innovate and enhance the value of their customer relationship management (CRM) software systems.

He has assisted his clients in the planning and implementation of innovative CRM solutions, in driving important shifts in the cultural mindset of the organization, in optimizing business processes and team structures to sustain digital transformation, and in leading go-to-market strategies to help organizations achieve long-term growth.

Prior to joining Huron, Ed spent over a decade as the head of global CRM and sales enablement technologies at the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon), where he implemented an award-winning Salesforce CRM solution. He also served as vice president of CRM solutions at Bank of America.

For additional resources on this episode and from our other episodes in this Masterclass Series, visit https://fiveechelon.com/masterclass

For more information about Eric Dickmann and The Five Echelon Group, visit https://fiveechelon.com/

For more information on Ed Garry and Huron Consulting, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-garry-salesenablementcrm/ and https://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/

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Transcript

Carla: 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit FiveEchelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann: 0:24

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week, I'm excited to welcome Ed Gary to the podcast and is an experienced CRM, strategist and consultant who specializes in helping financial services firms, unlock data, elevate customer experiences, and uncover the insights they need to transform. He is a leader within Huron's Salesforce team and has worked with global Fortune 500 clients and financial services leaders to innovate and enhance the value of their customer relationship management software systems. Prior to joining Huron, Ed spend over a decade as the head of global CRM and sales enablement technologies at the Bank of New York Mellon and he implemented the award-winning Salesforce CRM solution. He has also served as Vice President of CRM solutions at Bank of America. Ed and I are former colleagues working together for many years at Siebel systems prior to it being acquired by Oracle Corporation. It's exciting to bring him on the show to talk about the value of CRM and what it means to your marketing strategy as we delve into our Masterclass Series on building a strategic marketing plan for your business. Welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Ed Garry: 2:00

It's great to be here and great to see you again, Eric.

Eric Dickmann: 2:03

Hey, this is going to be an exciting conversation because you and I go way back in the, uh, in the world of customer relationship management and the focus of today's episode is going to be all about customer relationship management and analytics. But just to bring sort of the audience up to speed I want to give them a little bit of a uh, a frame of reference as to where we are in this MasterClass Series. So we are working on a series talking about building out a strategic marketing plan for your business, and we've talked about things like identifying your target market and ideal customer profile, the importance of product-market fit and competitive differentiation, building out a brand story that really resonates with your ideal customer, and then taking that story and building out some compelling marketing messages that then you can use in your marketing programs. From there, we sort of talked about how you can incorporate digital freelancers and content creators into your team to help create some of that real compelling content and then using marketing automation to really increase your campaign effectiveness, and that's been a great segue into our topic today around customer relationship management and analytics. And before we sort of dive into it, I would love it if you could just give the audience a little bit of background into your expertise in this area and what you're currently working on today.

Ed Garry: 3:23

Sure. So there's no need to emphasize the fact that we've known each other since way back. I think the way back part is kind of unnecessary, but sure. Uh, We've known each other for awhile.

Eric Dickmann: 3:35

We have indeed, we have indeed.

Ed Garry: 3:36

Yes. Well, actually, probably we met when I was at Quick Reilly, which was the brokerage firm that was owned by Fleet Bank, and is now part of Bank of America, probably most commonly known as Merrill Edge right now, and you, I believe were working at Siebel Systems. And, um, I was at Quick Reilly leading their CRM initiative when we didn't even know what CRM stood for, literally, we didn't know, what CRM stood for or what it meant or what the vision was. And so for the next six or so years this is going back to 1999. Uh, So there, I told you not to go to the way back and then therefore I threw an actual date with it.

Eric Dickmann: 4:13

You did it anyway. Yep.

