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At some point, the bad times will return. When they arrive, some asset managers will find new revenue opportunities, while others will need to go into survival mode. The smart firms will anticipate where they could end up and start preparing for the inevitable. As published on Advisorpedia.
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At some point, the bad times will return. When they arrive, some asset managers will find new revenue opportunities, while others will need to go into survival mode. The smart firms will anticipate where they could end up and start preparing for the inevitable. As published on Nasdaq.
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There is still time to gain control and put a strategic plan in place for what will be a pivotal year for asset managers.
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The results your digital marketing program delivers are only as good as the quality of your content and the relevancy of the people you’re trying to reach. As seen on Advisorpedia.
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As asset managers continue to do more with less, substantial changes are taking place when it comes to selling mutual funds. Dan Sondhelm commented for this story in Financial Planning Magazine.
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Sales are so important, yet many firms actually practice sales prevention. Here are the ways and what they can do instead. As published on Nasdaq.
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While Grenier, who currently serves as global head of asset management for Fidelity International Limited, lacks the technology background of his predecessor, the asset management division is likely to continue to prioritize tech capabilities. Dan Sondhelm commented for this FUNDfire story.
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Your firm can have alpha-generating funds, great marketing materials and highly motivated salespeople. But with so many asset managers vying for the attention of intermediaries, it’s critical to focus your sales efforts on firms and people who are most likely to let you in the door.
If you’re a boutique firm, you probably don’t have the time and resources to figure out which institutional consultants, broker/dealers and registered investment advisors will want to listen to your story.
Fortunately, there are a variety of online applications that can do this research for you. Three were discussed in the second part of the webinar series on Tech Tools for Stronger Mutual Fund Sales and Marketing, presented by the ICI Small Funds Committee and Sondhelm Partners.
These tools can help you build targeted lead lists; uncover advisors who are generating significant inflows to your funds; and find firms that are most likely to use your products.
Building targeted lead lists
CRM systems, email marketing platforms and marketing automation software enable sales teams to reach more intermediaries faster and cheaper, but as a result financial advisors and institutional gatekeepers are bombarded with unsolicited and irrelevant contacts each week and they ignore nearly all of them.
Wirehouse and independent brokers, investment advisers and institutional consultants have different due diligence criteria and business requirements. Your funds may be the perfect solution for some and a non-starter for others. That’s why it’s critical to focus your sales and marketing efforts on the target audiences that are most likely to listen to your story.
Building these qualified lead lists through Google, FINRA and SEC searches is time-consuming, costly and return limited results. To speed up the process and maximize opportunities many organizations, ranging from the biggest brand names in the industry to boutique firms, rely on access to online advisor databases like Discovery Data.
According to Discovery Data’s Executive Vice President Craig Katz, their data subscriptions provide detailed information on all 40,000 registered firms and over 2 million professionals across North America. These include wirehouse and independent brokers, investment advisers, research analysts, institutional consultants and insurance agents.
Discovery Data delivers robust and continually updated profiles that display important information including a professional’s title, licenses, designations, business and home email, phone and address, employment history, self-reported AUM where available, and more. Firm-level profiles provide hundreds of data points to qualify or filter against such as firm owners and partners, services offered, firm type, investment vehicles and strategies utilized, client type, custodian, total AUM and AUM breakdown by investment vehicle.
Discovery Data clients can apply customized filters to narrow down the universe to specific audience segments, for example, RIA firms established in the past year by an advisor who broke away from a wirehouse that today have over $100 million total AUM, at least $25 million invested in private funds and are based in the Chicago area.
Discovery Data also offers data integration services, so sales teams always have the most up-to-date information on clients and prospects within their CRM system and automatically receive notifications when advisors change firms or move to different locations.
Identifying your best-selling advisors
Your salespeople already know which of their advisor-clients use your funds. But what about other advisors who are generating inflows that you don’t know about-but should?
You absolutely want to cultivate these “top producers.” But the omnibus-level flow data you get from your transfer agent doesn’t usually provide information at the transaction, firm or advisor level.
SalesStation from Celera Systems helps you find the sources of your fund flows. According to Tom Larson, Celera’s Director of Business Development, SalesStation can collect, reconcile and map inflow and outflow activity coming from a variety of different internal and external data sources, including feeds from broker/dealers, custodians, and retirement plan recordkeepers.
From this data, SalesStation can report daily and monthly information on purchases and redemptions for each fund, both in aggregation and by channel (institutional, broker/dealer, RIA).
Even more impressively, SalesStation can visually display flow activity for both advisory firms and individual advisors in your territories, which can help you identify local top producers. Contact details can be fully integrated into your CRM platform, enabling your salespeople to elevate these “best-sellers” to the top of their VIP cultivation lists.
Honing your competitive edges
Targeting relationships with advisors who are using your funds now is only one side of your sales coin. The other side is targeting advisors who should be offering your funds.
Morningstar data can tell you how your funds compare to the competition in any given Morningstar Category. But it doesn’t tell which firms or even offices in your territories are using products with performance and expenses that don’t match up to your product in that category. That’s where a technology like Broadridge’s Opportunity Hunter can help.
According to Rick Niedt, General Manager of Distribution Solutions, the Opportunity Hunter algorithm uses aggregated positions, net flows, and product-level data from a variety of sources to determine which advisory firms in your target markets represent opportunities to gain new assets. The application provides detailed information on each firm’s overall asset allocation and book of business and can generate location maps to aid in road-trip planning.
