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Over the years, we've collaborated with numerous financial advisors to establish their software stack. While there are "financial planning" built-for CRMs that try to "do everything" the feedback we've received is that they are quite outdated and clunky to use, which is why modern financial planners are turning to other solutions.
The financial advisors we speak to often fit into the categories below:
What you won't find in this guide are general recommendations that will leave you more overwhelmed than when you started reading it.
This guide is prescriptive and offers specific recommendations to help you make essential business software decisions more quickly. The software we recommend has been thoroughly vetted against competitors, and the tools we recommend are used by the financial advisors that are our integration customers.
You've probably considered many of the financial advisor CRM options under the sun — from Redtail (recommended by many in the financial planning space) to Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (perhaps the hefty price of needing to pay six-figures to a consultant for a proper implementation stopped you). But which is the right CRM for you?
Instead of the CRM software tailor-made for financial planners, we recommend:
Since we tend to only build integrations for customers using Google Workspace as the foundation of their business, the financial advisors we work with are exclusively using Copper.
They chose Copper as their CRM software as it has a more elegant user interface and is super easy to use compared to the other financial advisor CRM systems out there like Redtail, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and Wealthbox. The same can be said about Pipedrive. Copper and Pipedrive are hands down the best CRM tools for financial advisors.
Copper as a CRM system stands out because of its powerful Google Workspace integration (it will retroactively sync your emails with each customer even up to a year prior to using Copper). So if you haven't been using a financial advisor CRM software yet and are regretting it, the good news is that once you sign up for Copper, it will automatically retroactively sync you and your teams emails into the CRM from 1 year prior.
Another reason why we think Copper is one of the best CRMs is their API. Their API allows for custom integrations to be built with other third-party tools that we'll mention in this guide.
Start a 14-day free trial of Copper.
Start a 14-day free trial of Pipedrive.
Integrating your CRM software (Copper or Pipedrive) with Outfunnel is powerful. Outfunnel will allow you to automatically send email sequences or send bulk emails to your clients straight form your CRM.
For example, one financial planner we work with uses Outfunnel to trigger personalized follow-up emails to their leads that attend their events. Another uses Outfunnel to automatically send intake forms to new leads on their website.
You can also send general updates to your clients (like market updates) using Outfunnel. All of this syncs back to Copper for compliance so all your personal and automated email communication is synced to one place.
While you can also consider Calendly for meeting scheduling, we prefer Motion because it also doubles as a task manager for your team.
Need to schedule a bunch of clients for their annual review? Simply send out bulk email invites from your CRM software for them to schedule a time that suits them, with auto-generated text such as the below that gives them time preferences.
Would any of these time windows work for a 30 min meeting (CDT)?
• Thu, Jul 13: 1:15pm - 1:45pm, 2:45pm - 3:15pm
• Fri, Jul 14: 1pm - 4pm
• Tue, Jul 18: 1pm - 4pm, 4pm - 6pm
Feel free to use this booking page if that's easier (also contains more availability and will be displayed in your local time zone):
https://usemotion.com/meet/example
Motion also tries to schedule your meetings together by letting others know your "preferred" booking times, which are closer to other meetings you have. This is so you have more uninterrupted chunks of time to get focused work done.
This experience is super easy for your customers as it allows them to schedule a time that suits you and them.
Finally, with Motion, you can put your tasks on your calendar. Tell Motion if the task is low, medium, or high priority, and it will put it on your calendar, scheduling it around your meetings. Don't get to finish the task as planned? Motion uses AI to automatically reschedule your tasks for the next day. Using Motion is really like having a personal assistant on your team, without the salary.
If you don't need a task manager, and you just want a calendar scheduling tool, you can also consider Calendly.
Start a 7-day free trial of Motion.
Every financial planner needs an e-signature tool. We recommend PandaDoc as it integrates super easily with Copper (our preferred financial CRM software).
PandaDoc has a Copper extension, so when you go to a customer record within Copper, you can easily use the PandaDoc extension to start working on their paperwork. The extension will allow you to pull in data from the CRM (customer's name, email, etc.) right into your documents (no more copy-pasta 🍝).
