As a Principal at a single or multifamily office, you and your team are responsible for a variety of tasks, from deal sourcing and conducting due diligence on potential investments to more traditional responsibilities such as managing investment portfolios, planning estates, and reporting on asset management, among others.
Effective family office management requires coordination across all of these functions while ensuring that each investment decision aligns with the family’s long-term financial goals.
Family offices need to leverage the power of their team's relationship networks and those of other family members to succeed at these mandates and compete more effectively against larger entities like hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, and wealth management firms.
But how can family offices keep track of and build stronger relationships with relationship information in disparate systems such as an individual’s email inbox, LinkedIn account, calendar apps, Excel spreadsheets, generic CRMs, and even people’s heads?
The answer is to have a Relationship Intelligence CRM such as 4Degrees, which has been explicitly designed to cater to the needs of family offices.
What is a Family Office CRM?
High-performing family offices use relationship intelligence CRMs to leverage and amplify the power of the team’s relationship networks and remove the friction of managing relationships.
A family office relationship intelligence CRM is vital to the family office software stack. It empowers firms to solve data integration pain points, become more organized, find proprietary investment opportunities, increase efficiency, and maximize family wealth.
Next-generation relationship intelligence CRM platforms are cloud-based SaaS software solutions explicitly created for relationship-driven teams' unique needs.
Traditional relationship management solutions such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot, etc., are transactional tools designed to assist sales professionals in moving leads down a conventional sales funnel.
On the other hand, navigating non-linear deals and managing long-term relationships with attorneys, advisors, fund managers, custodians, real estate agents, etc., differs from ushering a prospect down a sales funnel.
Unfortunately, some family offices try to shoehorn their unique processes into a traditional CRM tool- resulting in wasted resources and no measurable improvements in firm performance.
Your family office requires more than traditional relationship management software with sales-focused CRM functionalities to manage complex relationships successfully. It needs a CRM equipped with the intelligence to manage deal flow and analyze data and touchpoints across your firm’s entire network, generating actionable insights to cultivate relationships while automating time-consuming tasks like data entry and enhancing operational efficiencies.
This article explains why family offices should implement a customizable relationship intelligence CRM instead of shoehorning workflows into spreadsheets or sales focused CRM solutions not designed for specific family office use cases.
Organize Contact Information and Interactions
Teams at family offices deal with large volumes of communications and qualitative and quantitative data, including contact interactions, portfolio data, investment information, asset allocations, etc. Relying on spreadsheets, notes, email inboxes, or traditional CRMs to document and keep track of who spoke with whom, what was said, etc., is a recipe for disaster that will drag down your firm’s performance and overall efficiency.
As the firm expands and deals grow in complexity, more As the firm expands and deals become more complex, more stakeholders are involved, and more data is generated, which means your team will need to spend additional time searching for vital information across various systems. At this point, family offices require a data aggregation system that enables the firm to store data and makes it accessible to users throughout the organization.
A relationship intelligence CRM platform like 4Degrees serves as a single source of truth where your team can centralize all contact, interaction, and deal information. By categorizing, tagging, and reporting on this data, you can manage the ecosystem surrounding complex deals with complete visibility into your firm’s relationships and transactions.
Eliminate Manual Data Entry and Increase Efficiency
Manually logging contact or company information into a traditional CRM or spreadsheet is not a high-value activity.
It is incredibly time-consuming- costing teams hundreds of hours per year. Additionally, there is always the risk that not all data finds its way into the system due to human error. Time spent manually entering data is time spent away from other higher-value tasks like building relationships and moving deals forward.
Not having the latest information in your CRM means your team cannot access the most up-to-date stakeholder interactions or the status of a deal, which can negatively affect your decision-making and the transaction’s outcome, especially with private investments and other alternative asset classes.
Managing investments relies on access to accurate information, and nothing is worse than not being able to trust the accuracy of your data.
A relationship intelligence CRM eliminates manual data entry by relying on automation to sync your email and calendar data to create and auto-populate contact and company profiles and enrich them with data from third-party data providers to provide additional insight.
