The role of marketing in investment management firms has fundamentally changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many marketing teams have stepped into a new role with greater responsibility for business-relevant outcomes and have proven they are up to the challenge.
Senior leadership teams should build on this sea change to further develop their marketing functions and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their go-to-market strategies.
Developing the ability to cater to various clients’ specific segments and geographic needs is the next frontier, offering firms an opportunity to gain a hard-to-replicate competitive advantage.
COVID-19 has been transformative for marketers in the asset management industry. Before the pandemic, marketing played a subordinate role to sales in many firms across the sector. While the emergence of digital marketing slowly began to change the tide, the marketing function’s role had not substantially evolved over the last 25 years. However, with the onset of COVID-19, what was previously a glacial progression suddenly became an avalanche.
More than 50% of business-to-business (B2B) purchase decisions are made before meeting the salesperson
In our article “Are we getting left behind by our clients?” (1), we argued that clients in the asset management industry were outpacing investment management sales teams in adopting digital information sources. The proliferation of data sources means clients can filter their selection criteria and generate shortlists of potential providers before even reaching out to a salesperson. Indeed, as long ago as 2012, a Conference Board (2) survey found the average B2B customer completes more than half of the purchase decision-making process before engaging a salesperson and that, in some cases, this may be as high as 70%.
Furthermore, an MIH study from 2015 (3) found the number of decision-makers involved in typical buying decisions increased to 5.8 people from a 5-year average of 4.7. The result is that we have gradually seen customers adopting new ways of engaging with sales representatives. You could even argue that the role of sales in the industry is fundamentally changing.
Lastly, from our discussions with salespeople across the industry, we have generally seen clients limiting their discussions with sales representatives due to:
Fund selectors imposing strict terms of engagement, which materially impacts firms’ ability to connect with the relationship management teams of large wholesale groups.
Institutional clients developing web-based sales meeting booking tools as a firewall to reduce the burden of sales meetings.
Governments and institutions resorting to database-driven searches to ensure objectivity and combat potential corruption.
Weakening event attendance and the rise in popularity of the multi-manager event platform.
Are you really part of the conversation?
All these indicate that clients are demanding or imposing (and being technologically able to) their preferred engagement approach on the armies of salespeople that besiege them daily. Clients can inform and educate themselves, track market trends, assess product options, and shortlist strategies and suppliers—and all this before sitting down with a single salesperson.
The questions we asked ourselves back in 20181 were, if more than 50% of buying decisions are completed before the client contacts the salesperson:
How do you influence the client in the early stages of their buying process?
How do you make sure your product is on their long list?
How do you ensure your newly launched product is considered, despite its short track record?
How do you speak to investment committee members that are unwilling to meet with you?
How do you engage with influencers in the client’s firm who would like to see your competitor’s strategy selected, even if you do not know who they are?
Our conclusion even then, was that, if you are not in front of the client, how do you make sure that you are even “in the conversation”?
Such was the situation at the start of the pandemic.
Marketing shows its ability to deliver and demonstrate commercial impact
The pandemic accelerated these buying decision trends in a matter of weeks. Salespeople could no longer be in front of the client, and firms needed to find an alternative. The result was that marketing was finally given license to bring modern digital marketing techniques and technologies to bear. An epiphany, watershed, transformation—call it whatever you want. However, it took the biggest non-wartime event in history for marketing functions in the asset management industry to finally play a new role: lead generation and scoring, marketing automation, virtual event platforms, experimentation with formats and channels—test, learn, adjust and repeat. Resources permitting, marketing teams were able to develop their role almost exponentially.
Transformation goes warp speed… almost
The result has truly been transformational. Marketing is now invited into the boardroom to discuss lead generation and market development, segmentation, and customer experience. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a prominent bank-owned asset manager recently told us she was able to achieve her 24-month digital marketing development roadmap in only 6 months; such was the support and urgency for change. Another regional head of marketing for a US asset manager explained how the role of marketing had changed entirely—the function was now responsible for identifying new leads as well as existing clients’ interest in topics as a means of driving commercial efficiency.