Ed Garry: 4:14

And I did it anyway. So this is going back to 1999 and it was, I was put on a project that was, you know, six months and we're going to roll out this CRM system, and then you can go back to, you know, your full-time job because I was a financial advisor and I was in regional management and I was operations manager of one of our largest branches at the Quick and Reilly network. And I liked that. I loved it. But they asked me to do this project. And so I did and here we are X amount of years later, and I'm still on the CRM space. So it's been pretty exciting. And you know, what I've liked about it is that one day I'm a marketing expert and helping with data and driving marketing campaigns and strategies through data the next day and technology. And the next day I'm an operations or a call center or the sales organization, or I'm an analytics, building charts and graphs, I'm trying to tell a story through these charts and graphs about where our business is and where our business is headed. So, you know, everyday you walk in, you know, there's a current theme that's kind of across the bottom, which is using data to be able to improve the customer experience. Whether you're doing that from a technology perspective, a sales perspective, a marketing perspective, a service perspective. We're helping executive management be able to use data in a way that allows them to get those aha moments and tell a story and be able to, instead of, you know, using uh, this using a machete, you use a scalpel to be able to determine what they want, their, what they want their business to look like and what they want their strategy to be. So that's where I started. I moved over and joined you at Siebel for a couple of years. And then one of our customers. You know, had a, had literally they're like, we need someone to help us tell our business intelligence story and we need someone to help visualize, you know our data for senior management. So I joined the bank of New York Mellon in charge of their business intelligence platform. Which was at the time Siebel's analytical tool, which became O B I E E, was the name that I don't even know if I know what it stands for at this point, but something like Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition or something like that.

Eric Dickmann: 6:16

Right, I remember that. Yeah.

Ed Garry: 6:18

But we were very successful with that, but eventually, you know, we outgrew the platform and we had to migrate to Salesforce.com, so then I led that effort with a colleague or two, we led that effort to transfer from Siebel to Salesforce. And then I've been working in Salesforce ever since in the last couple of years, I've moved over to the consultant, the consulting side. Um, I'm now at Huron consulting, and I'm responsible for our Salesforce practice for financial services. So helping from a business development perspective, rolling up the sleeves, helping those customers envision where their CRM strategy needs to be, where it is today, how to make it better. Helping from a business development perspective, and getting our message out there. And really helping our clients be successful. And that's ultimately what it is in financial services.

Eric Dickmann: 7:01

Well, you've definitely got the expertise and the chops to get into this discussion today. And I think what might be helpful is, you know, we just talked about marketing automation in the previous episode and the importance of having a central repository for your data. With so many different applications that companies can use whether it's in their marketing, in their sales efforts, in their service efforts, it's still important to have a central repository for a lot of that data so that you can begin to understand what's going on. And, you know, in the early days we used to talk about CRM as really that 360 degree view of the customer. Do you still think that's a solid definition of what CRM is today, or do you think it's really expanded beyond that?

Ed Garry: 7:45

It's a great question. So here's the thing we talked about that, right? We talked about that from 99 to 2004, 360 view, 360 view and you know what, it became actually a negative thing. It became uh, A roll of the eyes and the board group, when you would say that. And you know, the technology, the vision was there but the technology wasn't there for a variety of reasons. We just didn't have what we needed to be able to achieve that vision. I think in the last three or four years, and you know what, we seen Salesforce and Cloud, and companies moving to the Cloud. You know, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and better analytical tools, and what are some of the core competencies of CRM and then what you need to look beyond CRM to help with your infrastructure. If you look at Salesforce, they bought so many companies that at one point I was questioning what their strategy was. And now here we are a couple of years later, and it was really to bring that 360 degree view of the customer back to the table and not have anybody roll their eyes, but now say this is something that is achievable. This is the dream that we had and now we can get there. So yeah, I do think that it's a relevant terminology still today.

Eric Dickmann: 8:56

You know, in those early days, a lot of companies felt like their product was the center of the universe, but in reality, wherever you implement a product, there are other products that are already there, right? And so the key to being successful, if you are going to have a hub of information is really to have a strategy around integration. You have to be able to integrate to existing systems and new systems that come along. And in some of those early versions of CRM, there just was not the integration capability that exists today. And so when you look out, whether it's a Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, we've talked about HubSpot in here, whatever CRM platform you're using, I think one of the keys today is finding something that has an open ecosystem that allows you to have multiple points of integration. What do you think?

