A sound investment

Selecting a CRM system is a major IT strategy decision for most companies, and as such, it can be pressure-filled. Finding the right system to fit the company’s needs, timeline, and budget can be difficult. And sometimes, even when a company thinks it has found the right solution, outside factors intervene that prevent full project success.

This was the situation Calamos Investments found itself in 2000 when, just eight months after Calamos purchased the Janna customer relationship management (CRM) system—before it had even implemented the system—Janna was acquired by Siebel. Calamos opted to go ahead with its implementation, launching Janna in April of 2001. In 2003, Siebel announced that Janna would be “sunset,” or gradually retired, and in 2005, it ended all support for the product.

The team at Calamos Investments recognized that an unsupported product could not serve its needs for long. However, they saw a switch to Siebel as costly, time consuming, and too complex in terms of the company’s customization needs. Wary of the stability of smaller vendors after their experience with Janna, the IT team began extensively piloting an open-source solution, feeling that building out their own features on an open-source platform was the only way to get the custom, flexible features the company required.

It was then that Carolyn Stuart, Calamos Investments’ Vice President of IT and Head of Business Analysis, first heard about Pivotal CRM for Financial Services. Learning of its industry-tailored features, Stuart decided to give CRM vendors another chance, embarking with her team on a full-scale RFP-based evaluation process to make sure all options were explored. This time, though, the company had very stringent expectations—there had to be little to no chance of the vendor being acquired, and Calamos Investments had to be certain the project would come in on time and on budget, or there was a strong possibility that the project would be called off altogether.

Close Alignment to the Company’s Needs

After closely evaluating eight vendors, the Calamos Investments team selected Pivotal CRM for Financial Services. Pivotal CRM came out ahead because of its technology fit (the company operates a Microsoft .NET environment), the financial stability of the company, and its close out-of-the-box alignment to the Calamos Investments’ needs.

A turning point in the evaluation process occurred when Stuart attended a Pivotal Financial Services User Group meeting in New York in September 2005. As she watched a succession of financial services companies present their Pivotal CRM success stories, Stuart noted vast differences between the ways in which each company was using the system. This was real-world evidence that Pivotal CRM was what it claimed to be: a robust system that could be easily customized to meet individual companies’ distinct business requirements.

“At that point in time I knew that this was the right CRM solution for us,” Stuart said. “I knew that with Pivotal CRM, we were going to be able to be customized and flexible, and that they were going to continue to bring the financial services products forward and enhance them in the future.”

“We evaluated a wide variety of CRM alternatives, including open source and on-demand,” said Stuart. “In the end, we chose Pivotal CRM because of its focus in the financial services industry and its reputation for success earned with many of our peer companies. Through this extensive review process, we determined that the other CRM solutions could not effectively support our financial services industry requirements, nor could they be easily tailored to match our unique business practices.”

And Calamos Investments’ needs were indeed unique. Ranked by Crain’s in 2005 as the second-fastest-growing firm in the Chicago area based on compound annual growth rate, Calamos Investments provides professional money management services to major corporations, public and private institutions, pension funds, insurance companies, and individuals and is an investment adviser to open-end and closed-end funds. This diversity of offerings has demanding implications for the company’s CRM system: it needs to be able to support a wide range of products and clients with different relationship dynamics—from high-net-worth individuals to institutional investors to financial advisors themselves. With Calamos’ multiple channels of distribution, the CRM system needed to be able to manage both company- and client-centric contacts, and it needed to be able to track activities and opportunities related to a contact separately to avoid conflicts between the different channels, whose advisors work both independently and collaboratively, depending on the business arrangement. Furthermore, the system had to be able to integrate data from multiple systems, including the company’s portfolio accounting system, mutual fund database, and fulfillment system. Pivotal CRM met all of these needs.

Rapid Implementation and High User Adoption

Calamos Investments also required a system that could be implemented quickly. The company began its Pivotal CRM implementation project in April of 2006, and despite complex customization requirements and multiple integration points, the company was able to complete the implementation rapidly and launch in August 2006—with no hitches.

“Pivotal CRM is now a core system for us that has been quickly tailored to model the business practices that make us unique in the industry,” said Stuart. “We have seen tremendous user adoption and are very pleased with the results to date.”

The quick uptake from users is attributable to Pivotal CRM’s intuitive, user-friendly interface. Effective user training has also contributed to user adoption. Calamos started with training from Pivotal CRM trainers, and the company’s in-house trainer has continued the process.

“Our trainer, who has worked on a lot of different system implementations, told me that it’s been the easiest implementation and the easiest thing to train and support because of the fact that people truly do love the system and love the software,” said Stuart. “He told me he’d never before trained people and had them say, ‘This is fabulous. This is fantastic. I just love this system.’”