This change is enormously encouraging. Having seen how marketing teams have risen to the challenge and added commercial value (and to demonstrate that value, something that is often extremely hard to do), senior leadership teams will be encouraged to invest more in their marketing teams in terms of skills and technology development.
Local relevance is the next frontier
So, where does investment management marketing go from here? We would argue the spotlight needs to shift from technology and digitization back to people—the customer. This means a renewed focus on developing, adapting and delivering content that is specifically tailored to the customer—including their industry (think insurance company versus Independent Financial Advisors versus direct customers), geographic differences (not just their language) and context (e.g., regulations), location in the sales funnel and, accordingly, the information they need in the format best suited to their requirements.
CMOs in the asset management industry must balance the mid-to-long-term challenges of building a strong, differentiated brand and meeting the short-term demands of their sales and investment teams, all across multiple markets and client segments. The popular model has been to establish a centralized production function to support and meet the needs of segment or country marketers.
However, the outcome, especially for local country marketing managers, is often one of uncomfortable compromise—using centrally produced propositions and materials with a generic client profile that fail to meet the actual needs of their segments, regions and salespeople. In our discussions with country marketing managers at top asset management firms across continental Europe, it is evident that few asset managers have so far cracked this nut.
The challenge is balancing the synergies offered by central production functions with the demands of local sales teams and clients for propositions, content, campaigns and collaterals adapted to specific local needs. Teams need to break away from the gravity and demands of the home market sales teams to find a model that allows local marketers (and non-core segment marketers) to adapt and respond to their clients’ needs.
Allow us to provide an example. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most progressive and advanced pension markets and, after the United Kingdom, Europe’s second-largest institutional market with over EUR1.7 trillion in assets under management (AuM) and approximately 300 decision-makers. However, when compared with other European markets such as Germany, Italy or France, it is often considered small—resulting in a constant struggle to acquire dedicated institutional marketing resources. Indeed, many local marketers must make do with centrally produced propositions and collaterals aimed at the company’s core segment, which for many Anglo-Saxon firms tends to be wholesale.
We would argue this is the next maturity frontier for marketers in the asset management industry. Firms must build their commercial functions (sales, marketing, and customer servicing) to reflect the complexity of the international markets they serve—the benefits will far outweigh the challenges or costs of striving for the right model. Indeed, this approach offers the prospect of long-term competitive advantages that are not easily replicated.
Conclusion
We would argue this is the next maturity frontier for marketers in the asset management industry. Firms must build their commercial functions (sales, marketing, and customer servicing) to reflect the complexity of the international markets they serve—the benefits will far outweigh the challenges or costs of striving for the right model. Indeed, this approach offers the prospect of long-term competitive advantages that are not easily replicated.
Notes:
Are we getting left behind by our clients? By Patrick Ide published October 2018
CEB Marketing Leadership Council, The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing, 2012
Miller Heiman Group Research Institute, 2015 MHI Sales Best Practices Study: Decoding the Decision Dynamic, 2015
GrndWorX and Erwin Heenk, ex Invesco EMEA, are joining forces to further the development of their asset and wealth management client base in the Benelux region.
GrndWorX, the marketing agency for asset management and wealth management across continental Europe, has formed a partnership with Erwin Heenk, marketing consultant, previously Head of Country Marketing EMEA for Invesco.
Patrick Ide, Co-founder and Managing Partner of GrndWorX: “Since GrndWorX is headquartered in the Netherlands, we couldn’t be more excited about forming a partnership with Erwin. Although we have clients across continental Europe from Germany to Finland to Luxembourg and Switzerland, his deep roots in the market will benefit our clients in the Benelux tremendously. Likewise, with his deep institutional asset management experience we think this partnership will allow us to provide even more pertinent and specific solutions towards institutional facing clients across the region.”