Ed Garry: 9:47

I do. I agree with you. I mean, I think there's a couple of different things. So everything that you just said, I think is spot on, Um, but I also think that the future of CRM is industry specific. What CRM has traditionally been focused on has been the front office. And you're seeing with the purchase of Velocity, you're seeing Viva as a company that started out with offering industry specific functionality. Uh, What you're seeing is that, it's important to connect the front, the middle, and the back office, right? And so what you said complements that, because the word I said was connect. It's important to connect the front office to the middle office to the back office and what CRM had done in the past is that there's a really good job at the front office and it owned the front office. But it really didn't do a very good job of connecting the middle and the back office and you still ended up having silos of data and silos of operations, and silos of processes and disconnects where the customer could get lost or get um, the transition wasn't necessarily smooth from the front to the middle to the back office. And you're starting to see that now more and more. If you look at, you know, like if you look for example, at Velocity and from an insurance perspective, what they've done to be able to take Uh, CRM financial services cloud at Salesforce, extend that beyond to the middle office and then into the back office and really allow companies like Airbnb to become an insurance company and to disrupt, in not years, weeks, right? Take that functionality and be able to, you know, get people up and deploying using Salesforce as a platform, and then complementing that with traditional CRM. And it's, you know, it's a new way of doing business. So absolutely. I think that, you know, we didn't have the technology back then, we didn't have the connectors. You're seeing that now with, you know, many tools, MuleSoft being one. But now you can really connect these really silos of business processes together to have that end-to-end experience, which is really the 360 degree view, right?

Eric Dickmann: 11:43

For sure When you as a consultant now go into companies, do you find that most of them have some sort of a CRM strategy in place? Or there are there still a lot of companies that really don't have what we would consider a CRM strategy implemented within their company? Maybe they're still doing things off spreadsheets, or it's all data scattered across multiple systems, you know, I'm sure it depends whether you're in a small company or large company, what may exist, but what are you seeing out there in the marketplace today?

Ed Garry: 12:15

So a couple of different things. One is I think that most companies have, you know, most sizable companies have a CRM strategy, all right? The challenge I think that you're seeing out there is that strategy is 10 years old. And in the case of someone who's deploying Salesforce, for example, Salesforce is a very different tool today than it was 10 years ago. And the functionality be it industry specific functionality or Salesforce as a platform where you can tailor the functionality to your industry, didn't exist. So, what we're seeing right now with customers is that there's a lot of help that's needed and going from where they were to where they need to be with their CRM strategy. So that's one thing. I do think that there are some companies that are looking at what they've done in the past and saying, Okay, it's probably easier to start over and to take advantage of this out of the box, than sit back and reevaluate everything that, that we've done over the last 10 years and figure out what stays, what goes, what needs to be converted. What, you know, out of the box functionality now exists to take it over. So there are some cases where you're helping customers not necessarily move from old to new, but rather take the old, use it to be able to build a better new. You know, you talked about spreadsheets and I think it's funny cause were using spreadsheets a little bit more and it is also um, sub vertical specific. So sometimes you'll see spreadsheets heavier used more heavily in somewhere like the mortgage business. But you also sometimes see it product based, right? So instead of having a robust BI strategy, they'll have, you know, spreadsheets, thousands of spreadsheets going around and looking at the data. And everybody's trying to find the latest copy of the data and we can't move to BI yet. We're just not ready there as a company because our data isn't there yet. Well you know, your data's not going to be there unless you move to a BI strategy because there's nothing, there's no brighter spotlight than a BI strategy that is going to bring your data to the attention of senior management, and they're going to say this doesn't make sense. Why is this showing up here? Why is this not up-to-date? Why do I have an opportunity in here that's three years old? And then all of a sudden, you know, when senior management starts to shine that flashlight on things, miraculously things get fixed. Things, you know, become a little bit clearer. The picture in six months of the data is a lot better than where it was today. So I like to win. You know, and You hear that with companies, I understand. You know, Gosh, I don't know that we're ready. If there is that self-doubt in there. Boy, everybody's farther ahead than we are, guess what? They're not. They have problems just like you do. They might be different problems that they're trying to juggle, but everybody's, you know, everybody's trying to get through the historical data, legacy systems, and everything that they've inherited to move forward, especially in financial services. And so you're seeing you know, you're seeing a lot of change from a BI perspective, you're seeing a lot of old to new from a CRM perspective, revisiting of the strategy. I think it needs to be revisited at probably about every five to seven years. And whether that's a endorsement of where we're going and continue to go on that path, or it's a little bit of a shift or a heavy left. It's all depends past.

