Cultivating a global brand

Jason Rushforth, VP of Global Financial Services at Pivotal CRM, took time out from the summit to talk customer relations in an exclusive interview with FST.

FST. First, can you give us some us some understanding of the lines of business that you're calling on right now?
JR. Absolutely. Financial services is a very broad word and it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. So when we really boil it down we try and look for vertical markets within financial services that have very niche, deep penetrating relationships. So when we look across the financial services marketplace the verticals that we cover include capital markets – and capital markets can be defined by both investment banking as well as institutional sales, research, and trading. We support investment management, both the mutual fund wholesaling aspect, as well as the institutional asset management aspect. We have private client and wealth management solutions as well as commercial banking solutions or commercial lending solutions.

And those solutions are all encapsulated within Pivotal's CRM. We recently had an acquisition of a UK based firm called Respond and respond is a complaint management feedback system. And Respond's vertical units that they focus on include retail banking as well as insurance as two of the core verticals that they go after. And, once again, when you look at that as a holistic view, that's many different aspects in the marketplace but we are trying to really fine-tune our go-to-market strategies to absolutely be the vendor of choice within all of those markets that we cover.

FST. Is there certain criteria that you look for in a prospect in order for you to be able to service their needs?
JR. We typically look at our prospect base and we work very closely with our prospects to understand what their corporate objectives are. When you look at cross CRM providers, we're not just selling a technology, we're selling a tool that really maps the business processes into a technology that allows them to go to market and effectively penetrate the markets that they go after, and how they want to strengthen the relationships around their customers, and how the internal teams collaborate together. So what we commonly look for are accounts or clients that are understanding of where they want to take their business and how they can align their business to a technology to derive success. And success is not just implementing the solution, success is looking at their balance sheet three years from now and seeing incremental growth in terms of revenues.

FST looking at Pivotal, how are you positioned in the marketplace and how do you differentiate yourself from some of the other companies in your space?
JR. Absolutely, we take a very consultative approach with our prospects where we work with them on something called business alignments where we look at what their corporate objectives are and we cascade that from a sea level all the way down through all the users of the system. This really fine-tunes the deployment model so that say, if the CEO wants to grow revenues by 30 percent but maintain the cost of the business, we have to make people 30 percent more productive in terms of generating revenues. So we will look at all facets of the business and help them come to an arrangement of how they can actually implement the solution that explicitly meets the business needs versus just saying, ‘you implement the software products and we're on time and on budget, therefore we're going to see 30 percent growth in our business’, It doesn't work that way.

FST. Looking at the big picture in terms of the global marketplace, what do you feel our institutions are doing to cultivate a global brand?
JR. Some of the things we see consistently in the marketplace is massive fragmentation in global institutions, a lack of understanding around who that client is. So, if you take a large institution and they have an institutional client in North America, many of the times people in the United Kingdom have no concept of that client even existing in North America. And they already have deep relationships and a deep understanding of who that client is and you can't share and learn that knowledge.

So, in order to build a stronger brand you have to build consistency around the globe and that consistency needs to be how you surround yourself around the client, how you go to market, there are regional nuances, of course, on how you go to market. There's different regulations but there is regulations in both – in all economies. So when you look at the go-to-market strategies in these firms it's how you service and how you sell to your clients, the consistency that you can provide as individuals representing that brand.

FST. So how does Pivotal really fit into the scope of global branding and how do companies benefit from some of your strategies and ways of helping them in those areas?
JR. From a global perspective there are numerous nuances around the world. And take something as simple as language nuances, you need to be able to support multiple language, first off. And that will allow the users to see and access information in their native tongue. You need to have multi currency capabilities so that if you have a pipeline forecast that rolls up from Euros, and Great British pounds, and U.S. dollars and it consolidates into the senior management's view of whatever currency that they're looking at at the pipeline end, but it needs to be consolidated, converted and rolled up so that they can have a complete picture of their global pipelines.

And the biggest thing is identification of cross selling and up-selling services and products that the firms offer. If you look at the marketplace today and you don't know that a relationship exists within an existing prospect with someone else in your firm then you can never use that relationship to help you cultivate a stronger relationship with your prospect in a different region of the world.

So, when you look at those aspects of it, you can leverage all this intel and information that you have to actually penetrate your markets more effectively, quicker, and with a higher degree of probability to closure because you already have existing relationships with an account.

It also allows you to provide intrinsic customer service where, whether the customer service agent is in Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, if they're in the UK, France, or the United States, or Canada – it doesn't matter where they are on the globe, everybody has common view of who that client is and therefore service levels can be maintained at an equilibrium across all regions of the globe. So from the time of day that a client calls in they're not getting a different level of service simply because they are speaking to someone in Singapore and they don't have the same access to information that somebody does in the United States.

FST. What kind of pressures are financial services institutions experiencing at this time and how Pivotal is instrumental in addressing those key business challenges.
JR. There are so many challenges in the marketplace today, I think the one thing that's taking place in the global marketplace is that, for the most part, financial services institutions are commoditized. They're providing the same product or service, maybe at different rates, to their competitors. So what differentiates institution A with institution B? It's their quality of service and commitment to the customer. And a lot of financial institutions today are looking at their most valuable asset as the customer versus the actual assets under management. And when you take an approach of understanding who that client is and understanding the unique value that that client brings to your institution you can better manage and service that client. So the more information you have about that client and you roll up and consolidate all the information about the client provided to users that can actually service or sell to that client, you have a much better capability of propagating yourself into the marketplace. I don't know if that answered the question.

FST. On a final note, is there a recent success story or case study that your company has where you've really made a difference in someone's world in terms of streamlining and optimizing the efficiency of their organization?
JR. Absolutely, and we actually have done a global implementation with Mellon Asset Management and we've done numerous videos and case studies with Mellon and the benefit to Mellon was – they're a global institution but not only are they global, they have thirteen wholly-owned subsidiaries. And each subsidiary goes to market just a little bit differently. And the biggest challenge that they were having was that management didn't have a clear picture or understanding of who their clients are and the value that the clients bring because they were spanned across so many subsidiaries that they didn't have a complete picture of the client.

So what they did was they actually took all these separate systems, they brought it together and they used the Pivotal CRM tool to manage all client relationships from a single point. Further to that they actually looked and said, ‘we can identify very quickly now, knowing their portfolio mixture, what cross sell and up sell products that we can position to this client to further penetrate or deepen the relationship with that client.’. So they got global reporting, they have a consolidated view of the client and all interactions client, they have a clear understanding of which lines of business have relationships and which don't, and then they can effectively cross sell and up sell into those accounts.