Prospera Financial Services

Prospera Financial Services, based in Dallas, TX, is an independent broker dealer firm with 80 offices across the United States. Prospera has been in the financial services industry for over 20 years and continues to expand its advisor network as a response to rapid market growth.

Prospera Financial Services organized its workforce as a network of independent contractors who work remotely while accessing common technologies. To coordinate communications and account management, Prospera deployed Salesforce with Partner Community licenses for contractor access, but they needed a consistent way for advisors to access and enter Salesforce data. The decentralized staff lent itself to different workflows for users who were focused on their own needs rather than data integrity.

“Our advisors are interested in output and in learning as few systems as possible to do their jobs,” said Marco Galvan, IT Manager for Prospera. “We knew they worked primarily in their email, so we needed to find a solution that would integrate Salesforce Partner Communities with Outlook using the smallest learning curve possible.”

The right email integration solution for Prospera would need to adapt to the workflow and custom environment that had been established. “Our instance of Salesforce was very custom, including white labeling and custom objects,” said Galvan. “We needed software that could support all of these nuances while making it easy for our advisors to use on a daily basis when recording emails, creating new records, and even working with their Calendars.”

LinkPoint Connect stood out to Galvan and the Prospera team as the best choice. “The ability to ensure that LinkPoint Connect would match up with our workflow needs from the start made it a clear winner,” said Galvan. LinkPoint360 Professional Services began the onboarding process with a custom Implementation Plan. “Service was outstanding, and the planning phase forced us to make decisions early on to set policy that we had not considered previously,” said Galvan.

Prospera launched LinkPoint Connect to over 80 end users shortly after deploying Salesforce. Their Salesforce adoption rate exceeded 80% within the first year as a result. “Our Salesforce adoption exceeded our goal of 50% usage once paired with LinkPoint Connect,” said Galvan. The successful Salesforce adoption metrics led Prospera to increase its LinkPoint Connect subscription and to incorporate LinkPoint Connect into their onboarding process. “Now, each new advisor we bring on to our team is trained on LinkPoint Connect from the start by our corporate trainer as part of our standard new hire orientation,” said Galvan.

Prospera advisors found that they could leverage LinkPoint Connect for the required email recording or go beyond with a variety of available features. “There are so many hooks back into Salesforce, and some of our more tech savvy advisors use the software as power users,” said Galvan. “We use LinkPoint Connect in a deeper way than we thought we could, including creating cases or recording attachments. Everyone seems to love something different about LinkPoint Connect. It’s easy to install, properly supported, and even manages its own updates as new features come out. We think we have email integration solved with LinkPoint Connect.”