Integrating data from four software platforms and five business units to give a diversified company a singular view of their customers.
We built an enterprise-grade CRM to connect customers across Prime Financial Group’s complex ecosystem. With customer data visible across the group, we used Financial Services Cloud to build out the complex relationships between them, allowing Prime Financial Group to understand their customers and spot the cross-selling opportunities they were missing.
Client background
Prime Financial Group is an ASX-listed financial services business with more than $1.9 billion in funds under management. Under Prime and several sub-brands, the group’s end-to-end offering spans the breadth of financial services, including wealth management, corporate finance, accounting and business advisory, SMSF and ESG advisory.
Like many of Fluent Group’s financial services clients, Prime Financial has grown its offering through years of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. But in bringing a family of high-performing specialist firms under one roof, Prime also inherited their systems and processes, leading to an internal environment that had become increasingly complex.
“We needed the one system to rule them all: a single view of the client, and a single tool that housed that client data and allowed us to market and nurture people through the business to the different areas they needed to go.”
The search for a partner came down to fit as much as capability. The introduction came, fittingly, through a Salesforce client event, where a Fluent Group client seated nearby offered an unprompted endorsement.
“We were looking for the right balance between cost and experience, but also a partner we fit closely with in terms of profile and size of project. We don’t need to be the most important client, but we want to be somewhere in the mix. That’s better for both parties.”
Good third-party feedback, and the right price, did the rest.
The challenge
Operationally, each individual business unit was thriving in their day-to-day work. But at a group level, their systems were disconnected. Prime’s leadership could not get a real-time single view of their customers, which services they were using, or spot the opportunities to cross-sell sitting across the business.
Customers were entering the business through a single silo, with no natural client journey between that first touchpoint and where they might need to end up. When a customer said ‘this is great, but I also need this’, there was no clear process to hand them over, and no way to see what they were doing with Prime holistically.
Behind the scenes, key customer information was living across multiple, disconnected systems: Xplan, Xero Practice Manager, Lincoln Indicators, Class Super, as well as in ad hoc spreadsheets used to manage sales pipelines and processes. Within each business unit, each system was working as designed. But the lack of visibility presented challenges for the group.
“We serviced a whole raft of entities. Someone had a trust for their superannuation, and another family trust that was invested in funds. We needed something that let us map that out, so when you looked at that person you realised they were the key contact for three or four other entities, the owner of that family group.”
No single view of customers
Some of Prime’s customers worked just with accounting, while others worked with Prime across multiple services. Some customers were direct clients, while others were clients of partner accounting firms. But with no connection between systems and no way to represent these relationships, the same customers were often represented separately across every business unit they dealt with. This made it difficult for leaders to answer simple questions about their customer base: who are they, and which services are they using?
Inconsistency in sales, referrals and pipeline activity
Each business unit had its own process for managing leads, referrals, opportunities and pipeline activity. This made forecasting a major challenge for leadership. Business unit managers were spending hours each fortnight manually collating their reporting, often compiling data from several systems and spreadsheets.
No visibility for cross-sell opportunities
Prime’s disconnected customer data meant they were missing the ‘low-hanging fruit’: opportunities to offer additional services to their existing customers. Sales teams within each discipline couldn’t see who was already using other services, while marketing teams had to rely on manually compiled lists to segment or target offers to existing customers.
Prime Financial didn’t need a CRM to handle everything but the kitchen sink; they needed a solution to make their customers visible across the group.
Our solution
With so many function-specific platforms to integrate, we started by helping Prime Financial get super-specific about the role they needed their new CRM to play within the business. The goal was to use Salesforce as a single ‘source of truth’ for customer data and their relationships across the group, while creating as little disruption to each team’s day-to-day workflows as possible.
Modelling customer relationships with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud
We implemented Financial Services Cloud (FSC), an industry specific edition that helps manage the complex financial and personal relationships required for Prime Financial Group’s customers. We were able to model every variety of multi-directional relationship between customers, households, business entities, partners and supporting service providers. With customer relationships accurately reflected in Salesforce, the system can display who each customer is, and how they interact with people, businesses and services in the Prime ecosystem. FSC also gives Prime the capacity to instantly roll up and report on customer and pipeline activity at a group level, without relying on manual reporting from each business unit.
