Some specific CRM options for accounting firms of any size.

In an earlier article I focused on why and how an accounting firm would use a CRM tool.

In this article I talk about some options that firms have available.

You might recall I said a CRM system provides a suite of tools designed to streamline the operations of a business in several ways, improving customer service, enhancing client retention, and ultimately driving growth. And although it is called a customer or client relationship management system there are actually three groups of people that a CRM is in my view designed to manage:

1. Existing clients
2. Potential clients
3. Contacts, which can include referrers (everybody you know not in 1 or 2 above)

I also talked about 8 things you might expect from a well implemented CRM:

1. Centralized Client Data:
2. Relationship Management
3. Cross-Selling and Upselling
4. Task Automation
5. Integration with Other Systems
6. Client Segmentation
7. Performance Tracking
8. Marketing Automation

Most firms use a practice management system which will have some, but usually pretty limited, CRM functionality. The use of custom fields often allows tracking of some key things and for some firms this might be enough. For many firms however I believe more functionality is valuable.

To give you some idea of how many options there are, when I typed “CRM” in the search bar in the Xero marketplace it came up with 114 apps! (Although I don’t believe a lot of them are really CRMs.)

Some confusion can arise when talking about CRMs because I think you could say that there are products described as email marketing software and marketing automation software that are really a part of the CRM category. For example Mail Chimp is probably the best know email marketing / newsletter sending software for small firms.

One way to learn about CRMs is to look at the websites of some of the vendors. Look at the functionality they offer and read any articles they may have – keeping in mind they will be written to make their product look good. This will however educate you on what’s possible with these systems and I hope help you get clearer on your goals in having a system in place.

Here are some options to have a look at. It’s up to you to do your homework but I reckon this is a really good cross section of what is available on the market. And if you are like me it often doesn’t take long to know whether you like a piece of software just by looking at some of the basic promotional videos.