Eric Dickmann: 15:23

You do hear that a lot from companies, that say that, well, you know, I don't know where to start. You know, my data's not in a good place, you get the arguments about the expense of it, you get the arguments about not having time to implement. But I think what's really interesting is you know, a lot of people who listen to this podcast are small and mid-sized businesses, but the fact is whether you're a business of one or your, you know, GM, AT&T, Boeing, you know, you name the largest enterprise companies out there, there is room for CRM in your strategy, right? and There's never a bad time to start. The bad time to start is not ever starting. You, you need to get a process underway to start collecting that data because nobody's data is perfect. But you have to start at some point collecting it.

Ed Garry: 16:13

Eric, the other thing that I would say to that, and I am a firm believer in this next sentence that I'm about to say, like, this is 100% of what I believe what my passion is. Is if your CRM strategy is driven by IT and not by the business, you are not going to be successful. I'm not dogging our friends on the IT side, they're important partners, we absolutely need them. But CRM is a mindset. It is a business strategy. It is coupled with the technology you need as a company to be able to say, my marketing team, I have a marketing team. You're not going to give marketing over to technology or do some third-party company to do everything from a marketing perspective. Yeah, you might have help and you might have assistance, but the business, the marketing team in your company owns marketing and the same thing needs to happen from a CRM perspective. Your CRM team is a business professional team that is this hybrid of people that understand the business process, that understand marketing, that understand technology, that to understand sales. That can put all these different pieces together and continue to drive the strategy and have the executive presence to sit in front of senior management and say, look, your day is bad. You got to do something about it. And, push those buttons when they're not necessarily the most popular buttons to push, but that's what this role does. And you look back on December 31st at the year whatever that might be and say, you know, where did I start and where did I end? And you will see that need to move, and you do see, you know, a little bit of moving that mountain. And I know personally from my experience at the Bank of New York Mellon, we move mountains in those years, and it was because our CRM strategy was driven by the business. So again, CRM strategy must be driven by the business and partner with technology in order to be successful.

Eric Dickmann: 18:00

We talked a little bit about the fact that our previous Masterclass was on marketing automation. And I think the point that we're trying to make with CRM is that, you know, marketing automation is sort of before the sale. And what happens with CRM is it gives you the ability to understand how a customer was marketed to, what kind of offers and interactions they responded to, how they actually came to have visibility within your organization. As you start to sell to these particular customers, you can see what those interactions were, you can see maybe what offers or lead generation activity sparked this customer's potential interest in your products and services, and then through the use of email outreach and proposal generation, and in all these different sales tools, you have all of this information sort of bound together in a customer record so that finally, when they end up becoming a customer and then they need to be serviced, this entire history of all of their interactions of how they became a customer, you know what the process was of selling, you know, what contracts maybe they signed, et cetera. All of this is together in one record, and obviously once you're starting to collect that level of information, it's all consolidated in one place, then you can start to run some pretty interesting reports and dig into the analytical side of this, right? You can start to say- What's working from a marketing perspective? what offers are working the best? What kinds of promotions are working the best? How is my sales team doing? Are they reaching out to these leads off enough? Are they converting the leads at the pace that we want them to? Et cetera, et cetera. There's a wealth of data that then becomes available to you to really understand how your business is performing.