MuleSoft Anypoint integrations to connect every system
Using multiple MuleSoft integrations, we were able to connect Salesforce with Xplan, Xero Practice Manager, Lincoln Indicators, Class Super (and others) to centralise customer records in Financial Services Cloud. Within the new integrated ecosystem, frontline staff could continue using their line-of-business applications, while Salesforce formed a connective layer between them. This structure gave the leadership, sales and marketing teams a centralised view of the data relevant to their decision-making, without forcing every team to abandon the specialist tools they rely on. A key focus was developing a robust data model within Salesforce that could handle the varied data formats of Prime’s existing systems, and provide a stable base for future integrations.
Standardised, business-wide pipeline process
To answer the business’ need for a standardised, transparent sales pipeline, we designated Salesforce as the system where customer data is entered. No matter who you are in Prime Financial Group, your customers and accounts should originate in Salesforce and populate automatically to your function-specific platforms via MuleSoft integrations. To do this, we worked with Prime Financial to understand the variety of ways business units were managing their pipelines, and standardised a new, business-wide workflow that reflected what was already working best.
Flexibility to support change management. Because we know humans are human, we anticipated that all100+ users might not follow the new process perfectly from day one. So we designed the model to be flexible. If a user enters a new customer into a connected system first, the model is built to capture that customer relationship anyway, flagging the ‘orphan’ record for review. Keeping data clean across a group Prime’s size is an ongoing discipline, but the design means stray records surface for attention rather than disappearing into a silo.
The results
1. A single source of truth on every customer
Prime now has a real-time view of the customers, services and relationships across its business. Teams and leaders can understand which services a customer uses, which parts of the business they are connected to, and where opportunities may exist. This gives Prime the customer visibility it needs to operate more like the integrated financial services group it already is.
“People have suddenly realised, ‘Hang on, we work with this person in more than one part of the business. We need to bring more context to this conversation.’”
2. Leadership has clear visibility of sales, referrals and pipeline activity
By standardising top-of-funnel activity in Salesforce, Prime Financial now has a complete, consistent way to track leads and referrals across business units. Instead of relying on manually compiled updates from different teams, consistent, real-time metrics and reporting are now available whenever they’re needed. From identifying the pipeline activities that generate the highest returns, to accurately forecasting future revenue and identifying growth opportunities, Prime Financial can now ground their planning and decisions on insights drawn from accurate, consistent data.
“Reports that would have been taking, collectively across the business, hours to produce are now instantaneous. And those reports are actually connected to meaningful data; you can follow that trail.”
3. The data foundation to grow as one integrated group
With customer data connected across the group, Prime is building the habits of an integrated business: shared context in every client conversation, and, for the first time, the lead data needed to plan growth on evidence rather than instinct.
“There’s no point having lead-indicator conversations when you have no lead data. We’re now starting to have that conversation: how much activity do we need to see to get the outcomes we want?”
The platform is also the foundation for Prime’s next phase: group-wide nurture journeys through Marketing Cloud to convert the cross-sell opportunities the single client view is already surfacing, along with more consistent KYC/AML workflows, shared client documentation and group-wide relationship management. And because Prime intends to keep acquiring, the connective layer is now part of the growth strategy itself.
In short
For Prime Financial Group, the value of Salesforce was never about replacing every specialist system across the business. The opportunity lay in creating a connective layer between them, one that could make every customer, relationship and activity visible across the group. By keeping the focus narrow, we were able to design a solution that surfaced this information for people who needed a business-wide view, with minimal disruption to day-to-day workflows. With the right data model, integrations and workflows now in place, Prime Financial has a foundation that is driving growth today and empowering smarter marketing, better client experiences and future acquisitions in its next stage, as a truly integrated financial services group.
“This was exactly the point: if we buy another business, how do you make one and one equal three? You need something like Salesforce to bring that client group in and start engaging with them as Prime.”
