Prior to coming to Miami I worked at a German private bank (100% owned by 3 private families) called Bankhaus Warburg & CO based in Hamburg, Northern Germany. It is fair to say that this bank was not exactly cutting edge in technology but tried to catch up with its Peers in the German private banking community.
My job consisted in managing a small team of sales people/relationship managers who were supposed to work on existing institutional clients as well as on new relationships (cold calling) and to offer the entire product range of Warburg & CO. At this time Warburg had several subsidiaries in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Zurich and Luxemburg each of them using separate sales entities to sell specific product ranges. Prior to my arrival there was no central entity overseeing all institutional clients that were defined as local corporate pension funds, intra-professional pension funds, foundations, insurance groups, churches etc.
Not only did I cover several client segments but the goal was to distribute a variety of investment solutions that were produced in separate entities - sometimes subsidiaries - who most of the time did not communicate with each other on a regular basis.
My first goal was to identify existing relationships within the group and to enter them into a basic CRM system that the firm had bought beforehand. In a second step those relationships needed to be classified according to the products they had invested in or for which they had contacted the bank in the past. The same applied for new prospects that the team needed to assess in terms of product interest and potential profitability on a short/medium term basis.
The existing database only offered a "one dimension approach" which was to store the contact information, notes about meetings and define the product area that was concerned. However the database could not communicate with the 2 other CRM systems used in the various subsidiaries that had already set up similar databases for their employed sales force. If the centralized approach was meant to be successful, a central, integrated IT solution was necessary. Otherwise most of the information gathered by the new team would be stored in a space that nobody could see and the follow up on product requests, interests etc was limited to a small number of people.
It took a while to convince the private partners of the bank to fund a new technology and to overcome the existing organizational behavior patterns and "old fashioned" client management processes that were implemented on a single product entity basis.
The decision was made by the senior management team consisting of 6 partners. IT was not involved at that stage and the partners only decided, that an integrated "IT tool" had to be found and implemented in order to enhance sales activities in the institutional department. Costs should not exceed 15.000 EUR. The decision making process was straight forward once the arguments were made as this is mostly the case in privately owned firms. The implementation took very long though and reflected the fact that existing sales people were very hesitant to give up their individual approach.
IT got involved and developed an in-house Access based application that was added to the existing CRM database and was meant to help establishing a link between a client visit (performed by the central sales department employee - i.e. myself) and the various entities among the Warburg Group that were involved with this new client. The new application was used for mainly optimizing the follow up of client meetings and thus speeding up the sales process. In a second time (that I did not participate in) there was a project for using hand-held devices that the sales person could use during a meeting and entering information for follow up / product requests etc on time. The information would be synchronized with the 3 existing databases once the sales person got back into the office and linked the device to the main computer. Wireless data transfer capability was not provided for that project (in 2006). Once the meeting was over all product areas that were involved in follow ups were informed in almost real time and could start working on that relationship. Which made the centralized client approach much easier to implement and also more efficient (again helping to establish a reputation within the organization).
Since I left the firm in 2006, I did not experience the implementation of the new devices and its impact on the profitability of the company. The goal initially was to harmonize and optimize sales processes and then to offer a "single face" approach to institutional clients. The expectation was that this approach would generate more revenues because of increased client satisfaction and less overlap in marketing activities by several product entities. According to some rumors I have heard in the meantime the system has technically been implemented but is not fully used by all sales people of the organization and therefore does not produce the cost reduction and revenue increase we had predicted in the planning process.
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