XLR8 takes CRM online

Advisers in the market for customer relationship management tools and aware of the popularity of giant Salesforce.com might be interested in examining XLR8 (pronounced "accelerate"). The application is the work of Bruce and Kim Moulton, husband and wife technology consultants whose 13-person Flower Mound, Texas-based consulting firm began rolling out the earliest versions of XLR8 two years ago. Today, XLR8 is being used by about 250 advisers at 35 firms. XLR8 isn't standalone software. It's an overlay for Salesforce.com Inc.'s extremely popular customer relationship management application and can be thought of as a bolt-on application that is specifically tailored for financial advisers.
The couple's firm, Moulton Strategic Partners Inc., had spent years setting up many CRM products for different clients before they concluded that the flexibility of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com made it a good platform for advisers. XLR8 is the end result of the Moultons' customization of Salesforce.com to fit the core needs of financial advisers. Consider, for example, the application's popular "checklist" feature. "It can be set up for anything from bringing on a new client [or] dealing with a client who is terminally ill — in as much detail as you want to put. You can take all that knowledge and share it within and throughout the firm," Bruce Moulton said. XLR8 provides 500 adviser-specific fields, compared with the 1,500 fields in the popular Act for Financial Professionals from SLM Holdings Inc. of Woodbury, N.Y. The latter's fields are said to be more difficult to configure. There's also a customized "dashboard" view of checklists that provides an at-a-glance view of all those items in process along with a progress bar. "In the end, it's not CRM by Salesforce or XLR8 by Moulton Strategic Partners; our clients are able to customize it such that it really becomes their own application," Mr. Moulton said. XLR8 is one of more than 750 third-party software programs found in the Salesforce.com Application Exchange — better known by the marketing name Appexchange — all of which are built to work with the underlying Salesforce.com platform. Unlike two of its chief competitors — Goldmine from FrontRange Solutions USA Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., and Act by Sage from Sage Software Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz. — which are run on a firm's own network of PCs, XLR8 is an online software-as-a-service product. In other words, it runs elsewhere and is accessed via the Internet. "We were using Goldmine before XLR8 and we really wanted to go with a web-based software-as-a-service model," said Benjamin J. Rickey, a certified financial planner at Leonard Rickey Investment Advisors PLLC of Yakima, Wash., which manages $200 million in assets. Mr. Rickey was one of six advisers provided by Moulton Strategic Partners to be interviewed for this story. He said that Goldmine had become too slow and too difficult to access from the firm's various branch offices. "We found out about XLR8 literally by searching through the Appexchange," he said. It took his firm about a month to customize the offering and to transition its data onto the XLR8 system, said Mr. Rickey, who paid $25,000 for the system, largely because of the high degree of customization his firm wanted. For a basic installation, the Moultons charge a one-time upfront fee of $1,500 for the first XLR8 license and $350 for each additional user. Beyond that, any negotiated fees for customization, or recurring licensing costs, are charged by Salesforce.com. and include at least one enterprise user at $125 per month and $50 per month for each additional user. Michael Leonetti, chief executive and founder of Leonetti & Associates Inc. in Buffalo Grove, Ill., said his firm went live with XLR8 in October 2007 after spending about $70,000 on migration and setup. The firm, which has $410 million in assets, spends about $2,000 a month in Salesforce.com licensing fees. "With eight financial advisers, a portfolio manager — 19 total in the firm — we really wanted a Cadillac or Rolls Royce CRM system that would serve us now and into the future," he said.
David Foster, a principal of the Cincinnati-based RIA firm of Foster & Motley Inc., with 12 advisers and $600 million in assets, wanted to replace its CRM system from ProTracker Software Inc. of Hampton, N.H. He said that his firm had evaluated several packages — the latest version of ProTracker; Junxure from CRM Software Inc. of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.; and Microsoft Dynamics from Microsoft Corp. of Redmond Wash. — before selecting Salesforce.com and XLR8. "ProTracker was fine, but we were just outgrowing it," Mr. Foster said. "We had some internal differences of opinion and just could not get 100% adoption, which of course is the key with CRM. "It's not cheap, but it's been worth every penny," he said, explaining that the firm had spent $26,000 in total for their rollout and continued to spend about $15,000 in yearly licensing fees. One complaint with the system is that the client reports are not quite as slick as he'd like. But Mr. Foster intends to continue working with the Moultons on that. E-mail Davis D. Janowski at djanowksi@investmentnews.com.