The Broadstone Group is a specialist pension and employee benefits consultancy operating across two brands; Broadstone and 20-20 Trustees. They offer a full-service capability across DB & DC pension schemes, independent trusteeship and employee benefits provision. They operate on a national basis with a client portfolio encompassing 150+ independent trusteeships and 1,300 clients.
Before Gold-Vision, we used extremely manual processes to manage our data and it was hard work. We relied heavily on ten plus spreadsheets and each consultant had their own database in a spreadsheet on Outlook. Trying to compile all of that data into one place so that we could track sales and answer very basic questions, such as how many clients do we have, across which streams, and is there an opportunity to cross-sell, was really tricky.
Gold-Vision provided us with a solution that met our key requirements and removed a high number of manual and unscalable processes. We now have access to all the information we need, such as how long an opportunity has been open, and an up to date view on where in the sales cycle each prospect is which means we can more accurately track and find ways to reduce the sales cycle.
Gold-Vision has also given our management team instant access to MI that they need, especially a view of our sales pipeline and a more in-depth view of those leads likely to close within any chosen period. We have gone through two sales of the business ourselves, and if we hadn’t had easy access to information such as how much our forecast is worth, how many clients we have on the books, how long we’ve had them for, what clients have lost and when/why then undoubtedly it would have taken us longer to collate the information required. By using Gold-Vision it meant we could easily answer questions about our business and use one system to pull our data together.
Implementing Gold-Vision into the business was smooth. We got together to go through the back end of Gold-Vision and worked together to build it as we required, adding in additional fields where required. Then, as and when over the following weeks and months, if we realised that we had left something out or that we hadn’t thought something all the way through we had the support to add those things in, such as new fields or missing lists. Even things such as BP numbers that had been an issue were able to be added in and the issue was overcome with no problem
Dashboards have to be my favourite feature. I am regularly asked by team members in different offices or new starters about how much time they have recorded on a day by day basis for the previous week. Gold-Vision makes gathering this information simple – it takes 30 seconds for me to complete and build that dashboard for them. We also use the dashboards and reporting to keep an eye on things across the business much more easily than before. For instance, I use dashboards to monitor open opportunities based on their estimated closed date. If an opportunity has exceeded this point, then it’s much easier for me to identify and speak with the owner of that opportunity and understand the situation. This simply wasn’t possible before.
The fact that there was a face to put to Gold-Vision’s development team was great. Tim Beresford came to the office and we sat down and went through everything that we wanted together, then he drew up the project plan and went away and completed it all for us. If at any point he had any questions, suggestions or ideas on how to make the whole thing better or smoother he spoke his mind and then we would come up with a plan together to either meet in the middle or just make it happen.
Gold-Vision has made things so much easier and there’s much better visibility across the business now that we don’t have to rely on manual processes and multiple spreadsheets. For instance, we use Gold-Vision to capture and record our time spent on cases and projects. This not only helps us to understand project resource planning but also feeds straight through into our financial billing system which is the real gain. It’s also easy to use – even those that aren’t that tech-savvy in the business have been able to get on with it really well.
“Working with the Broadstone team demonstrates how to succeed with CRM. It’s been a pleasure to work with key stakeholders including directors on an on-going basis who continue to be highly interested in Gold-Vision’s on-going development and roadmap as well as internal process improvement and embedding Gold-Vision through the whole client lifecycle.
We’re lucky to have key champions at Broadstone who have fully engaged at all levels to maintain a successful Gold-Vision project! – Thanks Steven Turner, Paul Noone and Anwar Bhatti”
Jiggy Patel, Gold-Vision Head of Customer Experience
Upgrading to the latest version of Gold-Vision is next for us – I’m really looking forward to having a play with the new user interface and tailoring it to the different streams that we have in the business. We are also considering if we could make use of the marketing functionality, such as automation and touch point scoring to help us be even more strategic in our marketing efforts.
