The Financial Services Sales Stack

In today’s changing climate, it’s vital that Financial Services companies have the right sales tools to help them adapt, compete and grow. Pipedrive provides the core customer solution for many different companies worldwide in this industry, including Banks, Brokers, Advisers, Lenders, and Wealth and Fund Managers.

In addition to Pipedrive, Financial Services sales teams use key software tools, enabling them to improve productivity, make better decisions and automate repetitive tasks.

These tools help with the different stages of the pipeline and include email marketing, lead generation, calling, performance monitoring, project management and communications.

In this article, we’ve selected the best tools to augment Pipedrive for Financial Services companies. These all work seamlessly together. The ideal Sales Stack will be different for each customer, and the great thing about the apps presented is that they can all be trialed, so customers can easily decide whether the tools work for their business.

Kixie

Kixie is a phone solution that takes just a few minutes to install and can be used from your computer, desk phone or mobile phone.

The tool enables sales managers to keep track of their team with automatic call logging, lifetime call recordings and call coaching, as well as intuitive sales metrics through the Pipedrive integration.

Human interaction is vital to building trust in the financial services sector. In fact, according to a recent survey, 31% of people said it was most important to interact with a real person when getting investment advice.

Kixie allows you to make and receive calls in over 90 countries, but from a local number thanks to the app’s automatic local-presence dialing and SMS text messaging.

Once integrated with Pipedrive, you can sync up deals with incoming and outgoing calls, so that the customer’s and prospect’s information is readily available, helping you to build trust and an all-important connection.

Read how a Pipedrive integration with Kixie helped point-of-sale financing company Scratchpay grow and support their network of vet clinic partners in our case study.

“Being in the financial services industry, it’s especially important for us to have calls logged so we can quickly address nuanced queries about our offerings,” explains Angela Morisette from Scratchpay. “With all past call recordings logged into Pipedrive and the right place in Kixie, we are able to identify and clarify these calls for our partners and borrowers.”

Lemlist

Customers want to be treated as an individual in all of their business relationships, no matter what industry. That’s just one reason one of the biggest digital trends in financial services is personalization.

Lemlist is an email automation platform that enables you to automatically generate personalized images and videos in your cold emails. In other words, it becomes possible for you to deliver hundreds of personalized cold emails at scale with just one click, so that customers feel like the messages they receive from your company are just for them.

With Lemlist’s Pipedrive integration, you can set up workflows that use triggers and actions to automatically engage your customers and prospects. You can also create persons, deals and activities in Pipedrive based on this engagement, including email opens, clicks, and replies.

There are many financial services companies that could benefit from using Lemlist but, as an example, let’s use a stock brokerage or an insurance company.

Imagine that, instead of sending one message to everyone or doing that same cold call, you start your opening message with an email that contains a personalized image.

In that image, you put your prospect’s name or a picture next to a stock chart that’s about to go up. Or you present a specific insurance package with contextual images that are connecting life situations with the different insurance offerings.

This level of personalization can really catch the attention of leads and encourage engagement.

Klenty

Sales engagement platform Klenty can help your sales team manage their emails and follow-up to potential customers automatically.

Klenty’s sales engagement software takes over the mundane and repetitive parts of the job, freeing up your time and allowing you to focus on closing more deals.

Imagine having an assistant who can send personalized emails, track engagement metrics and follow-up with leads automatically until they are warm and ready to have a conversation with you. This is all while keeping your CRM in the loop so that when you do have an actual conversation you have the benefit of full context and history.

Once Klenty is integrated with Pipedrive, you can import and export your contacts between the two tools.

A streamlined email marketing strategy is vital in the financial services industry, and automating parts of it will help reduce the workload on your team.

With Klenty, you can automatically notify customers of updates to your services, keep them up to date with regulations that could affect their finances and send them documentation relevant to their account.

A well-integrated sales engagement tool and Pipedrive can radically scale up your sales team’s performance. The integration boosts sales team productivity by entirely automating the process of reaching out and following up while keeping Pipedrive up-to-date.

Plecto

Goals and KPIs increase motivation and employee engagement, but all too often team and company goals and KPIs are only being discussed once in a while in management meetings.

With Plecto’s real-time dashboards, you can make your data visible for all employees across teams and offices, encouraging healthy competition.

Plecto helps to visualize KPIs such as Monthly Recurring Revenue, Customer Lifetime Value, and Net Margin. By displaying KPIs on real-time dashboards, you can act to adjust your management style immediately, instead of having to wait for daily or even weekly reports.

The visualization ensures that your goals are always on top of everybody’s mind, increasing focus on what’s important for your business.

“Displaying the positive development in number of deals and activities not only illustrates the output of hard work, but also creates a sense of ownership,” says Jesper Ring Jakobsen, Business Analyst at Mybanker, one of the financial companies taking advantage of Plecto’s services.

You can read how Mybanker is using Pipedrive and Plecto to grow their sales team and their business in our case study.

Quickbooks

There are plenty of tools and integrations that financial services companies can benefit from using, including financial tools.

Quickbooks is one of the most popular and powerful financial tools available, simplifying and automating many of the tasks associated with invoicing, expenses and cash flow.

Many financial services can even integrate Quickbooks into their own services.

You can integrate Quickbooks with Pipedrive to create and track invoices right in the Pipedrive deal details view.

Asana

For financial services, activity tracking doesn’t end with sales. Customer support, HR, marketing and more need a system to make sure they’re completing their tasks and hitting their targets.

Asana is a project management software that enables your team to easily track the progress of activities, with a variety of views including kanban and Gantt.

When integrated with Pipedrive, you can set Asana tasks to be created automatically when a Pipedrive deal’s status changes.

According to a recent study by KPMG, increasing financial regulations mean that project management has become vital to all organizations. Financial services companies, in particular, need to ensure that they comply. Asana can help businesses do just that.

Slack

When you're on the front-line at a financial services agency, you need to be able to react quickly.

Slack enables customer-facing employees to instantly communicate with colleagues in other areas when they have challenging customer questions or problems.

With Slack channels, you can set up specific groups of individuals from different teams, who can then lend each other specialized support and information.

Pipedrive’s Dealbot for Slack takes this one step further, automatically keeping relevant team members informed of a deal’s progress.

Pipedrive

With CRM (customer relationship management) tool Pipedrive, you can track prospects and leads through your sales pipeline and ensure you never miss an opportunity to convert them into a customer.

Add pipeline stages that are specific to your company. For example, if you are an insurance or banking company, add a stage to notify prospects and customers of your other, relevant products.

As Deloitte said in their 2018 outlook: “Technology-enabled, front-end platforms enable banks to cross-sell fee-based services to customers more efficiently.”

For more information on how to take full advantage of all the tools in this list, read our financial services CRM series.