Ed Garry: 19:50

And do I have that client journey mapped from prospect to customer and beyond mapped out? What people sometimes tend to think, and I'm not, not just from a marketing perspective, but sometimes from a sales perspective, but in general is, Oh, Eric became my client because of this one source, right? You got a referral from Ed or he already had a relationship with another line of business or the sales person worked for six months, or it was that marketing campaign that we sent them out to them. And it's never one source it's number one source. It's many sources and don't be afraid to double count. There's nothing wrong to say that, look, we had to have 12 touch points with this customer, with this prospect in order to make them a customer. And it's okay to have 12 points, right? It shows that your marketing team and your sales team, and your data and your technology and CRM, and all those things are tied together. But it's really important to have that journey mapped out that you take that prospect, through the lead process, you have the ability to create the opportunity from the lead so it tracks the source, tracks the lead, it ties it to the opportunity. You can see the life cycle of the customer journey and then you can ultimately show ROI. I was working with a clinical resource organization that was doing, that was really struggling with how to show ROI on you know, on their marketing campaigns and they didn't have the customer journey mapped out. They didn't understand what happens to leads, and when those leads get distributed. How many are being followed up on, and you know, how many are created to opportunities, and what opportunities are one versus what is lost. And, you know, I did at my Quick and Reilly days, starting back to the beginning of our conversation, I did my Six Sigma training on. on lead management, and it's so important to be able to have that journey process mapped out because, you know, especially with artificial intelligence and, you know, the way that we're using data to be able to enhance and score leads and it's getting better and better. The conversion rates on lead continue to go up. I can tell you my story. And I remember I did Six Sigma and that's so detailed. Here I am 20 years later, I remember the numbers. And it was 27% all the leads that came into Quick Reilly from Fleet Bank were followed up on, 27% were followed up on. Out of all those 27%, 86% actually became accounts, okay? And of those 86%, the average balance was somewhere close to a hundred thousand dollars. It was like 86, seven or something like that, or somewhere in that space. But my point is that, if we just followed up on 50% of the leads or 90% of the leads, if we had that high of a conversion rate, the amount of assets under management, which is key in financial services, especially from a wealth management perspective would soar. So, leads and the customer journey are critically important.

Eric Dickmann: 22:37

Many times, at least from a marketing perspective, there's this tendency just to keep throwing dollars at things and doing more, when in fact there's a lot that you can do by just moving the needle a little bit in one direction or another. As you said, you know, maybe converting a higher percentage of the leads that are coming up and following them. Many organizations that I've worked with they don't really even understand how many touch points it takes before you get a hot lead or what is the average length of time that. It takes to close a deal, you know, once somebody starts working on it, you know, how many outreaches does it take from a sales person before they have engagement with that contact? And some of these things are so important to understand because you might be one or two interactions away from being successful with a whole lot more leads if you just look at what your averages are. You may need to invest more in your marketing, if it takes more interaction points, if it takes more outreach to be able to bring that customer in. And I think all of this starts to get uncovered when you start to have analytical tools and dashboards and all built on a strong foundation of data, because then you can start to see these kinds of trends.

Ed Garry: 23:49

Absolutely, strong foundation data, one of the gaps I think, and this is probably a little bit of a controversial statement because all of the CRM tools. will say. oh, we absolutely have this, but I've seen personally from a financial services perspective, is that for a variety of reasons, the synchronization that takes place between your email and calendaring platform, and your CRM tool is less than ideal. And what ends up happening is if you're trying from a marketing perspective to find out what activity is taking place with customers, oftentimes that activity is, you know, the lead is being pushed to CRM. The emails, the telephone calls, the calendar invites, all that information might be saying, will say Outlook instead of an email platform just for the sake of, but if you don't have those two things connected and the ability to do analytics on top of that, then you really can't see, not only from a marketing perspective, but from a sales perspective, what are those interactions with the customers? When are those interactions picking up so that I know that I'm getting closer to the end of my sales cycle, or when are they slowing down, and I might be at risk of losing this customer or, you know, falling off the preferred list of you know, through there shortlisting of whatever project they're looking to do? So. And here at Huron Consulting, we've partnered with an organization that helps us do that calendar synchronization for customers. And I think it's a gap in CRM, and I think that it's vital to be able to have this piece because it not only helps with that lead distribution and then with the analytics and with machine learning, but marketing automation and then lead management. It just, it's the glue that kind of sits throughout that entire process from a CRM perspective. Activity management and in synchronization of calendars and email behavior and contact information is, It's a super important part of CRM. It has to be a number one, two or three part of your CRM strategy in order to be successful.