Now, other applications can produce similar results. But Opportunity Hunter takes this process a step further. Using Morningstar data, it dynamically compares the performance and expense characteristics of your funds to an aggregate of the competitive funds held in that category by local advisory firms, with graphic visualizations displaying where yours outclass-or lag behind-the aggregate.
Armed with this inside knowledge, you can focus your sales efforts on the advisory firms where your “ours is better” story is supported by Morningstar’s objective research.
Putting it all together
Building a list of qualified advisors will make your outbound marketing and sales efforts more efficient, and will reduce the risk of sending an irrelevant message to the wrong people. This, of course, assumes that your sales and marketing teams are equipped with the right materials and resources to convey your success story effectively and quickly. To learn more about sales and marketing automation tools that can maximize and measure the impact of your inbound and outbound marketing efforts, read the first article in this series.
Dan Sondhelm is CEO of Sondhelm Partners, a firm that helps asset managers, mutual funds, ETFs, wealth managers and fintech companies grow through marketing, public relations and sales programs. Click to read Dan’s latest Insight articles and to schedule a complimentary consultation.
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State Street Global Advisors took over San Diego last week with a massive advertising campaign targeted at the attendees of Schwab’s Impact adviser conference. Dan Sondhelm shared his thoughts with Fund Intelligence for the story.
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When I discuss the importance of inbound marketing with boutique asset managers, many tell me that they use email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and Mailchimp to cultivate leads.
These email services are great because they are easy to use and inexpensive. Asset managers like to compare open and click rates on each send. In addition, they are good to report “either/or” results. The message arrives or is “bounced” back. A recipient either opens or doesn’t open a message. She either clicks on a link or doesn’t. She either opts out of further emails or doesn’t.
This kind of binary data isn’t actionable, however. It doesn’t tell you how long visitors stayed on your web site, where they went afterward, which additional content they consumed and if they’ve ever come back to your site on their own.
If you really want to measure someone’s level of online engagement to determine their position in your sales funnel, consider a marketing automation software platform like Marketo, Pardot, Sharpspring or Hubspot. And if you want to make it easier for your salespeople to know which digitally active prospects they should contact first, ensure your CRM system can dynamically import the results of your inbound marketing campaigns into the activity tracking areas of your client and prospect records.
These were the main points of a recent webinar, Give Your E-Marketing a Speed Boost, presented by the Satuit Technologies Learning Center. In this session, I provided an overview of marketing automation strategies for asset managers and Satuit CEO Karen Macguire discussed the benefits of integrating inbound marketing and CRM platforms.
Marketing automation: The Fitbits of inbound marketing
Think of marketing automation as inbound marketing Fitbits. Like email platforms, they can automatically execute email marketing campaigns and generate social media posts. But rather than simply reporting “either/or” results, these applications can also track and report the online activities of anyone in your client or prospect database.
At a glance you can find out:
These applications can also automatically execute specific follow-up activities based on a person’s behavior. For example, if an email recipient doesn’t open an email, the program can automatically re-send the message with a different subject line. If someone opens a message and clicks a link – for example, downloading a whitepaper on small cap investing – the program can automatically send a relevant follow up message offering a link to performance data for your small cap funds.
The best marketing automation programs can assign “lead scores” to your clients and prospects based on their level of online engagement. These scores can help you determine if and when follow-up contact is warranted.
For example, your salesperson may want to call an advisor – prospect with a high lead score and ignore those with low lead scores. Or, if a formerly highly engaged advisor- client is no longer opening your emails or visiting your site, this may be an attrition warning sign that elevates them to the top of a salesperson’s client retention list.
Integrating e-marketing and CRM
Whether you’re using a standalone e-mail platform or marketing automation software, you want to get lists of your most engaged recipients to your salespeople as quickly and efficiently as possible. The biggest bottleneck in this process is the time and effort it takes to manually enter each recipient’s activities and lead scores list into your CRM system.
According to Satuit Technologies CEO Karen Macguire, Satuit’s CRM system can clear this virtual logjam by establishing dynamic links with many popular email and marketing automation platforms.
Email “objects,” including the results a particular campaign (open, click, bounce, opt-out) can be added to the “mailings and events” section of each recipient’s CRM activity record. And lead scores and historical online interactions can be imported from marketing automation programs. As new inbound marketing campaigns are launched, Satuit’s CRM system can automatically update the results for each recipient.
Combining this digital activity intelligence with the results of sales – initiated activities like meetings and phone calls give a salesperson a much richer picture of their clients’ and prospects’ level of engagement with your firm. Satuit can even flag high lead scores and move them to the top of a salesperson’s “priority contact” dashboard.
Elevating your inbound marketing gameplan
Often boutique asset managers can benefit from digital marketing to attract leads, engage and support their sales teams. Email marketing makes it easier to deliver their story and value-added content to consultants, brokers and investment advisers. But to truly tell which of your email prospects are bona-fide leads requires the kind of detailed information that marketing automation can provide. Marketing automation can deliver these insights, and dynamically importing them into your CRM system can help your salespeople make the most of their valuable time.
Dan Sondhelm is CEO of Sondhelm Partners, a firm that helps asset managers, mutual funds, ETFs, wealth managers and fintech companies grow through marketing, public relations and sales programs. Click to read Dan’s latest Insight articles and to schedule a complimentary consultation.
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