Why First Thought Financial Services chose FLG to help grow their business

I spoke to William Gibson, Director of First Thought Financial Services, who explained why they selected FLG to help them move forward with their plans to grow the business. 

Discover the role FLG plays in this financial services firm: 

• Keeps track of all inbound leads from multiple sources
• Logs and records calls with our CircleLoop integration
• All lead activity can be viewed at a glance in one single place
• Easy reporting functionality to track adviser workload and conversions.

Challenge

William set up the high street business two and a half years ago with one other person, and spent the best part of a year getting their name out and forming relationships with local estate agents. Now, they’re a team of ten and an established financial services firm providing mortgages and insurance products, with plans to bring in more advisers and expand into pensions and investments in the near future.

Like many small businesses when they start out, the team didn’t have a CRM in place and was using a combination of emails, documents and spreadsheets to manage their leads.  Advisers would assign leads to themselves and manually input information from telephone, email and purchased leads into their own spreadsheets, and schedule call backs and appointments through email and calendar invites.

Now with seven advisers, they were finding it difficult to keep track of everything and felt it was no longer sustainable to manage things manually. That’s why they began their search for a system that could help them capture enquiries, hold everything in one place, and manage leads through to conversion and beyond.

Solution

William first heard about FLG when one of their lead providers recommended a few CRM systems they felt would work well for First Thought Financial Services, one advantage being that FLG has a direct integration with the lead provider’s system. There were some big CRM names on the list, and William was surprised that all bar FLG weren’t responsive to his enquiry and failed to listen to his requirements:

“They were too concerned with showing off the bells and whistles of functionality we didn’t require and wasted a lot of time going backwards and forwards without telling me if it could actually do what we needed it to do and how much it would cost. Some of them lacked important functionality too, such as reporting, but FLG ticked all the boxes.”

 

He was impressed with how quickly we got back to him to acknowledge his enquiry and discuss FLG’s suitability for their sales process in an informative, pressure-free way. He also saw the value he could get from our Concierge plan, and subscribed to get hands-on assistance personalising the set-up and API integrations to work exactly how he wanted. Whenever he needed to tweak it, he was able to call and have his account manager change it for him immediately.