A Single System with a Multitude of Uses

Calamos Investments has thus far rolled out the Pivotal CRM system to more than 150 internal users as well as 20 remote users who access the system via laptop and BlackBerry. The variety of users working with the CRM solution points to its value and versatility; users include employees across executive management, wholesalers, client relationship management, institutional services, the private client group, client services, and marketing. Calamos Investments was able to easily set up Pivotal CRM with custom “SmartPortal” interfaces with specialized data and configurations for its different user groups, increasing user-friendliness by showing only the data and features that are most relevant to their role.

Calamos Investments’ 199 users don’t just represent a wide cross-section of the company’s departments and business lines; they also represent the diverse utility of the Pivotal CRM system. All of the users input contact information to the system on a daily basis, but beyond that, their uses of the system branch out in a number of different directions:

• The company’s wholesalers uses Pivotal CRM to inform, schedule, and record their conversations with financial advisors at multiple firms.
• The private-client group uses Pivotal CRM to provide service to their high-net-worth clients and easily look up their clients’ portfolios, interests, and past interactions with the firm.
• The institutional services group uses Pivotal CRM to track and manage their contacts, activities, opportunities, and the RFP process.
• The client relationship management team uses Pivotal CRM to manage their interactions with clients and firms, as well as strategic partners within these firms.
• The marketing group uses Pivotal CRM for campaign management.
• The client services team uses the system to quickly access and update client information in response to incoming calls, enabling them to log the call and to answer a wide variety of inquiries knowledgeably.

With Pivotal CRM, tools and data models tailored to each of these lines of business and user groups are all available through a single, centrally administered CRM infrastructure.

Thanks to the integration to the company’s portfolio accounting system, users can check on the size or value of clients’ assets or the value of assets under management that a particular partner or advisor has brought in. They can also see specifically, for example, the mutual fund contributions and redemptions that have been brought in by a partner or advisor. They can use the fulfillment center to follow up on client or partner requests and automatically send out any type of marketing or follow-up materials using Pivotal CRM. Partners and employees can log in to access information through the company website; they are authenticated against the Pivotal CRM system to ensure that they have authorized access.

At the company’s upper levels, the executive management team is using Pivotal CRM to roll up information about all of these disparate activities and get a company-wide view of opportunities, sales force activities, and what is happening across the firm’s diverse lines of business.

A 360-Degree View of Every Individual

The ability to collaborate effectively when working as teams has also been a major benefit of using Pivotal CRM for Calamos Investments. For example, using Pivotal CRM, the institutional services group can see at all times where the company stands in the RFP process, what types of other people have to get involved, and what each person has to do next. They use the system to assign each other tasks, so that everyone is aware of their responsibilities.

“Among the greatest benefits that we have received from Pivotal CRM is that everyone truly has all the information they need at their fingertips; they’ve got full knowledge,” said Stuart. “They don’t have to look at multiple systems. They know when they talked to this person last, what activities they’ve had going on with them, if they owe them anything, what they talked about in the past, any type of business that they potentially have going, and what’s in the pipeline. They also understand the relationship structure: they know whether the person works alone or as part of the team, team members, and what activities have taken place with the individual or the team. So literally they’ve got a 360-degree view of every individual, which is tremendously beneficial. They’re never walking into any situation without the knowledge they need. It’s made them smarter, and it’s allowed them to talk to people more intelligently, knowing more about what their needs are.”

Pivotal CRM’s reporting functionality has also been very beneficial to Calamos Investments. “Reporting has been so easy and flexible,” said Stuart. “On one occasion a salesperson needed to do a custom report that wasn’t supported by the system. Within a couple of hours, a programmer had added some logic and built it in. They couldn’t believe that it was that easy for a developer to provide such a benefit so quickly.”

A True Understanding of the Industry

Ease of customization wasn’t the only facet of Pivotal CRM reporting that impressed Stuart. “One of the things that amazes me about Pivotal CRM is the ability to take the information at, for example, a financial advisor level and roll it up to the branch, regional and even the firm level. It shows that the Pivotal CRM team really understands how, for example, a wirehouse is structured,” she said. “It means you can provide executive management with summary information that lets them really understand where they’re deriving business, where there are gains, and where there is the potential for up-selling and cross-selling, so that they can really drive the business.”

In the end, it’s that deep understanding of the financial services industry and its processes that truly set Pivotal CRM and its team apart and has enabled Calamos Investments to derive real value. “When we looked at other CRM packages on the market, none of them were truly tailored to financial services the way Pivotal CRM is,” said Stuart. “If you’re on the institutional side, Pivotal CRM has a tailored solution. If you’re on the retail side, they have another tailored solution. And the specialized tools and data models for all of these different lines of business are provided on a single CRM platform with centralized administration and reporting.

“With some vendors, you spend a lot of time teaching them your business,” Stuart concludes. “With Pivotal CRM, it’s clear they already know it.”