As a Principal at a single-family or multifamily office, you and your team are responsible for various tasks, ranging from deal sourcing and performing due diligence on potential investments to more traditional tasks such as investment portfolio management, estate planning, asset management reporting, record keeping, and so on.
To succeed at these mandates and compete more effectively against larger entities like hedge funds, private equity, and wealth management firms, family offices need to leverage the power of their team’s relationship networks and those of other family members. 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, and increase efficiency.
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, 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.
To successfully manage complex relationships, your family office needs more than a traditional relationship management software platform that only stores contact interactions and information. It requires a CRM with the intelligence to manage deal flow and analyze data and touchpoints across your firm’s entire network to generate actionable insights to cultivate relationships while automating time-consuming tasks such as data entry and increasing operational efficiencies.
This article explains why family offices should implement a relationship intelligence CRM instead of shoehorning workflows into spreadsheets or traditional 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, deals, 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 stakeholders are involved, and more data is created, meaning your team will have to spend more time searching for crucial information across multiple disparate systems or spreadsheets. If your data set includes relationship details, account information, and other qualitative data points, the efficiency of spreadsheets begins to fall apart. At this stage, family offices need a data aggregation system that allows the firm to store data and make it accessible to the necessary users across the organization.
A relationship intelligence CRM platform like 4Degrees is a single source of truth where your team can centralize all contact, interactions, and deal information. By categorizing, tagging, and reporting on all your information, you can manage the ecosystem surrounding complex deals by having complete visibility across your firm’s relationships and transactions.
Access to your firm’s relationship information in real-time makes your team extremely efficient, saving you hundreds of hours per year and allowing teams to focus on other, more pertinent matters.
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 Management
Family offices manage sophisticated, complex transactions involving multiple stakeholders over long periods. Unfortunately, many teams still rely on inefficient workflows and legacy tools like spreadsheets and traditional CRMs to manage these complex deals. These cumbersome processes are causing firms to spend lots of time on low-value administrative tasks and, as a result, lose deals to more efficient firms.
Getting visibility into the stage of a deal at any given time should not take hours of going back and forth with colleagues and looking at endless spreadsheets and emails to determine where a deal stands and if deliverables are on track.
Relationship Intelligence CRMs have a user experience familiar to investment management professionals, enabling teams to track a deal’s progress and manage their pipeline in a single view. This functionality allows any deal team member to drill down, see the deal’s status, and foresee any possible roadblocks in real-time.
Since not all family offices follow the same processes, 4Degrees allows teams to customize their deal flow dashboards and pipeline views with the metrics that match the team’s dealmaking workflows.
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 the data to help you surface real-time insights to increase efficiencies, close more deals, and keep family members and other stakeholders abreast.
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.
