By someone who’s untangled a mangled household (or two).
When you’re selling standard products or services, Salesforce handles your client relationships without breaking a sweat: one account to many contacts.
Neat and tidy.
But if you’re in financial services, you know the relationships you deal with are neither of those things.
Add trusts, spouses, holding companies, beneficiaries, advisers and two people who own five entities together but file taxes separately, and watch Salesforce’s out-of-the-box relationship model implode.
That’s why Salesforce built the Relationship Groups feature for Financial Services Cloud (FSC): customisable containers that represent any complex account-to-account, account-to-contact and contact-to-contact relationship accurately within your CRM.
Relationship Groups are a golden opportunity for financial services
The beauty of Relationship Groups is that they don’t make complexity go away. They make it visible and manageable. With Relationship Groups up and running, you can:
- Roll up assets to the right place once, for an instant, error-free view of your FUM
- Understand a client’s position as well as someone who’s worked with them for years
- See who’s connected, who owns what and who does what for whom, without needing to ask
- Target clients who already trust you with expanded services
Set up properly, Relationship Groups become one of the most useful tools you have for improving day-to-day efficiency, growing your client base and making more money managing other people’s money.
This sounds promising. What’s the catch?
As Salesforce implementation experts and Relationship Group groupies, there’s one thing we can’t stress enough before you flip the ‘on’ switch.
Relationship Groups are ready. But your data probably isn’t.
We’ll hold your hand while we tell you this: getting the most out of Relationship Groups is going to take some work. There will be friction up front, and a teething period as relationships migrate from human minds into a digital system. Don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.
But at Fluent Group, we believe forewarned is forearmed.
So here’s our take on what the rest won’t tell you about the three trickiest bits of the Relationship Groups implementation process. Not to scare you off, but to prepare you to sail through the choppy ‘go live’ breakwater and into the calmer water beyond.
Tricky bit #1: Dragging relationships out of the hive mind
The first friction point most firms hit is that they’ve never really documented their existing relationship structures.
- Advisers hold half the model in their heads.
- Accountants have their own version in a spreadsheet.
- Wealth and tax each have slightly different interpretations of the same group.
Even so, most firms come to us assuming they’re all on the same page internally. Which makes sense: they’ve operated this way for years with no issues that they know about. But once we start turning those assumptions into a consistent data model, the cracks show.
And that’s where a good implementation partner comes in. The first thing we do is sit down and map how a household or a group actually operates across the whole organisation.
This part is critical for clarifying the assumptions you’ve never needed to define before, like:
- What is a trustee, and how does it relate back to other groups?
- Which relationships matter legally? Which matter commercially?
- When do we create inverse relationships, and when do we avoid them?
- Who needs visibility of which roles?
The process takes time and dedication. There will be some tricky discussions about the finer points of trusts. You’ll probably start wondering why Salesforce didn’t just define all these relationships ahead of time.
Which is when we’ll order you a coffee and reassure you there’s a method to the DIY (define-it-yourself) madness.
Relationships are open for a reason
Salesforce leaves relationships open because there are no standard definitions. Every firm has its own slightly different internal logic. Every jurisdiction has its own legal framework. For your new CRM to give you efficiency, not errors, it has to reflect the relationship definitions you use with precision.
So we’ll sweat the details together to reach clarity. With the decisions made, even the most complex and unique relationships become clear and consistent, ready to represent in Salesforce.
Tricky bit #2: Facing the primary relationship problem
The next challenge is setting primary relationships for every client. It’s one small field, but it can make or break your CRM project. Without enforced primary relationships, you’ll end up with the same person appearing in multiple groups in conflicting ways. That double-counts assets and inflates your FUM. Which isn’t good for business (or the ATO).
So be warned: when you first open your new Financial Services Cloud dashboard, it might look like you’ve grown overnight. Don’t get too excited. This isn’t magic. It’s the system showing how inconsistently people were grouped in the past.
We have ways of making primary relationships work
To bring things back to reality, a good implementation partner will configure Salesforce so records can’t sit in impossible states. If someone tries to save a client with three different primary households, the system pushes back. Computer says no.
And yes, users will be uncomfortable the first time they hit a validation wall. And the second. And the third. But a little frustration up front beats discovering your FUM is inflated and having to dig through your database for the one person who was counted five times.
Our advice? When Financial Services Cloud goes live, order your team a round of coffees and remind them: getting primary relationships right is the difference between a CRM that makes their life easier and one that quietly adds chaos.
Tricky bit #3: Accepting the ugly truth (at first)
The moment we load data into Financial Services Cloud is the moment firms get their first real look at the picture they hold of their customers. And it’s never as neat as they imagined. Addresses don’t match. Entities are duplicated. Households exist in multiple unrelated variations, one for each area of your practice.
This is the part where some clients panic: my shiny new Financial Services Cloud implementation is “broken”. We’ve seen some abandon their projects here, frustrated that an investment meant to make things easier has made things feel messy as hell.
Don’t panic, the mess is just the truth
At this point we’ll order in more coffee and reassure you: your shiny new Financial Services Cloud is working as intended. The issues you’re seeing weren’t created by FSC. They were there all along, hidden between disjointed systems and in people’s heads.
For larger clients, we’ll often bring in data partners to clean and reconcile the data before it hits FSC. But even then, we always stress that data migration is never a one-off event.
Go-live isn’t the end. Go-live is when the system starts enforcing the rules we chose. From that point on, your business slowly aligns to the new data model.
We do understand that being prompted to update data every time you open a client record adds friction at first. So a good partner will configure data entry to be as intuitive as possible, building in simple prompts that ask users to enter what they know:
“this person is the trustee”, “this company owns that trust”, “these two people are spouses”
and let Salesforce do the heavy lifting to create the underlying structures, inverse relationships and group memberships. Where patterns are predictable, we can automate part of the process too.
What happens when you get Relationship Groups right?
There’s no magic button for Relationship Groups (we wish there was). But with watertight modelling, consistent use and patience, your data repairs and refines itself over time, each improvement building a richer, clearer view of your clients.
A full 360-degree view, where everyone in the firm shares the same understanding as the adviser who’s held this client for decades. Not to replace her knowledge, but to make it available to everyone.
Forewarned is forearmed: are you ready for FSC?
If your financial services firm is ready to define your relationships, align your assumptions and confront the hidden mess in your data, we’re ready to help.
It’ll be hard work. We’ll all drink a lot of coffee. But doing it right gives you a CRM that holds all your complexity effortlessly, so you can offer more consistent service, make more accurate forecasts and spot new growth opportunities in your current portfolio.
Relationship Groups are ready for you. And now you’ve got realistic expectations around the tricky bits, we can’t wait to dig in and help your firm reap the benefits.
