You treat the CRM as the advisor's tool, not the manager's dashboard. I led Salesforce for 400 Merrill Lynch brokers managing $14B+ in assets, including the KMI IPO in 2011.
I'm Michael Thomas Zajac. Hermosa Beach. This is the same operator work I still do in RevOps: sit with the people who own the book, find where the process leaks, build the system they will actually use.
What was broken?
Advisors already had a motion. Their book lived in their heads, their assistants, and a pile of tools that were not talking to each other. A CRM that exists to feed a manager report gets ignored. The book does not get logged. Pipeline is fiction.
The KMI IPO made that unusable. You cannot run a structured motion on a once-in-a-decade event if 400 brokers are still in personal systems.
What did I build?
I was lead project manager implementing Salesforce.com for the Houston AS office. The job was not a software install. It was making Salesforce the place a broker would work because it helped them keep and grow the book.
When a founder has run out of their own network, it is the same wall financial advisors hit at Merrill. Then you need a structured motion to turn strangers into clients. Salesforce was that motion for 400 people and $14B+ in assets.
What is the number?
400 brokers. $14B+ in assets. KMI IPO, 2011.
What should you do Monday?
Pick one required Salesforce field. Ask: does filling this in help the person who owns the relationship close or keep the client? If the answer is no, kill the field. Then roll the next one. Adoption follows usefulness, not a training deck.