Cloven vs Salesforce Financial Services Cloud: Which CRM Is Better for Canadian Financial Advisors?

Are you choosing between Cloven vs Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) for your CRM needs? When considering CRM solutions, it’s essential to understand their differences to make an informed decision for your business needs as a Canadian Financial Advisor.

Let’s break down the key features and advantages of each platform to help you make an informed decision.

Customization   

Both Cloven and Salesforce FSC do have the ability to customize the CRM to your businesses unique needs.

Customizing Salesforce requires fairly advanced knowledge of the platform. As a result, most financial advisory practices hire a Salesforce admin to build out their Salesforce. This can lead to high upfront costs (we know practices who have spent $100K+), but also slow turn-arounds when you need a quick fix as your practice evolves.

Cloven is built specifically to empower small-medium financial advisory practices by providing a user-friendly interface to customize your CRM without extensive technical knowledge. This enables advisors to tailor their CRM experience themselves or with minimal assistance. This not only saves significant upfront costs but also ensures flexibility as your practice’s needs grow.

Industry-Specific 

Beyond Salesforce’s own Financial Services Cloud, there are partners like XLR8 who have made an advisor-specific version.

The big difference is that these solutions are US-built and focused, whereas Cloven is specific to Canadian advisors.

Cloven’s focus on the Canadian market offers advantages for Canadian advisors- especially with integrations. Cloven integrates with tools used by Canadian MGAs such as BlueSun Advisor- allowing for simple upload of data. What’s more, Cloven integrates with Canada-specific planning software such as SideDrawer.

Full Software Stack   

When it comes to integrating with other software products, both Cloven and Salesforce FSC offer solutions, albeit with differences in approach and pricing. Salesforce requires additional subscriptions and integration efforts to bring in new tools to your software stack. Cloven provides a comprehensive Productivity Suite that seamlessly integrates with the CRM at no extra cost, simplifying the process for users.

This Productive Suite includes E-Signature, Calendar Bookings, Cloud Storage, Social Media Management, Online Form Builder, Receipt Scanner, and Email Marketing.

Pricing   

Pricing considerations play a significant role in the decision-making process for businesses evaluating CRM solutions. The pricing models of Cloven and Salesforce FSC are both per-user, but come at different price points.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud starts at a higher price point of $325/month, Cloven offers a single-tier pricing structure that includes all integrations and the Productivity Suite for $90/month.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and Cloven both provide CRM capabilities for financial advisors, but they take different approaches. Salesforce offers a broad enterprise platform that requires extensive customization, but there’s a large global ecosystem. Cloven is designed specifically for Canadian advisory practices, with Canadian integrations. Salesforce FSC is usually better for large multi-national firms whereas Cloven is better suited to the Canadian focused firm.