McCurrach Financial Services has been steadily building a comprehensive knowledge of the adviser market since it first deployed Salesforce CRM in 2008 – interacting with hundreds of financial advisers across the UK day in day out, and using Salesforce as part of its daily routine. As Managing Director Chris Thorndycraft explains: “Salesforce is one of the powerhouses of our business. It gives us immediate visibility to help maximise the outcomes for our business partners and helps us identify emerging trends.”

McCurrach leads the way in the provision of outsourced sales and development teams, helping major financial services providers, such as banks and insurers, position their products with thousands of financial advisers across the UK.

To match the right partners’ products to the right advisers, McCurrach’s business development teams need to know their stuff. “Before we deployed Sales Cloud, we were drowning in spreadsheets,” comments Campbell Alexander, Head of Insight and Proposition at McCurrach. “For every partner we work with, we have to exchange, segment and update a huge amount of data.”

Greater consistency and collaboration

Thanks to Sales Cloud, this data is not only in one place but it’s also updated on a regular basis. When Peter or one of his colleagues finishes a meeting, they can use Salesforce to detail their discussion and log any new information they have gathered on a live basis. This means that everybody is on the same page.

“We take a view that if it’s not on Salesforce, it’s not happened,” comments Thorndycraft. “Information is everything, and Salesforce helps ensure we can access up-to-the minute detail and makes us more efficient. It ensures that our people in the field and office who are collaborating on the same accounts are always looking at the same information. This is not just important for us but a really important benefit for our clients too.”

The account teams at McCurrach also use Sales Cloud to access their events, tasks and sales plans. “A disciplined and focused approach to activity is fundamental in the financial services sector. Sales Cloud brings additional structure to how we work with financial advisers, which means we can deliver better results,” says Thorndycraft.

By taking an integrated and standardised approach, McCurrach has increased both people productivity and agility. As Alexander confirms: “For us, Salesforce is also about speed of delivery. When a client asked us to set up a customised pilot, we did it in just three weeks. This would not have been possible without Salesforce.”

Stronger performance, higher productivity

Greater agility and adaptability were key drivers for deploying Sales Cloud. “Our partners and clients have different product sets and want different management information,” comments Charles Evans, Corporate Partnerships Director at McCurrach. “Sales Cloud – along with our in-house expertise – makes it easy for us to create bespoke views, allowing us to provide a tailored service that adds value.”

McCurrach has used Visualforce pages to modify Sales Cloud with custom objects to deliver a simarily tailored experience to its teams and partners. As a result, it can use the Sales Cloud dashboards to track performance at an individual, team, client and company level, which makes for increased productivity and effectiveness.

To simplify the collation and management of data from its partners, McCurrach uses data uploading and cleansing tools from the Salesforce AppExchange.

“Up-to-date business information and strong sales processes are core to our success. We are going through a period of considerable development as a business, and Salesforce is a key contributor to the success we’re experiencing,” concludes Thorndycraft.