CRM and Marketing Automation technology is horizontal rather than vertical. It is not Fintech specific. However, Banking Finance Securities Insurance (BFSI) has huge need for CRM and Marketing Automation.

For example:

• Wealth Managers (aka Private Banks, Multi Family Offices) selling to High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) and Institutions such as Endowments.

• Asset Managers selling to Wealth Managers and Institutional Investors

• Pension Managers selling to individuals managing their Pensions.

The scale market is Wealth Managers selling to HNWI. There are a lot of both and the market is big because each HNWI client is worth a lot of money to a Wealth Manager.

There is a continuum between Sales and Marketing Automation depending on the deal size and length of sales cycle. Most consumer markets are marketing centric because the deal size does not justify personal selling; they will use Marketing Automation more than CRM.  In this post, I want to focus on the examples above where the deal size justifies a lot of personal selling; these are use cases that are CRM centric (with some Marketing Automation). Wealth Managers selling to HNWI certainly fits that category.

The instinctive reaction is – just install a CRM system. Of course almost all Wealth Managers have already done that. Which CRM system it is – such as Salesforce or Microsoft or Oracle or something like Nimble for smaller firms – does not matter that much. Having run a lot of sales teams I can assure you that I have never heard any sales professional claim that one or the other made a difference. Users value familiarity, which simply means that once you have one CRM installed it is highly unlikely that you will replace it, but sales people seldom say that a CRM gives them a competitive edge.

However, the world does not stand still.

The world of Salestech is changing at the same time that Fintech is changing.

The SMAC technologies (Social Mobile Analytics Cloud) change the SalesTech game. Before starting Daily Fintech, I built and managed many sales teams and used this experience to review some of the challengers in the Salestech market for ReadWrite.  At the time I was deep into writing my book – Mindshare to Marketshare – about how the Internet has changed the art and science of sales & marketing.

The SalesTech early adopters have mostly been in High Tech. That is natural. The High Tech sales teams are naturally inclined to see technology as adding value and the Salestech entrepreneurs are connected to the High Tech sales teams through earlier jobs and/or through their investors.

However, BFSI is a large % of GDP, so any horizontal tech company needs to get into BFSI to be a major player. This is when the SalesTech entrepreneurs have to wrestle with that other actor – the regulator looking over the shoulder of the sales guy. You have the same issue in other regulated markets such as Healthcare and Education.

The regulatory dimension is where two of the ventures that we have recently reviewed on Daily Fintech are interesting:

• InvestGlass (reviewed by Efi Pylarinou) seems like a CRM system with a compliance layer (or maybe a compliance system with a CRM layer).

• RecordSure (reviewed by Rick Huckstep) focuses on challenge of mis-selling. The article focusses on the niche of Pension Managers selling to individuals managing their Pensions, but the technology is clearly applicable to any market where regulators are involved in the interaction between sales person and customer.

The Salestech pioneers are focused on five challenges:

• Mobile-first user experience so that sales people can do their non-selling work efficiently in between meetings.

• Just in time coaching. These services use Predictive Analytics to help guide a sales professional to think about what to do next (and help a sales leader to coach that sales professional).

•  Social Media. How to connect with the people on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter who can influence your sale.

• More accurate forecasting. These services use Data Science (aka Big Data) to help make the art of revenue forecasting into more of a science.

• Talking points. This can be viewed as Business Intelligence (BI). It is more than competitive or marketing intelligence. The key is that data is delivered in context to what the sales person is doing.

These are the SalesTech ventures we are tracking in Fintech 1,000

Clari

Tactile

First Rain

Relate IQ

Nimble

Little Bird