Eric Dickmann: 25:44

You know a great example. Is, you know, all my own websites, I have Contact Us forms. You know, people are interested in learning more about products and services. And the great thing about having it built on top of a platform, like I personally use HubSpot, is that I can see all of the web pages that somebody has visited prior to filling out that contact form. And I can guarantee you that if somebody came to my website and they simply went to a contact form, chances are, they're not a very hot prospect, right? Because they haven't done any research, they haven't looked around, they haven't understood what products and services my consulting company is offering, they just went right to a contact form. Whereas, if you can see somebody was reading articles on a specific topic, was drilling into pages, you can see sort of what their path was through the website, that gives you a little bit better idea that, Oh yeah, this person really does have some interests, they're really trying to understand what kind of services I provide, and that's just a simple example, but again, it's keeping all of this content or this contact information, this outreach information, this information that you're gathering about your perspective customer all in one place, you can start to build out a theory if you will, of what is really going on in this customer's mind to see if they are potentially a hot lead or not.

Ed Garry: 27:04

Absolutely. You know, there's nothing more that I can add to that because you're absolutely right. it's the ability to have that view of what the customer's doing and, and, the balance, by the way what, what comes with this then is the training from the person, the client facing staff. I'm going to say client facing staff for sales people, or service people, or whoever ever. Who or internal sales desk that calls up the verses. I see you went to these five websites that becomes the creepy factor, right? So you got to balance how the uh, the knowledge that you have to be able to help the customer, but not be able to be like, wait a minute, what are they looking at everything that I'm doing, right. Because, today's world I think we're more sensitive to that, especially with what you've seen with some of the data breaches. Um, information being used in ways that it probably shouldn't be used. You know, so, so it's that balanced on with that from a training perspective is make sure the client facing staff in general know how to use that. way to be able to move the process forward and not scare the customer off.

Eric Dickmann: 28:01

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. If you have a sales team, for example, that is kind of doing their own thing. They're managing their leads on their own, maybe they've got their own spreadsheet or whatever. What happens if tomorrow they leave? So if all of that information isn't in a central repository, not only are you not able to track it and understand the analytics behind it, but when that sales person goes, or you have employee turnover or people get promoted, whatever it may be, you don't really have any interaction history that you can go back to. So I view another real benefit of a CRM system is being able to keep all of that data centralized. So you can easily reassign accounts if you need to, you can reassign opportunities, reassign contacts, whatever you need to do, because it's all in one place.

Ed Garry: 29:37

Yeah. So what you just said in some areas of the financial services space scares the hell out of the end user, right? Because their value that they bring to the organization is the fact that I have the relationship with Eric. Eric is my customer. I worked for ABC investments, making up the name of the company. Yeah, I work for ABC investments, but you know, Eric is my customer, and if I put all my information about Eric and do a CRM system, then what value do I bring? Well, there's a couple of different ways to answer that question. One is technology's never going to replace the relationship and you know, the bond, the trust, the experiences that you and I have together as a customer to a service provider, right? But, you know, I think that the way companies need to look at their CRM strategy is twofold. What am I doing to the desktop to inspire or encourage people that, that are concerned about getting their data over or turning their data over and putting it into a system like this. What am I going to do to make their job easier, to give them the ability to make more money, to be able to get that 360 degree view of the customer, to be able to add real value to their job, so that they're not putting in their information, the system because management wants them to, but it adds value to their job on a daily basis and they make more money. You know, I wrote a white paper,and I'm a believer of this as well, is that either the desktop, especially in financial services and somebody who is like an insurance agent or wealth manager or relationship manager thing, the desktop is a competitive advantage. If you are not investing in the desktop so that people can do their job more efficiently because they can do twice as much as what they were able to do five years ago in half the amount of time, they're gonna look to go somewhere else that can make them more money because everyone's going to give it on that, you know, great signing bonus or, you know, you know the difference between getting paid at Firm A versus Firm B compensation structure for the assets that you have under management is not going to be that different. It's how can you pull more out of that asset base and out of those assets under management, out of that customer base that you have, so you can make more money in your technology and your desktop is going to do that. It not only helps you with retention, how do I keep those top performers, right? And keep them happy at my firms that can continue to be money and can continue to invest in the desktop? And then two, how do I recruit? If I can show that ABC investments has a better desktop than 123 Investments, and our people are making more money under the same amount of assets that, you know, somebody else has, then that's something that, that you really need to look at. So the desktop is a competitive advantage.

