How an Asset Manager is Leveraging Salesforce

“With Salesforce in place, Silvercrest now has a unified view of its entire set of prospective client and outside manager relationships and an ability to grow those relationships in a scalable manner while still maintaining the high-touch experience that’s led to the firm’s success.”

ABOUT SILVERCREST ASSET MANAGEMENT GROUP

Silvercrest Asset Management Group provides customized investment solutions on behalf of families, endowments and foundations. They have differentiated themselves in the market by building strong personal relationships with clients, taking time to fully understand their clients’ long-term mission and objectives and tailoring portfolios to their specific needs.

This high-touch, client-centric approach has helped Silvercrest grow assets under management to $22 billion, with its top 50 clients averaging $250 million, and to boast a 98% client retention rate over the last decade.

In addition to traditional asset management, Silvercrest’s offerings include asset family office services, family business advisory and an Outsourced Chief Investment Office (“OCIO”) solution.

THE CHALLENGE

Silvercrest built its core business primarily through word of mouth and by leveraging the personal relationships of its ultra-high net worth portfolio managers, largely eschewing marketing along the way. As the New York-headquartered firm grows it is adding portfolio managers that spend more time on business development. It also recently launched the OCIO initiative targeting the endowment and foundation market. Further, the firm acquired two asset management firms in the last year, one located in the Midwest and one on the West Coast. These developments surfaced a need to better organize, track and analyze firmwide marketing initiatives.

In addition to stepped up marketing across the firm, there was a fear that the three business units of wealth management, proprietary investment strategies and OCIO might inadvertently step on one another’s toes as prospects of one unit can frequently be prospects of another.  

Silvercrest required a way to coordinate efforts across its marketing teams as it systematically increased its prospective client outreach. It also desired to more effectively track its sales cycles.

THE SOLUTION

Working with Union Square Consulting, Silvercrest implemented a customized Salesforce CRM platform tailored to meet the needs of each of the three business units. Now, prospective client information is collected in one central place and shared across the firm. The marketing professionals are now able to tracks every relationship entered, connect individuals to family’s, firms and institutions, and move open opportunities through the sales process in a more focused way. All this information is easily accessed on their desktops, laptops and mobile devices, anywhere and at any time.

ADDITIONAL SOLUTION FOR MANAGER SELECTION

Once this new CRM platform was in place, Silvercrest’s Manager Selection Group, which performs investment research and operational due diligence on outside managers, realized that it could harness Salesforce to track progress in its manager research. While not a sales process, the team’s methodical procedures benefit from Salesforce’s tracking of process stages and allows an easy way to organize manager contacts and meeting notes.

This reduces the risk of historical information being lost or overlooked, while simultaneously saving time by providing ready access to well organized research notes and saved communications from the managers, such as quarterly portfolio updates.

Silvercrest now has full visibility into investment research and due diligence work pipeline, and can easily access its history of calls, meetings and notes on the managers it interviews. This is a good example of Salesforce being leveraged to track and organize a non-sales business process.

THE OUTCOME

The Salesforce implementation has fostered greater collaboration across business units and made the effective integration of the two recently acquired firms more seamless. With Salesforce in place, Silvercrest now has a unified view of its entire set of prospective client and outside manager relationships and an ability to grow those relationships in a scalable manner while still maintaining the high-touch experience that’s led to the firm’s success.