Technology Separates High-Growth from No-Growth Professional Services Firms

Jody Glidden — April 6, 2017

— April 6, 2017

What differentiates professional services firms that are growing from those that are not? Above anything else, it’s the adoption of technology.

Consider a just-released survey by Hinge Research Institute of more than a thousand professional services firms generating at least $ 1 million annually. The most successful, those that are growing 20% year over year, pointed to technology as the primary reason they are outperforming their competitors. Of these high-growth firms:

They were nearly three times more likely than no-growth firms to reference their use of technology as a differentiator.
They listed technology as their number one differentiator; it even outranked marketing and business-development.
Technology is becoming more important – 64% more identified use of technology as a differentiator compared to last year.

This doesn’t surprise people like Gene Marks, CPA, and columnist for publications such as Forbes and The Washington Post.

“Every partner and owner of a professional services firm is investing in technology – mobile apps, cloud apps, automation, workflows – to make themselves and their people more productive and their firms more profitable,” he explains. “Today’s technologies save time, improve data accuracy and elevate client service. Not keeping up on technology and making the wrong (or no) investment is a recipe for early demise.”

Ray Beste, a partner with Sikich, a top 100 accounting firm, concurs.

“In professional services firms (such as accounting firms), where relationships drive success, having the proper technology to capture and report on those relationships is key to stability and growth,” he points out. “Today’s technology allows for the ease of capture of those interactions so that users spend more time using the information rather than collecting the information.”

CRM automation technology optimally addresses each of the benefits that Gene and Ray reference. It works with your existing CRM system to:

Save significant time. Introhive CRM automation makes manual data entry obsolete. It automatically recognizes activities, from both internal and external sources, that need to be included in the CRM system and automatically logs them in. This frees 5.5 hours per week for every one of your team members, which adds up to more than a month of work hours annually per person. What would your team do with an extra month of work time?
Make data easy to use and act on. You don’t even need log into the CRM system or navigate through any system to get it. Instead, customer details are delivered to you wherever you’re at – on your laptop, mobile device, or tablet. Plus, it’s packaged in the format you prefer, such as Word or Excel, so you can effortlessly see client issues and opportunities. This includes:
- Transactional data
- Social contacts
- Activities
- Behavioral Information and more
Improves data accuracy. Because CRM automation eliminates the need for manual data entry, the human error and gaps that come with that are eliminated, too. You can rest assured the information CRM automation provides is complete, up-to-the-second, and accurate.
Captures and reports on relationships. With Introhive, all your company’s important contacts are automatically synced and recorded to your CRM, so staying on top of relationship-driven business is simple.
Elevates client service. By instantly transforming data into actionable insights, CRM automation can easily provide client-facing personnel the details they need to engage clients more effectively by proactively addressing their needs. In fact, it can provide unexpected insights that point to new opportunities; to achieve this without CRM automation would be extremely challenging, if not impossible.

If you want your firm to be among the fastest growing, you owe it to yourself to set aside 15 to 20 minutes for a demo that will outline how CRM automation works. There’s no sales pitches (we really don’t need one) but we will gladly answer any questions and show you how Introhive can be customized to your specific needs.

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