Eric Dickmann: 32:21

And I think that's an excellent point. It's not something that you need to be scared about, it's really something that you can use as a differentiator. I know that you do a lot of work with Salesforce.com and for specific businesses, you know, that's going to be a great solution. Do you have any tips that you would say looking out at the marketplace between all the different kinds of CRM offerings as to maybe some criteria that people should use to say, you know,

Ed Garry: 32:48

It's really about your business requirements. It's about your budget and your business requirements, right? I mean, Salesforce started out as that small and medium-sized business. Remember we were, we at Siebel and this was the time that you and I were there. We were selling to you know, these huge organizations out there and we looked down on Salesforce and said well, they're only for small and medium-sized businesses. Now it happened in 2004. It happened in 2004 when Merrill Lynch bought Salesforce and replaced their Siebel System with Salesforce. Salesforce then became the enterprise choice or a choice for large enterprises, right? So in my opinion, they still have dedicated resources for small and medium sized businesses. So there's a place there for Salesforce, but it all, it all depends. It's about your budget, it's about your journey, it's about your requirements, it's about knowing what your priorities are and how having either someone internally that can help you with a methodology to come up with the answers, because, you know, you ask five people, they're going to have a different list of what the top priorities are. How do you get through an organization and have consistency across an agreement across what those top, top priorities are, so, or business requirements are. So having a methodology to uncover that, and then to use those requirements to evaluate the different tools that are out there. Most CRM solutions can do a lot of the same things that other solutions can do. Yes you know, that's a very broad, general statement. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, there are definitely differentiators between the different tools, but from a basic contact management perspective, there's a lot of choices out there. You have to find the one that aligns with where you are today, but don't forget about where you need to be tomorrow, right? Because if this is implemented right, that utopia that you're trying to get to is gonna arrive faster through an implementation of CRM. And so you need to make sure that there is a tool that can grow with your organization as your organization grows and changes as well.

Eric Dickmann: 34:49

I think that's a great point. You know, we talked at the beginning of the program here about the importance of integrations and you definitely want a solution that can grow with you. You want a solution that will integrate to the other tools that you're gonna use because the CRM system isn't going to do it all. You're going to need other tools in your stack, and you want to make sure that there's integration capabilities, and that whatever company you choose, they've got a real desire to have as open and ecosystem, I think is they can so they can grow. Yeah. This is a topic that I know both you and I are very passionate about and CRM I believe whether you're a solopreneur or you're a large enterprise company is a critical piece to have as part of your technology stack and the sooner you get it implemented and start collecting that data, the better off you'll be. So you know just to wrap things up here today, I'd love just for people to know where they can learn more about you, where they can learn more about Huron Consulting, give us the pitch.

Ed Garry: 35:45

So I'll tell you. When you said, wrap things up here, I'm kind of surprised, cause you and I could go on probably for another two hours on this particular topic and continue to have a great discussion around CRM. So, uh, But what I can say to your listeners, into your know, your customers, if this conversation inspired you, hopefully gave you some insights on your CRM strategy, you know, pick up the phone, give me a call on my over at uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, Edward Garry G A R R Y because everybody forgets that second R in my last name, but I'm over Huron Consulting. One one thing that I love about Huron Consulting is that you know, we look at the entire business process we're focused on transformational change and using technology to be able to do that versus development organizations just implementing a tool because you know, you know, you have a strategy that, you know, you've come up with necessarily on your own, that might be siloed for particular business. But anyway I lead our Salesforce and CRM practice over at Huron Consulting, and I would look forward to having this conversation with any of your customers or anyone who's listening to the audience. And feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Eric Dickmann: 36:50

That's great. And I'll make sure that we have all those links in the show notes so that people can find you. But this has been a great conversation, it's something that we're passionate about. I'm just so impressed at what has changed over the years, since we first got involved in CRM. You know, a lot of acquisitions in the space, a lot of new competitors. It's an area that clearly the marketplace has embraced. And, I can't recommend strongly enough that you get a CRM system in place to be able to support your business and grow your business. Driven by the business. Absolutely. Ed, this has been great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to uh, to talk and

Ed Garry: 37:34

Sounds great, Eric. Good to see you again. And I look forward to the next time we get an opportunity for our paths to cross. Always puts a smile.

Eric Dickmann: 37:44

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.