How CLA Achieved Digital and Business Transformation with Introhive

CLA was recently honored with Introhive’s Customer of the Year award, acknowledging their exceptional thought leadership and innovative contributions to the industry. Lani Warsaw, Daniel Carr, Yassir Karam, Christie Rodgers, Brendan Kurvers, and the wider team at CLA were also recognized as true collaborators, openly sharing their experiences and insights and demonstrating an exceptional passion for customer-centricity that sets them apart. With an unwavering focus on customer-centric values, their receipt of this award is a testament to their ongoing dedication to excellence in their industry.

We spoke to Lani Warsaw, Manager, Marketing Technology and Brendan Kurvers, Principal to discuss how leveraging Introhive has helped them drive greater firm wide engagement and efficiencies in supporting their clients.

About CLA

CLA is a professional services firm delivering integrated wealth advisory, digital, audit, tax, outsourcing, and consulting services across 120 U.S. locations and a global affiliation. They were built to create opportunities for their clients, people, and communities through industry-focused wealth advisory, outsourcing, audit, tax, and consulting services and employ more than 7,000 people in executing on that vision.

Opportunity

Enhancing engagement through technology enablement

CLA is currently on a journey towards achieving greater engagement within the organization through technology enablement, Lani Warsaw, Manager, Marketing Technology, shared. While this journey began with an interest in increasing their CRM contacts and improving data quality, they’ve widened their approach around technology and CRM management to take into account the ways in which their CRM enables the day-to-day of their business development and sales operations.

They recognized the opportunity to improve data automation and combine their own data analytics with detailed contact information for greater CRM adoption and technology activation across their teams. Their goal was to incorporate detailed client insights into the team’s existing cadences to streamline business development and sales processes for greater productivity and success. They also understood that their tremendous headcount growth year over year meant there was a need to better understand and leverage their existing network by connecting the dots of ‘who knows who’. 

Decision-making Process

Understanding the capabilities needed to elevate their existing infrastructure

During their initial evaluation, Introhive’s cross collaboration and automation capabilities were what stood out the most to CLA. Leadership knew that to succeed as an organization, they would have to approach the market as a team. Brendan Kurvers, Principal explained that this included knowing who in their firm was speaking to which clients, when those discussions were taking place, and what insights those conversations could provide to other team members. 

Introhive’s dashboard panel and automated client intelligence briefs gave CLA professionals the ability to see all past and future client meetings, as well as review up-to-date and nuanced intelligence for a 360 view of their client before hitting send on their next communication.

Technology enablement and user adoption

In elevating their existing infrastructure, CLA leveraged their existing growth networks, which pair business development and marketing professionals together in driving technology adoption to make CLA employees’ jobs more meaningful and impactful. 

Aligning both the business side of growth and the marketing team allowed CLA to create a comprehensive GTM strategy in which accountants are equipped with the data needed to make smart decisions and marketing has the right data to effectively measure ROI and their market impact. 

Ensuring new team members were set up for long-term success

CLA’s evaluation of Introhive coincided with the organization’s movement towards a customer-centric mentality and the creation of an enhanced sales function with formalized processes around onboarding and training.

Brendan shared that the enhancements made to CLA’s existing infrastructure were viewed as tying into firm-wide professional development. Greater transparency into the tactics used by high-performers could be leveraged by other team members to ensure higher team-wide success rates, as well as serve as part of their growth roadmaps within a wider growth culture.

Solution 

Introducing efficiencies to complement existing firm processes

CLA worked with Introhive to automate contact syncing and enrichment, client briefs and meeting notes, and relationship mapping as part of their business development and sales operations.

One of the keys to the successful integration of the platform in CLA’s existing infrastructure was ensuring relationship data was embedded in their professionals’ daily processes. For example, by sharing data firm-wide through Outlook, CLA was able to introduce efficiencies by complementing existing tasks and schedules. 

Results

A One Firm approach to client relationship management

From a lead development and relationship management perspective, leveraging Introhive across a cross-section of CLA teams has been immensely valuable, Brendan explained. “As a result of CLA’s breadth across the country, a lot of times we’ll have multiple principles and leaders within the firm talking to the same banker, the same attorney, or another center of influence in the market and Introhive has ensured the whole firm understands who’s talking to who”.

Similarly, marketing has seen a direct impact on their ability to expand opportunities across the firm. Lani pointed out that they’ve already started seeing new contacts in their CRM through automation and have gained confidence that they’re reaching out to the right audience. “After starting to track our opportunities in a more cohesive way across the firm in the same way, we’re going to see more of those seamless growth opportunities.”

Elevating sales operations

For CLA, 2023 was the year of kicking-off the use of client data within their business development and sales processes to promote a culture of visiting their clients again at a higher frequency. Using Introhive has really helped to incentivize the drive to get back out there with customers by streamlining their processes and saving their teams time – and clicks – in setting up time with prospects and customers.

Introhive’s platform has also helped CLA to develop a roadmap of success for new business development team members who may be at an earlier stage of their career. The platform has supported the implementation of mature processes and increased accountability while allowing for greater transparency into what tactics work and team-wide learnings. 

CLA’s biggest achievement has been the creation of a sales organization with strong processes in place and the right tools to streamline day-to-day tasks and allow more time to meet with clients. They’ve been successful in activating change within the organization and across their business development and sales operations to:

• Increase lead conversion rates and gain deeper insights into prospects
• Speed up lead routing and the establishment of a relationship with early stage prospects
• Strengthen prospecting by mapping connections and existing relationships across CLA
• Train new business development team members and ensure long-term success

What’s Next for CLA

Lani explained that while CLA has taken a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach to technology transformation, they’re now at a point where they feel they have both the right people and technology in place to drive their strategy around client relationship data. “I would say that in the year ahead we definitely have exciting goals and a vision for what we want with Martech and ECM to become even more efficient and work smarter,” she added.