Start Your Own Brokerage: Marketing, Sales and Retention

Introduction 

Marketing, sales and retention are by far the most important departments of any online brokerage. Assuming that you have set up, staffed and equipped the rest of your departments correctly, they should run like clockwork, awaiting new traders to turn up and start using your services.

Breakdown of Responsibilities

Marketing and sales are the two departments responsible for keeping a steady flow of new traders coming in. Your marketing department is likely to be the one with the biggest budget of all, and 

the one that makes the greatest difference to your company’s bottom line. Not only is it responsible for being the face your company presents to the outside world (website, content, social media, advertising etc.), it’s also responsible for building strong relationships with affiliates and creating and maintaining your brand’s character and image. The most successful brokers in the industry have developed brands that are instantly recognisable to the outside world, even to people who have no idea about or interest in online trading.

You can think of marketing as the department responsible for the broader picture. Your marketing executives will be responsible for all areas of the look and feel of your company’s client-facing real estate. This is where design, content and specific marketing campaigns come into play. Your sales and retention departments, on the other hand, are responsible for providing the personal touch. Your sales team will be in contact with your prospective traders, introducing them to your services, helping them with their issues and creating a relationship with all the leads that your marketing department’s activities generate. After conversion, your retention team will be responsible for keeping your clients happy and building long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Technological Requirements

For your marketing department to not be working in the dark and blindly throwing money away at unsuccessful campaigns, you will need powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 

and Marketing Information systems. As mentioned above, your marketing department is most likely to have the largest budget within your organisation, so streamlining marketing’s activities and

ensuring that they can be tracked and monitored for effectiveness is key. One of the biggest pain points of online brokerages is the inability to get this right. This is often because a brokerage has selected technological components that are incompatible with each other or require difficult, time-consuming workarounds.

The Importance of CRMs

Your CRM is the single most important back-end piece of technology that your brokerage will ever purchase. We keep emphasising this to the start-ups we consult as we’ve seen so many problems beginning with unsuitable, out of date, or incompatible CRM systems. Think of it this way, your CRM is the central hub of your brokerage business. It’s the one piece of software that nearly all of your departments will require access to.

-Back office and accounting need it to track incoming clients, ensuring that their documents are correct and up to date, and to process deposit and withdrawal requests.

-Customer support will routinely access it to check client histories and verify what communications your company has had with them.

-Compliance requires access to the KYC/AML documents stored within your CRM, as well as its report generation capabilities.

-Your finance department will need to use it to track your company’s relationships with the Payment Service Providers (PSPs) you partner with.

-Finally, your upper management will need it for the bigger picture it provides of how efficiently each department is performing in its duties.

That said, a good CRM truly comes into its own in what it can offer to your marketing, sales and retention teams. Your CRM should be able to track all incoming leads at all stages of your various conversion funnels. It should be able to manage your marketing department’s campaigns, monitor their effectiveness, and allow your teams to discern the quality of the leads they generate. Once received, your CRM should be able to create workflows, allowing your sales team to address the most pressing leads first, thus increasing your conversions. Without these key features, all the other departments can do their jobs, however, marketing, sales and retention are working in the dark.

Panda CRM

As a custom development house, we have gained a lot of experience creating bespoke solutions that are based on our clients’ requests. We have also often been called in to solve many problems that brokers encounter when using unsuitable CRM systems that don’t play nicely with the rest of their technologies. This was such a recurring issue that we decided to solve it once and for all by creating our own!

Panda CRM is a Customer Relationship Management system that has been specifically designed for modern online brokerage businesses. Not only does it perform all the functions outlined above, it also perfectly synchronises with the rest of our products, ensuring that your teams can effortlessly coordinate with each other and serve your traders in a quick, efficient and data-driven manner.

With Panda CRM, you can create hierarchy trees that map your entire organisation’s structure and assign different permissions to different members of staff. You can also generate detailed reports per department or comprehensive ones for your upper management. For your sales and retention teams, you can create up-to-date leader boards that encourage friendly competition by presenting top performers at a variety of time frames. It really is a game changer and has to be seen in action to be believed.

Join us in Part 4, where we’ll explain how certain relationships with banks, payment processors, affiliates and IBs are crucial to the success of a modern online brokerage.

Alternatively, you can get in touch with one of our success managers right away for a more personal tour of what we have to offer.

Continue reading in Part 4.