What makes ABLE different than other CRM tools?
ABLE is a CRM tool designed for the accounting profession by the accounting profession. Nearly 100 firms use it to accelerate their business development efforts.
Rooted in four main business development principles, ABLE’s foundation lies in Doing Small Well – investing the limited time you have in building the most important relationships for your firm’s growth.
Proactively manage your key relationships, build your personal brand, foster accountability, and enable synergy across your team.
Find out more about how ABLE positions your accounting firm for sustainable, profitable growth and see how ABLE stacks up to its competitors in our CRM comparison chart.
What are CRoPs?
CRoPs stands for Clients, Referral opportunities, and Prospects. Within ABLE, 36 CRoPs Tiles represent your 36 most important relationships (12 clients, 10 referral opportunities, 14 prospects). Here’s how we arrived at these 36 client relationships.
The identified CRoPs relationships are placed on tiles that are color coded based on interaction history. This allows you to easily assess the health of those relationships. ABLE alerts you when your relationships are due for attention by changing from green to yellow to red. This allows you to focus on who is really important to grow your business.
Will ABLE manage all of my contacts or just the contacts on my CRoPs Tiles?
ABLE can house all of your contacts’ information as well as important notes, activities, and associated tasks, in one central location. It’s really all the CRM you’ll ever need.
The difference between “just” a contact record and a CRoPs Tile is the manner in which you engage with that contact. If the contact represents a significant portion of your business, then grant it real estate on a CRoPs Tile. This article helps you decide who are your most important client relationships.
We do not recommend uploading rented or purchased lists. During implementation, we encourage new users to ask themselves, “do I know this person” when evaluating their contact lists. If the answer is no, the contact should not be entered.
Can we upload a large list of contact records?
Users can export data from filtered reports or the entire database of contacts.
How does ABLE manage accountability?
Accountability is one of the fundamentals principles of ABLE. Our CRM platform serves to open business development conversations and ensure that team members are accountable for their interactions.
- Create friendly competition across your team with the My Firm Dashboard that allows all of your firm’s users to see the status of all CRoPs Tiles.
- Track business development progress with the Latest Activity Feed, Deals Pipeline, and user-specific reports.
- Survey clients and identify hidden concerns before they become a lost relationship with the Net Promoter Score®*. Monitor progress as loyalty metrics improve.
Each of these CRM tools is included in your annual subscription fee.
Dive deeper into ABLE’s team accountability features.
*Net Promoter, NPS, and Net Promoter Score are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.
How does ABLE help me build my brand?
With ABLE, you can position yourself as an industry thought leader and a trusted business advisor to your contacts, showcasing your value. One way to accomplish this is by providing your contacts with the right piece of content at the right time with ABLE’s Thought Leadership.
The Thought Leadership module allows you to share relevant articles and information with your CRoPs client relationships in context, solidifying your personal brand. Send personalized communication to these top contacts within the ABLE platform. You can find your own articles to share or leverage the Content Library. Each week, more than a dozen new articles are added to the Content Library, complete with topic tags, suggested headlines, executive summaries, and social media lead-ins.
You can deliver enormous value to your most important contacts by curating, not necessarily developing, relevant content, and ABLE provides you with the resources you need for marketing yourself as a brand.
From CRM to marketing to business development, ABLE has you covered. Schedule a demo to learn more.
How does the Content Library work?
To remain relevant to your most important contacts, you must position yourself as an industry thought leader. This does not mean you have to become a top-notch content developer. You simply need to find and send the right piece of content to the right contact at exactly the right time.
To help you find the best content, our team has a full-time content curator who scours the web to add the most applicable articles to the Content Library. More than a dozen articles are added each week, and three new articles per niche segment are added every 45 days.
These articles are available for you to send to your most important contacts, complete with article summaries, tags, business categories, and links.
