Pitch Books for Asset Managers

Your prospects may have seen hundreds of sales pitches. How do you make yours memorable and compelling? If you have one, your current pitch book likely has issues you are unaware of. Consider these best practices your sales deck may be missing and how to apply them.

Pitch Books Should Tell a Story

Your pitch book should speak to your audience’s emotions through a compelling narrative. Facts and figures on investment strategy are requisite but should not be the entire book. We often counsel our clients to use a “problem” and “solution” format to highlight pain points. And according to the Content Marketing Institute, your deck should give audiences what they want.

For example, one wealth management firm we’ve worked with, a specialist in legacy planning, had a problem: the adult child of a high-net-worth client had squandered a $2 million inheritance on exotic trips and fine jewelry in four years. Distraught, he came to Dad asking for more. Dad said no more; you failed the legacy test. We created a single slide that told the story and offered a solution. The answer included instilling values, teaching financial literacy, building communication, and preparing the next generation for the responsibilities of wealth.

Show who you serve. Investors should know if your services are a good fit to help solve their issues. Is your strategy best for high-net-worth investors who need long-term growth and protection of their assets? Or do you primarily serve institutional investors who need an investment to fill an asset allocation box?

Tell your investment management story. Telling the tale of your fund should include your investment management story, philosophy, screening, buy and sell process, and risk mitigation. However, it’s not the only part of your narrative, as many portfolio managers often think. Your story should reflect the uniqueness of your strategy—as jargon-free as possible.

Talk about your investment team story. We’ve seen more than a few pitch books that excluded information on their investment and executive team. What were they hiding? The team slide doesn’t have to include everyone. But it should include key people’s backgrounds, experience, pictures, and links to social media. You don’t need lengthy bios. Include names, titles, years of experience, and schooling.

Discuss your performance. Investors want the narrative of your performance, too. What’s a pitch book without performance slides? It’s either empty, hiding poor results, or a new fund or strategy that needs to focus on storytelling. For existing funds, including monthly, annual, three-year, five-year, ten-year, and year-to-date returns since inception, where applicable and required by compliance. Include risk metrics and specialized data where it helps build your case. Many asset managers have or are considering using technology to automate performance data updating for cost savings and efficiency.

Pitch Books Should Help Build a Relationship

Your sales deck should help establish a relationship with prospective clients. In fact, don’t even pull out the pitch book at the beginning of a meeting.

Just sit down and talk to your prospects. Let them talk. It’s a great way to learn things you didn’t know to ask. When appropriate, point prospects to relevant parts of your deck. Then, after your discussion, email the pitch book to build the relationship.

Your story should also have a clear value proposition. “Why you, why now, why this investment” is part of your value proposition. The challenge, beyond saying you are different, more experienced, or more nimble than others, is to show how you are different. Investors have many investment choices and will want salient information on your competitors and your firm’s critical advantages. Is there something specific about today’s market climate that makes your strategy timely and potentially profitable?

A Winning Pitch Book Should Include Specific Slides

A cover page. Start your story with a cover page that says who you are and why prospects should get to know you. Use your tagline. If you don’t have one, it’s best to create one.

An executive summary. Including an executive summary at the beginning of your story helps investors know what they can expect to learn.

Why should investors go with you?
What makes you different?
Is it your investment process, risk perspective, or expertise in a specific sector?
Or something else?

Be clear on your differentiators.

Risk Management. Part of the value proposition decision-makers want to know is how you seek to manage risk. If you deliver a pitch without a risk discussion, you risk not being heard. Consider creating a slide with data and analysis of your maximum position sizes, industry exposure, and stress testing.

One of our clients was concerned about including a slide about how they managed risk because their story was complicated. We helped simplify their messaging: They sought to protect investor capital by providing a low correlation to other investments through diversification and an emphasis on low-risk principles.

Disclosures. Your compliance department will likely want a slide or three of disclosures. If you manage a hedge fund or provide services for institutional investors only, internal use only, or accredited investors only, say so.

Disclaimers should detail risks, cite indices, and source outside data. Text should be displayed in the same type size as the body copy. Fund objectives and terms should be consistent in legal documents and sales materials.

Investment Terms. What are the terms of your investment? Consider a slide that shows your fees, minimum investment, and IRA availability. For alternative funds, the investment terms page is where you include information about liquidity, high-water marks, and service providers.

Summary Page. The summary slide is the bookend to the executive summary page. Wrap up your story by reminding investors of the three or four key messages you’ve told them—and what they should take away.

Back Cover Page. Provide your contact and social media information on a nicely designed back page.

Your Pitch Book Design Must Be Compelling

Design elements of a winning pitch book should:

Reflect your brand identity and mission. Depending on your needs and budget, you can use a professional designer or a template to help create the design. Visual storytelling should align with your firm’s values and vision. Obvious stock images and clip art likely won’t help your sales proposition. Charts, tables, and graphs should be intuitive and easy to understand. If your investors can’t understand the graphics without you explaining them in person, you may have to return to the drawing board.

Total no more than 20 slides. Be concise. An asset management pitch book should help you tell your story concisely and clearly. A maximum of 20 slides is a guideline, not a rule; convincing content is key. Less text often means greater comprehension. Give prospects a reason to want more.

Present no more than one idea on each slide. Each slide should efficiently present one idea. Headings should announce the slide’s theme. An individual slide should focus on the concept you want your prospects to remember.

Use white space; it’s your friend. According to HubSpot and others, clean design is critical to effective pitch books. How many presentations have you seen with charts, pictures, animated art, long paragraphs of text, multiple typefaces, and tiny type–all on one slide? Well, that’s one way to keep the presentation to less than 20 pages. The net impact, however, is client confusion. Prospects don’t know where to look first, so maybe they don’t look. Limit different font sizes, typefaces, colors, and animations.

Employ call-outs and pull quotes. A pull quote is a key line, thought, or takeaway shown as one slide in the presentation. Yes, it’s an additional slide, but it seeks to reinforce your main point while providing a visual resting place for the audience. For example, an alternative fund client of ours announced their new tagline in a distinct messaging slide. Prospects have told them how that single slide helped make their presentation distinctive and memorable.

Start Pitching Now

Does your pitch book deliver your story? It should—it’s a fundamental building block of your messaging for acquiring new clients and revenue. Start with these best practices to build a winning pitch book.

Schedule a complimentary strategy session to gain fresh insights and start charting a course for growth.

Frank Serebrin is the Content Marketing Director for Sondhelm Partners. He leads strategic and creative content and marketing services for our asset and wealth management clients.