January 10, 2019 | Andrew Lawlor

Aptaria restructured the firm’s Salesforce system to save time, instantly pull key insights from thousands of records, and support better relationship engagement.

Challenge: Data Structure Lacked Streamlined Reporting and Relationship Follow-Up

Lee, Sipe, and Associates (LSA) is a financial services practice that specializes in serving career government employees. Although the firm already used Salesforce, their system relied on “person accounts,” which fuse accounts and contacts into a single record. This structure seemed better suited for a B2B organization and made it difficult to organize client data.

“Everything was one-dimensional,” explains Administrative Associate Linda Hope. The old system caused the following problems:

Unclear relationships between data: For example, financial advisors had to create separate person accounts for each member of a family, but could not group them together as a household. This probably made sense for B2B firms but not a relationship driven organization.
Redundant data entry: As Hope notes, “there was a too much duplication” to maintain the many person accounts. Staff found it time-consuming to update client information.
Limited lifecycle tracking: LSA meets and serves the federal community through seminars, phone calls, and consultation meetings. However, the firm’s existing Salesforce system made the capture of interactions less efficient.
Cumbersome reporting: LSA wanted the ability to capture data more easily for reporting.

These issues prevented LSA from working as efficiently as possible, impacting their use of time.

Action: Restructure Data to Show Relationships and Capture Client Histories

Lee, Sipe, and Associates searched for a certified Salesforce developer who could optimize their system.

Their team chose Aptaria for our high-value pricing and “personable” project management style, Hope remembers. “The owner of the company [Aptaria CEO Andrew Lawlor] came out and met with us. They were very enthusiastic and responsive to our emails.”

Given LSA’s time constraints, Aptaria’s lean, Agile approach also proved an advantage. “We were under a tight deadline because our annual renewal was coming up,” Hope explains. “We wanted to get the data into the new system as soon as possible so we weren’t paying for two.”

Within the target time frame, from January to May 2018, our team accomplished all of the following steps:

Transferred the client database. Aptaria migrated records for around 3,000 people in the LSA system.
Cleaned the data. Collaborating with Hope, our team worked to make sure that the data was consistent and ready to be added to a new structure. For instance, due to open fields, staff sometimes wrote out the names of government agencies and used acronyms other times. We standardized the formatting.
Implemented a more flexible structure in Sales Cloud. We set up Salesforce objects, like households and government agencies, that allow the staff to group similar records and accounts together. Our team created custom fields, campaigns, and an onboarding process to track the information that Lee, Sipe, and Associates needs most.
Trained the firm’s employees. To maximize the usefulness of the new system and ensure a smooth transition upon release, we held a classroom-style training for financial advisors.

Throughout the process, Hope communicated closely with Salesforce-certified Senior Cloud Consultant Jenn Dwyer. “I had weekly meetings with Jenn, but we also communicated through a spreadsheet she created where we wrote problems. She would go in, look at it, then fix whatever needed to be fixed. They’re easy to work with and insightful. You can tell they’re very experienced. You present them with a problem or an issue, and they come up with great ideas.”

Linda Hope
Administrative Associate
Lee, Sipe, & Associates

Result: Fast, Accurate Reporting and Improved Follow-Up and Service for Clients

LSA’s updated Sales Cloud system went live on May 1, before the firm’s old Salesforce licenses expired. The benefits of Aptaria’s implementation include:

Logically organized data: Financial advisors and administrators can create households for client families and browse clients by their government agencies.
Saved time on data entry: Without person accounts, users no longer have to input the same information multiple times for related records. Busy advisors can keep up with recordkeeping tasks and devote more energy to their clients.
More user-friendly interface: Salesforce Lightning presents a comprehensive snapshot of each client’s record on a single screen. “The layout is placed better, so it’s much quicker to access information,” Hope notes.
Efficient browsing: “We now have an automatic address look-up, so I can type in a Google search bar within our Salesforce and find addresses,” says Hope.
Less human error: Autofill and automatic calculations help ensure that advisors and other staff enter data correctly and in the same standard format.

Most important, LSA’s new Salesforce system makes it possible to better capture and report interactions with the community they serve. Individual histories and firm-wide summaries are just a click away.

“The biggest thing is the tracking,” Hope explains. “We have different reports where we can see how relationships progress and our clients are being served, based on what avenue they’re on.”

In other words, the firm can now save and analyze information about all the distinct phases of relationship development and client care. The Salesforce system built by Aptaria introduced onboarding tracking that can monitor new relationships in a way that was previously inefficient.

The custom Salesforce implementation also tracks best practices for the advisors since it records the answers to key questions like:

What follow up activities are taking place?
What is the relationship development timeline?
How are we continuing to deepen the relationship over time through follow up and review?

By supporting stronger and deeper relationship engagement, the new system helps LSA grow.

Managing Partner Dan Sipe commented on Aptaria’s collaborative approach: “As a non ‘digital native’ it was refreshing to work with a tech organization that did not talk down to us.”

Hope agrees: “They’re easy to work with and insightful. You can tell they’re very experienced. You present them with a problem or an issue, and they come up with great ideas.”