If you have original content or an article you found on your own, you can add it to your firm’s Content Library. Share it through the Thought Leadership distribution center to send as a one-to-one personalized communication, opening the door for strategic conversations and building your client relationships.
What type of information can I store on my contacts?
While there is not a dedicated document storage area, you can upload files to the company records.
You can also add important email messages directly into ABLE using the Emailed Notes tool. You can forward important messages to their ABLE account from your email client and add their content directly to contact records.
Our CRM platform allows you to store all your contacts in one central location.
What dashboard views are available?
Dashboards provide an at-a-glance reference to gauge your progress.
When you log in to ABLE, you see a number of dashboards to help you ascertain the status of your client relationships. These include:
- Client Loyalty based on NPS scores®* shows your overall client satisfaction
- Growth Dashboards show an overall view of your CRoPs Tiles based on your major growth interactions
- Nurture Dashboards show a view of your CRoPs Tiles based on your minor, or nurturing, interactions
- Growth Pipeline shows the number and associated revenue of all deals entered into your CRoPs over the past year
- ROAI demonstrates your “Return on ABLE Investment” by taking the amount from deals won and dividing by your annual subscription cost
The ABLE CRM platform helps you manage your top relationships, close more deals, become a trusted advisor, and enable team accountability. It’s all the CRM you’ll ever need.
Can I customize ABLE?
You can easily add customizable filters to support the unique niches you serve, categories you have, and other aspects specific to your firm.
What is the implementation process like?
We’ll begin implementation with a kick-off call to discuss the process and set expectations for our team and yours. Once this call is complete, a timeline is put in place to ensure that your experience is as painless as possible. In the meantime, we will begin data gathering and system setup, which typically takes two to four weeks. This initial phase ends with a two-hour virtual training session.
Once training is complete, your users gain access to unlimited training, support, and two annual boot camps. In addition, our implementation team will check in periodically to make sure your team’s users are engaged with the system and are receiving all the support needed to use ABLE in the smartest and most successful ways they can.
What technical support is available?
A Live Chat feature is available for immediate assistance. This chat is manned during regular business hours by our team who is ready to respond in real time (not robots).
You are also provided direct phone lines and email addresses for ABLE team members, so questions are resolved as quickly as possible.
Find answers from our team, as well as other users, in ABLE Nation, our exclusive online community platform. This private community serves to connect users with each other to share tips and tricks, as well as a space to discuss professional services issues.
How is ABLE installed?
ABLE does not require software installation of any kind. It is a cloud-based, or SaaS, CRM platform available through a web browser. If you have internet access and a web browser, you can use ABLE. This means all your contacts and notes are available whenever you need them, whether you are in the office or on the go.
Learn more about the main differences between CRM software and a cloud-based CRM.
How many users can my firm have?
Typically we recommend starting your ABLE journey with a pilot group of 10 or fewer users. As it becomes a larger part of your firm culture, you can easily add additional users. If you cross the baseline of 10 users, the additional user fee is prorated based on your subscription date. No need to wait until you have renewed to give others the power of ABLE.
The baseline package is for up to 10 users, with modest incremental costs for each additional user. This makes ABLE the perfect CRM for small businesses!
How is ABLE's pricing structured?
For your investment, your accounting firm will receive full access to ABLE, full implementation, and contact list upload. All features are included—no costly add-ons.
We offer a 60-day guarantee for new users. If you decide in the first 60 days that our CRM tool isn’t a good fit for your firm, we will refund your money, less the setup fee (though we’ve never been asked)!
How is ABLE updated, and what is the cost?
The product updates frequently result from feedback we receive from our users, so that ABLE continues to be a business development platform designed by accountants for accountants. Users offer feedback through a variety of channels including Live Chat support and ABLE Nation, our exclusive online user community.
What if we decide ABLE isn’t right for our accounting firm?
ABLE offers a 60-day guarantee. If you decide in the first 60 days that ABLE isn’t a good fit for your firm, we will refund your money!