Erwin Heenk: “I see real potential in combining our expertise and running cutting edge marketing projects for our Benelux clients with the GrndWorX team and capabilities. As we share the same values and outlook for the market, I am also very much looking forward to working with GrndWorX on pan EMEA assignments.
The Netherlands is a fascinating springboard towards the rest of Europe with roughly 300 decision makers managing 1.7 trillion AUM and one of the most progressive pensions markets in the world. You could say that the Netherlands is an institutional investment laboratory for the whole European asset management industry. As a result, we believe that there are significant opportunities for cross-over of experience and expertise for other clients within EMEA.”
Dorit Erzmoneit, Co-founder and Managing Partner of GrndWorX: “We are excited to have Erwin on board. Our partnership is built on a strong foundation of shared values. His skills and understanding of the region are a perfect match to our capabilities and complement our deep understanding of the European markets and culture. As many asset management firms primarily service the Dutch market with a sales team and limited marketing support, we see tremendous opportunity to support those businesses in developing programs which are tailored to the specifics of each market.”
GrndWorX is a marketing agency dedicated to wealth, asset management and other B2B clients with a focus in Continental Europe.Our motto is “thinking big, making things happen one small step at a time”. With deep experience in the wealth and asset management industry, we support our clients by helping them to declutter, align their marketing strategies, initiatives, or narratives to meet their business goals so that they can focus of what really matters to their clients. More information on GrndWorX, see this website: about us.
Business to business clients, across industries, are changing the way they buy – it’s a fact. But, in the asset management industry, are we doing enough to grasp this simple reality and to take the necessary measures to adapt.
I believe that, for those that do adapt, this can be a potential source of structural competitive advantage and the good news is that only a small number of asset management firms are successfully responding so far. There’s a lot of potential upside for firms that take material measures to change how, when and where they engage with their clients.
The answer is not a simple one though; it’s about changing behaviors within the firm. It’s about how firms do things, not what they do, it’s about building real collaboration and breaking down the silos. What silos I hear you ask? The big structural ones, the ones limiting collaboration between sales, marketing, client servicing, investments and technology, I reply. Oh, we’ve already done that you say… Read on.
So, what’s happening?
Let me be clear from the start, this is all about the how, not the what. The reason I say this is that most senior sales, marketing and investment people spend a majority of their time talking about the what – and I strongly believe that because clients are changing, now is the time to look at how teams are collaborating around those changing behaviors. If you don’t, I would argue that you run a very real risk of being excluded from the digital conversation that is going on while your sales people are not in front of their clients!
The fact that B2B clients are generally changing the way they take buying decisions is of course not new. A raft of surveys by respected organizations have highlighted this fact since as early as 2012:
The average B2B customer completes more than half of the purchase decision process before engaging a sales person – this can go up to 70% in certain cases. (note 1)
Over 2/3 of B2B buyers want to self-educate rather than talk to sales about new products. (note 2)
The number of decision makers involved in the typical buying decision increased to 5.8 people in 2015 vs. the 5-year average of 4.74 people. (note 3)
In 2007 it took on average 3.7 cold call attempts to reach a prospect. By 2013 this increased to 8. (note 4)
Lastly, for those who would say that this does not apply to asset management, a Forrester survey across industries found that financial service buyers consult between 10 and 12 sources of information during the buying process.
From personal experience, I would argue we are seeing this client withdrawal within the asset management industry too and it’s happening for a variety of reasons:
Fund selectors imposing strict terms of engagement, materially impacting firms’ ability to connect with the RM teams of large distribution groups
Institutional clients developing web-based sales meeting booking tools as a form of firewall to limit the burden of sales meetings
Government institutions resorting to database driven searches in an effort to combat corruption
Weakening event attendance, the rise of popularity of the multi-manager event platform
Etc.
All are symptoms of clients insisting on imposing (and being technologically enabled to do so) their preferred engagement approach on the armies of sales people that besiege them daily. Clients can inform and educate themselves, track market trends, assess product options, short-list strategies and suppliers and all this, before sitting down with a single sales person.
