Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, these platforms are used by millions of businesses worldwide. They're powerful, well-supported, and highly configurable. But configurable is exactly the problem for UK financial advice firms.
A CRM that needs months of customisation before it fits your workflow isn't built for you. It's built for everyone, and that means it's built for no one in particular.
Want to see a CRM built specifically for UK advice firms? Book a demo to see Glimzer in action.
The customisation trap
Generic CRMs sell flexibility. You can build custom fields, create your own pipeline stages, and wire up automations to do almost anything. In theory, that sounds ideal.
In practice, it means:
- Weeks of setup before anyone can use the system
- Ongoing maintenance as your customisations break with platform updates
- Dependence on consultants or a technically-minded team member to keep things working
- No shared language between the CRM and your actual advice process
Financial advice isn't a generic sales cycle. It involves fact-finding, suitability assessments, ongoing reviews, and regulatory record-keeping. Forcing that into a generic deals pipeline creates friction at every stage.
What goes wrong in practice
Pipeline stages don't match
Generic CRMs model a simple sales funnel: lead, qualified, proposal, closed. Advice firms need stages like initial enquiry, fact-find, research, suitability report, implementation, and ongoing review. You end up renaming everything and hoping the underlying logic still works.
Compliance is an afterthought
Generic platforms have no concept of FCA requirements, audit trails, or document version control. You bolt these on with plugins or manual processes, and they're the first things to break.
Reporting misses the point
Sales-focused reports track revenue and deal velocity. Advice firms need to see review completion rates, outstanding compliance tasks, and pipeline coverage. The data is there, but extracting it requires custom report builders that nobody has time to maintain.
Team adoption suffers
If the system doesn't speak the language of financial advice, your team won't use it. Advisers, paraplanners, and administrators each need views that make sense for their role. Generic CRMs require heavy configuration to achieve this.
What a purpose-built CRM looks like
A CRM designed for UK financial advisers should work out of the box, not after a customisation project. That means:
- Pipeline stages that reflect the advice process, from enquiry through to ongoing servicing
- Compliance workflows with audit trails and time-stamped records built into everyday use
- Client profiles that include the fields advice firms actually need
- Team views designed for different roles within the firm
- UK data hosting and security practices appropriate for handling sensitive client data
Glimzer's Pipeline and Advice modules are built around these principles. Pipeline handles prospect tracking and conversion, while Advice manages ongoing client relationships and annual reviews.
The hidden cost of generic
The upfront cost of a generic CRM might look reasonable. But add the cost of customisation, training on a system that doesn't fit naturally, ongoing maintenance, and the productivity lost to workarounds, and the total cost of ownership is often higher than a purpose-built alternative.
More importantly, the compliance risk is real. A system that doesn't support your regulatory obligations by default creates gaps that are hard to spot until an audit reveals them.
The right CRM for your firm shouldn't need months of configuration to match how you work. It should understand financial advice from day one.
Mortgage and protection advisers face similar challenges with generic tools. If your firm handles mortgage and protection cases, the same principle applies: your CRM should fit your workflow, not the other way around.
See the difference for yourself. Book a demo and we'll walk you through how Glimzer works for UK advice firms.