Forging and maintaining strong relationships with clients is the cornerstone of every advisor’s business. But during times of volatile markets and economic uncertainty, keeping track of the method and frequency of your communications with clients is more important than ever. And keeping tabs on the prospects you hope to convert to clients is crucial to your future, too.

The days when a contact book and an Excel spreadsheet for tracking clients would suffice are long gone. Today, technology can help you serve your clients and prospects more effectively while keeping track of every phone call, e-mail and personal meeting. Several sales and marketing and customer relationship management tools exist to help you deal with these challenges.

The more clients you have on your books, the harder it is for you to keep track of them and remember each one’s preferences. This client doesn’t want you calling him at work, while that client doesn’t like you calling her at all and will only deal with e-mail, unless it’s an emergency. But Bob, whom you signed this past summer, wants to speak to you at least once a week. Unfortunately, Bob also resides near the bottom of your roster in terms of account value.

Understanding when and how each of these clients are to be contacted — and, in some cases, placated — will help you manage your time and concentrate on ripe accounts that can generate more revenue.

There are several CRM options. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. offers an enhanced version of its Outlook system called Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager. It features a prospect tracker, so you can manage prospects all the way from initial contact through to closing the sale.

For Mac users, Markham, Ont.-based Marketcircle Inc.’ s Daylite is a contact management and calendar system that goes beyond the functions normally found in contact managers. It includes the ability to add customers to a sales pipeline, tracking them as they move through the various stages of a sale — and these stages are configurable, enabling you to create your own pipelines that more accurately reflect your business.

Other systems are held entirely online, and offered to advisors in a “software as a service” format. These Web-based applications don’t require you to install anything on your local computer, which can be reassuring to advisors worried about having their laptops and sensitive information stolen, or who don’t trust themselves to back up things properly.

San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc. offers the ability to track and communicate with customers online, and to view their financial account information. Because it’s online, multiple people in your office can have access to the same data, says Renny Monaghan, vice president of financial services with Salesforce.

“You can see joint calendars, and assign tasks to each other,” he says. “It’s all integrated with Outlook.” It also supports the execution of know-your-client rules.

Multi-user access can be important if more than one person is dealing with a client, agrees Karen Maguire, CEO of Norwell, Mass.-based Satuit Technologies Inc.,which specifically targets financial services with its product.

“If your organization has made mistakes with clients and you’re not talking to clients daily,” Maguire says, “there may be conversations that you don’t know about that might affect this relationship.”

Regulation support is a big part of these packages when used in the financial services sector.

“You need to document every touch point with your client,” Maguire says. “If you send him or her any information, if you’ve had any conversation or send an e-mail — it all needs to be documented. If you are investigated, you need to show what you’ve done.”

The Satuit product tracks all conversations with your clients.

If you aren’t comfortable with storing your data off-site using another company but still need to share your data with others in your office, you can opt for a server-based solution that sits in your own building. Satuit offers both an online and a server-based version of its product, unlike Salesforce, which is available only online.

Microsoft also offers a server-based CRM product, Microsoft CRM, that resides on a server in your office and integrates with Outlook for easy access.

Such systems give you lots of potential for e-mailing and calling clients. Satuit provides you with reporting capabilities that show you, for example, those clients you haven’t phoned in 30 days.

@page_break@“We call it our ‘negligence report’,” Maguire says. “You could also ask the system to show you everyone that you haven’t met face to face in the past year.”

The Satuit application also offers a scoring system so you can weight those clients that you should be contacting. A client you haven’t met in 10 months might get a certain number of points, but if you had a good phone conversation with her, for example, then the score could be mitigated.

E-mail blasts can also be enhanced with extra information. Satuit features the ability to customize mailouts to clients with information relating to their particular portfolios.

Salesforce, using a third-party application called Dow Jones Wealth Manager, does the same. This can help keep clients abreast of their personal account information, which can be particularly useful at a time when markets are uncertain.

Whichever CRM system you choose, it has to be better than the haphazard way in which some advisors still manage their clients. The larger your book, the more you’ll need to apply an automated, structured way to manage it. At a time when the markets are uncertain, that is more important than ever. IE