Clearly, the increased availability of data and information sources as well as the pressures for unbiased, fact-based decision taking is driving a change in the balance of power between the buyer and the seller. Equally clearly, distribution functions need to change how they engage with their clients. The funny thing is this: you would think that with these trends readily apparent, distribution teams across the industry would be rushing to adjust. The question is: are they?
Sales has changed
10 years ago, the best sales people were those who were able to influence client buying criteria to such an extent that the criteria simply reflected their own firm’s product strengths. Today, the rise of the fund selector, the establishment of strict procedures and governance bodies, the aversion to scandals such as Madoff, have all but driven such practices from the industry.
If more than 50% of the buying decision is completed before the sales person is contacted by the client, how do you influence the client in the early stages of their buying process? How do you make sure that your product is on their long list? How do you explain that the peer group for your product should not be the one indicated by Morningstar because the benchmark is different? How do you ensure that your newly launched product is considered despite its short track record? How do you speak to investment committee members not willing to meet with you? How do you engage with influencers within the client firm who would like to see your competitor strategy selected even if you don’t know who they are!? Digital is dramatically changing the role of sales. The thing I find fascinating is this: a bit like a frog in slowly boiling water – is sales aware that the client has turned up the heat, and that their job has forever changed? Because, it has.
If you’re not there, you’re not in the conversation!
And the simple truth is this: if you, as a sales or marketing leader, are not collaborating intensively with your opposite numbers in sales or marketing to develop new and relevant ways to be present and engage interested buyers across the digital communications platforms they are visiting, your firm is effectively no longer part of the conversation.
Breaking down the silos
The answer sounds easy but challenges the status quo that I have observed in many, many financial services firms over the last 20 years: deconstructing the silos between sales, marketing, investments and technology. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on the areas that typically form the distribution function.
I agree, it doesn’t sound impressive and that’s just the problem. But, if it is so easy, ask yourself this: why are so many sales, marketing and client servicing teams still not able to collaborate effectively? Why are so many sales people critical of their marketing team’s campaigns (“no use to me”, “not relevant to my clients”… I could go on all day)? Why are so many marketing people fearful of collaborating with their sales colleagues (“they just say ‘we know the client, so this is how it needs to be”)? And why, when I attended a sales strategy program at Kellogg Graduate School of Management recently, was I the only pure-play marketing person present?
Given how are clients are changing, I would argue that this simply can’t continue.
Focus on the how not the what!
I would argue that in the new paradigm, every sales person should be working hard to make marketing their best friend, to access their skills in dialogue marketing to make sure that the firm is part of the conversation even if they aren’t sitting in front of their client.
Marketing should be working just as hard to collaborate with, and understand the issues their sales colleagues are facing, and to engage clients and prospects in ways which will contribute positively to progress along the sales funnel: demand generation, leads nurturing and qualification, account-based approaches, the list goes on.
Client servicing should be working hard with technology as well as marketing to explore and co-create solutions that will enrich the experience of the client while enabling the capture of data that will further the development of the client relationship to the benefit of sales.
Collaboration is a win-win
The key here is the enormous upside potential for successful collaboration between sales, marketing, client servicing and technology – all can succeed individually, but the upside potential for seamless collaboration outstrips what they can achieve alone. The opportunity is simply lying on the table.
I guess the real issue in the end is leadership. As I’ve already said, it’s about the how not the what. Distribution is composed of multiple functions each with their own focus, jargon and career paths. The onus is on leadership to create a meaningful and ambitious vision and roadmap for future success. This should include the vision for what the firm should represent to the clients, the positioning, the relevance of the firm’s DNA. It should also include a call to arms for collaboration (including with the investment side of the business) and the need to change how distribution teams function to engage clients for success. Even better if it is hard coded into performance objectives and all sides!