PandaDoc is also super easy to use for customers. If you want your customers to feel like they are working with a modern financial planner, then PandaDoc will impress. We'd consider PandaDoc one of the best financial advisor tools out there 👌
When we first started working with our CPA, they sent over a PandaDoc for us to sign, and Alex couldn't help but write them and thank them because it made our life easier to work with!
Start a 14-day free trial of PandaDoc.
In some countries, like Australia, laws are cracking down and regulators require detailed tracking of all the work that was done for each client per year. This is super tough to track within a CRM solution, so you'd want to consider a time tracking tool.
Harvest lets your team track time against each client so that at the end of the year, you can see how much time was spent with each customer. We love a tool like Harvest because it can even manage your invoicing if you wanted to bill your customers straight from the tool. Read more about time tracking tools.
QuickBooks Online (QBO) is a cloud-based accounting software that will help you track your income and expenses. You can send invoices straight from QBO, although you might choose to do it from another software like Harvest (and integrate the two tools).
We recommend Quickbooks Online over QuickBooks Desktop because of their robust API—you're not going to be integrating QuickBooks Desktop easily with anything if you choose the non-cloud version.
We find that teams based in the US tend to use QuickBooks Online, and businesses outside of the US tend to lean more toward Xero.
Start a 30-day free trial of QBO.
Many of the financial advisors we work with use a VoIP in order to log recorded calls with clients within their CRM software (great for compliance 👌). If having calls recorded is important to you, we highly recommend giving Dialpad a shot. The last thing you'd want to happen is to allow your employees to use their personal phone number at work. That is a regrettable decision 100% of the time.
Dialpad plays well with Copper and just recently (in beta) released a native integration where you can automatically log calls into Copper (if you plan on going down this path, just make sure to email Dialpad and Copper before signing up to ensure they can toggle on the native integration for you).
We've personally been using Dialpad for years in our business and have built a custom integration to log all text messages into our CRM system.
Start a 14-day free trial of Dialpad.
tl;dv stands for too long; didn't view and it's one of the best financial advisor tools!
Given that most of your formal client meetings will happen over a Google Meet call, tl;dv allows you to record the meeting to reference later. You can also use Zapier to integrate it straight with your CRM software so that the meeting recordings are logged under your customer records.
It records not only the audio, but the actual video and allows you to time stamp notes throughout the meeting if you want to make notes to yourself. But wait, it gets better. Don't want to take notes? The AI feature will auto-create time-stamped notes 🤯 And the notes are actually pretty accurate.
Simply create an account, install the Google Chrome extension, and it will automatically ask to join each Google meeting. After the call, you can choose to send the call recording to your clients or just keep it for your team.
Loom is one of the most underrated tools on the market. It allows you to record videos of yourself/your screen and share them via a link. No editing, no uploading, just record and when you're finished, it's already uploaded on the web.
Financial advisors use Loom to record market updates for their customers, or if a meeting can't be scheduled and a complex concept needs to be presented, they turn to Loom.
If you're running events as a financial planner, our top pick for event registrations is Luma. It's by far the most modern virtual and in-person event scheduling tool. It allows you to automatically send countdown email reminders, plus even survey your audience post-event to get feedback for improvement.
We've integrated Luma with CRM software (Copper/Pipedrive) so that when someone registers for an event, they are automatically added to the CRM. After the event is over, we have the customer relationship management software (via Outfunnel) trigger an automated email sequence to take leads through their next steps. Note: this is a custom integration that we built for one of our customers and you won't get this out of the box.
Last but not least, our top pick for storage is Google Drive. Like with all Google Workspace tools, Google Drive has a powerful API that allows for automations that can help save your team from doing busy work.
For example, when a new lead submits a form on your website, a folder can be automatically created with their name and linked back to their record in the CRM (an automation we have set up for financial planners). This saves your team from manual work like creating folders. And because automation is taking care of the folder creation, you can ensure folder naming consistency, making your folders nice and organized.
If you're using Microsoft 365, then we'd recommend Box for your storage solution.
Whether you came here looking for financial advisor CRM systems or the best financial software tools in general, we hope this article helped point you in the right direction.
Using modern financial CRM software solutions coupled with solid processes will bring stability and consistency to your business, letting you concentrate on what's most important—your customers. If you have more questions, feel free to reach out.
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