John Bloomfield

Image Credit Paul Downey The British public don't exactly hold the financial services sector in high esteem these days, if they ever did. From personal experience I would say that most of the vitriol is directed at the upper echelons of the banking sector rather than at financial advisers like myself. One of the side effects of the regulatory reform that the industry has gone through is that financial adviser are now almost all members of one of the two main professional bodies. Financial advice is a constantly evolving sector where it is important that an adviser maintain his or her knowledge through continuing professional development (CPD). We have always done this but following regulatory changes we now have to have this audited and a Statement of Professional Standing (SPS) issued annually or risk de-authorisation. The most cost effective way to meet this requirement is to join a professional body and so most advisers have. And these bodies as a condition of memb

My seemingly never ending search for the perfect online CRM now finds me trying " Capsule CRM " I have already eliminated, LessAnnoyingCRM , Salesforce and Insightly and I may still consider OnePageCRM which I trialled recently. Capsule is initially more traditional in the way it does things. One quite nice unique feature is that as well as having an opportunities section you also have a 'cases' area if I were to commit to capsule I think I would find this quite useful for logging and managing service requests, keeping the 'real work' in opportunities. You also have 'tracks' as a nice option so you can set up processes and stages for how every opportunity and case can be handles the user inputting selecting which is the appropriate 'track' to set an enquiry or opportunity down. Opoortuities still have seperate milestones - tracks is more about actual activity rather than where a client or prospect is in the commitment process. Unfortuna

OnePageCRM The system is cleverly thought out. No doubt about it of all the systems I've looked at this is the most productivity organised. I'm not easily impressed, first looked at this and I was impressed immediately. I signed up for a free trial and there are a couple of fake contacts in the system to get you started and allow you a feel for the system. Instead of the traditional CRM dashboard throwing a ton of information at you, when you log in your are presented with the 'Activity Stream' page. I think this concept is based on  'Getting Things Done'  productivity system. Basically your Activity Stream shows you nothing other than a list of the next thing that needs to be done to move your sales/business process forwards and nothing more. If you have ever suffered from low motivation or just been overwhelmed with the level of work you have to do you might have discovered this as a technique to just get on with stuff. It works I can testify to tha

My experience with LessAnnoyingCRM helped me to hone in quickly on things I was looking for in the other options which has been a big time-saver. I won't go in to massive detail on each of the systems as I stopped trialling / playing with each of them as soon as I encounter a must have that they don't have. So sorry these remarks are not a full review of each system just my thoughts and how they relate to my needs. Insightly Insightly don't offer a free trial instead they steer you towards their free account which lacks a few features such as mailchimp and Google integration. Not a great start, but I opened the free account to have a little play around, one thing I noted very quickly - the 'live' system filled with fake contacts LessAnnoyingCRM offer is much more useful than a trial or account for evaluation purposes, as I am unwilling to load in client data until I am committed to a system. After keying in a handful of fake clients the first things I noti

As you may know I am currently in pursuit of a new web based CRM system to replace ACT! which I have been running on my desktop and laptop for many years. I discussed the background in my last post on this blog. When I made my last post I had narrowed my list down to; Capsule Insightly Onepage LessAnnoying and I was still investigating the possibility of Zoho and Salesforce. Salesforce is off my list at the moment ironically because i haven't liked dealing with their Salesforce! Zoho looks more impressive every time I learn something new about it but I still haven't fathomed the pricing because of their modular approach. The first system I have looked at properly was LessAnnoyingCRM and it has a lot going for it first off it really does live up to it's name. The pricing is flat 10 US Dollars per user per month, unlimited use. And when I raised questions with their support people they came back to me quickly, with simple plain English answers - and seemed ver

This is going to be a long post. Recently I asked for your help in finding a suitable CRM system via google+ (not a back office I already have one of those) Many G+’s helped me out with suggestions and ideas - which I have worked through as you helped me I feel it is only fare that I post my findings on each of the systems so that it may be an aid to other advisers in the future. Background For many years (about 9) I have used ACT! CRM which I have highly customised in to a hybrid CRM/Back Office. I have always been very happy with ACT! it is very powerful (more than I knew now I have compared it to many of the modern offerings) I use the swiftpage emarketing add on and it does a very good job for me. Why then you might ask would I want to leave them! Well basically ACT! is a locally installed program and I have to manually sync to my laptop, it’s all fairly simple to do if not a little laborious, but that is not why I want to leave. Basically things go wrong with ACT!