The best is still to come
I know many will respond that this is already happening. My answer is that I’m really not seeing it. At best, most visions are a half-baked re-work of the same old language that you see in the ‘About Us’ section of fund managers web-sites across the industry. At worst it’s a set of sales targets with no mention of clients, focus, positioning or value creation. The real work is still to be done. And the race is on…
Over recent months I have had the opportunity to speak with many senior leaders from the European headquarters of some of the largest asset managers globally, most of them based out of the UK. This fact, the strength of the UK within the European and even global asset management industry, has been especially remarkable, undeniable. As a serial expatriate, I have come away with a reinforced sense of respect for my home country. Yet these discussions have also left me with a question about diversity. Not about gender diversity, but about cultural diversity.
Is the gravitational pull of London creating a cultural myopia within asset management firms?
There can be no doubt that London remains the firm favorite for many US-based firms for their expansion plans into ‘Europe’ and thereafter their launchpad towards the continent. Ease of access, language and the extensive talent pool in London are all strong and rational arguments for this. However, with the UK acting as a bridgehead for so many international firms into Europe, I cannot help but be surprised by how the clear majority of board members and senior managers appear to be of Anglo-Saxon origin and how few of those people seem to have spent time living and working in the markets that they are responsible for building their businesses into. My question: with such reliance on the talent pool of one country and the resulting lack of diversity of thought, experience and cultural sensitivity, how can you successfully be sure to bring the voice of the European client base into the board room?
Years ago, I worked for a Unilever firm in Paris called Lever Industrial. Our team was made up of people from France, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands. Clients from across Europe had a voice at the table, represented by people with deep experience of their needs and the specificities of their markets. This experience was ensured by establishing a base of strong local talent and enhancing it with frequent expatriation meaning that ‘international’ was at the heart of all senior leader’s careers. Moving into the world of asset management was to be a rude awakening; the simplistic and Anglo-Saxon-led view of Europe (‘just translate the English headline, after all, we know how to do it here…’) struck me as myopic in the extreme. Since then, some progress has been made. After all, we are talking about nearly 20 years ago, so one would hope so.
Recognizing the complexity of Europe
The simple fact is that Europe is diverse. Geographically speaking it reaches from the polar cap to north Africa and the Atlantic coast to the plains of Hungary. Religiously, Europe is composed of followers of Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and more. Temperatures range from the freezing winters of Sweden, to the raging summer furnace of Spain and Greece. To simply call it Europe, or ‘The Continent’ is a gross oversimplification that does not do justice to what it takes to be successful across the region. And here’s the rub, how can you successfully service clients from such a diverse geography? How do you make sure that you are able to hear, listen to and digest the diversity of customer need? What is the right degree of complexity to embrace when the focus today, is on strict cost management? How should you balance local responsiveness and central synergies?
For me, it all starts and ends with people. In a recent conversation, a colleague of mine of central European nationality, working for a very large US asset manager, was commenting on what a big and positive step it was for his firm to employ someone from Continental Europe to the EMEA management board. That’s one person on a board of eight to ten people within a division that is looking for significant expansion and development into non-UK Europe. How can the voice and diversity of continental European clients ever be heard in such a configuration? The cultural biases will be all but deafening. With consolidation in both UK institutional and retail distribution, shelf space declining as more firms bring in guided architecture and concentrate their supplier partnerships, competition from passive further shrinking the addressable market, growth and expansion on the ‘Continent’ is once again high on the agenda of many UK-based asset managers. Indeed, I would argue that ability to address and manage the complexity of Europe will become a key factor for the success, if not survival of many firms over the next business cycle.
Working harder to internationalize the talent pool
There is no doubt that London is the European powerhouse for asset management. However, as it looks to navigate Brexit and prosper further, I would argue that firms based in London need to work harder to find ways to bring diverse cultural experience into their organizations to enable the voice of customers from across the full spectrum of their clients to be heard. Such diversity of experience takes time to build, from expatriation ensuring mixed experience across markets in both local office and headquarter environments, to foreign-local hires, to structurally building multi-national teams responsible for driving decision taking. However, over time, such approaches will help to deconstruct cultural biases and bring diversity of thought and experience through-out the organization.