Real-time access to up-to-date information allows your deal team to have visibility into the entire deal lifecycle, contact information, shared notes, etc. This wealth of information streamlines workflows and family office operations, ensuring your team can move fast without spending time looking for data across platforms.
Contrast this simple and seamless process with relying on conversations with colleagues and endless emails for knowledge sharing and deal status updates.
Pipeline and Portfolio Management
Family offices manage sophisticated, complex transactions involving multiple stakeholders over long periods. Unfortunately, many teams still rely on inefficient workflows and legacy tools to manage these complex deals. These cumbersome processes cause firms to spend countless hours on low-value administrative tasks and, as a result, lose deals to more efficient competitors.
With their unique structure and long-term approach to wealth management, family offices face distinct challenges that set them apart from traditional investment firms. Their focus on personalized service, legacy planning, and multi-generational wealth preservation demands tools that not only centralize information but also accommodate bespoke processes, ensuring the precision management of every stakeholder’s relationship.
Identifying a deal's stage at any given time should not require hours of back-and-forth communications or scouring endless spreadsheets and emails to determine its status or whether deliverables are on track.
Relationship Intelligence CRMs offer a user experience familiar to investment management professionals, enabling teams to track a deal’s progress and manage their pipeline in a single view, allowing any deal team member to drill down, review the deal’s status, and foresee any potential roadblocks in real-time. Since not all family offices follow the same processes, platforms like 4Degrees and other service providers let teams customize their deal flow dashboards and pipeline views with the metrics that match their specific dealmaking workflows.
In addition to managing deal flow, relationship intelligence CRMs are invaluable for portfolio management.
Family offices are tasked with overseeing diverse investments—from private equity and real estate to alternative assets—which requires constant monitoring and analysis. By consolidating investment performance data, contact interactions, and strategic communications into a single, accessible platform, 4Degrees empowers family offices to make data-driven decisions quickly.
Automated data aggregation and real-time updates mean that teams can keep an accurate pulse on each investment, streamline reporting processes, and allocate resources more effectively, ultimately maximizing family wealth.
Streamlined Reporting
As the adage goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This principle also applies to family offices that want to streamline operations by following a data-driven approach.
If you do not know what is causing bottlenecks in your closing process, where your best deals are coming from, or what percentage of introductions become deals, you will not have the data to make informed decisions and run an efficient family office.
To generate actionable reports that help you uncover opportunities and measure progress, spreadsheets, and traditional CRMs require hours of work or cannot generate the reports you need.
Access to the correct data is imperative for family offices where Principals and their teams need to “do more with less” while providing family members with investment data on how different investments and asset classes are performing.
At 4Degrees, we understand the unique reporting needs of family offices and empower your team with data to help you surface real-time insights, increase efficiencies, close more deals, and keep family members and other stakeholders informed.
Take Your Family Office to The Next Level
As a multi-family or single-family office, you are responsible for the assets and legacies of high-net-worth families. Tracking relationships, assets, and deals can be highly complex, even if you only look after a single family. To successfully stay on top of connections and navigate intricate non-linear deals, you need something more powerful than a spreadsheet or generic transactional CRM system that relies on manual data entry.
Your family office needs the right tools and processes to compete with larger financial services firms and create value in today’s complex deal-making environment. 4Degrees can optimize and accelerate your deal pipeline and provide your team with accurate real-time information across their collective networks, allowing you to make the best data-driven decisions.
Family offices looking for a CRM choose 4Degrees over transactional CRMs for its relationship intelligence capabilities, APIs, and integrations with other components of a family office’s tech stacks. Additionally, the 4Degrees team understands the unique use cases of a family office and is committed to providing the highest levels of service, from onboarding to periodic training and check-in sessions with your team.
Click here to schedule a personalized demo to learn how 4Degrees and relationship intelligence can help your family office optimize your processes and find and close more deals by leveraging the power of your team’s relationship networks.
Now is the time to transform the way you manage your legacy. Experience firsthand how 4Degrees can streamline complex relationships, automate tedious data entry, and provide a unified view of your portfolio that empowers you to outperform the competition. Request a personalized demo today and unlock the full potential of your family office’s network—because your legacy deserves nothing less than the best.
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