In conclusion, I strongly believe that having strong multi-cultural leaders with mixed in-country experience of managing both local and central functions across a variety of markets and ensuring that leadership teams and working groups include a broad spectrum of people who have lived, worked and breathed the same air as the customers they serve can only benefit the competitivity of firms and London as a whole. It’s taken 20 years to get where we are today, lets see if we can accelerate the next step!
The workload of asset and wealth management marketing teams has never been higher and yet resources and budgets are often stagnating as cost-income ratios tighten: Increased regulatory requirements, demands from sales teams across multiple locations in different languages, maintenance of sales materials and presentations, publishing newsletters, maintaining web pages… Near-sourcing can be used as a strategy to help manage the execution of ‘business as usual’ activities and balance the workload of your teams.
Marketing teams across the asset and wealth management industries, including the big ones, are caught in a double trap between resource tightening and the rapid expansion of digital tools. On top of that, marketing assets are requiring higher levels of aftercare and constant renewal to remain relevant.
Catering to international demands with less resources
Add to this the daily business of newsletter production, updating your shelf of standardised sales presentations, beautifying presentations, laying out invitations and emails, strategy updates, producing infographics, updating web pages… the list of work never gets shorter while team resources are often struggling to expand at the same pace or may even be reduced. Combine that with the extra dimension of catering to the fragmented demands of international sales teams in a variety of locations and the pressures become all but un-manageable.
In simple terms, the right solution is to establish a service centre in a low-cost location. Having built such a centre of excellence in Poland, we can vouch for the benefits and efficiencies that this can bring. In real terms however, except for large organizations that already have an offshoring strategy, such projects can be time consuming, complex and lack critical mass in order to be a realistic solution for most small- to mid-sized marketing teams.
Tap into a near-shore talent pool
Marketing near-shoring with a specialized partner, however, is a more viable option for many marketing teams and provides a means to tap into a talent pool that, until now, has been difficult for marketing leaders to access. Near-shoring is a new form of marketing services that combines traditional services such as desk-top publishing, layouting, design, presentation services, web publishing and design, social media management and so on, all provided from a low-cost location that offer the skills, professionalism and quality equal to those available on the ‘home’ market at considerable cost savings. After-all, why pay €65-€85 an hour or more for a freelancer or internal staff member to do desk top publishing when you can get the same service for €45?
Balancing act: skills versus task complexity
Near-shoring helps to balance the equation between skills and complexity of task and the cost of labour: focus high cost and high skilled team members on high value-added tasks, while lower skilled tasks can be managed by adequately skilled team members in a low-cost location. Or, transfer work from external service providers based in high-cost locations to a near-shore provider with the same skills but significantly lower costs.
Put simply, it’s all about allocating the right work to the right skills-set in the right location at the right price, all while increasing the motivation of your team by focusing them on work that really has a high value impact on the business.
One of the key preoccupations of any CMO or Head of Marketing is ‘have I got the right people focused on the right things, am I really using my people to best effect?’. Marketing near-sourcing can help to answer this question by providing a means to tap into a talent pool that, until now, has been difficult for marketing leaders to access.
The workload imposed on marketing teams across the asset management industry has never been higher and this, at a time when resource levels are stagnating or declining. In all but the best resourced teams, we see employees stretched thinly, trying to fulfil both the execution and maintenance of existing marketing collaterals and the development of strategic initiatives that will help ensure the profitable growth of the business. Now more than ever, it is critical to be sure that your resources are focused on the right work and are doing it the right way.
From personal experience, we know that it is quite easy to skim over this simple question, as a negative response is often to open a can of worms. However,we would argue that it is likely to be critical to the future success of your team, and to really come to a balanced point of view, you need to reflect objectively on the following 5 questions:
What are the right skills and experience needed to undertake a specific task?
Do I have enough of that skill and experience to meet the demands of the business?
If not, am I allocating over- or under-skilled team members to cover the need?
If they didn’t have to do that work, would I prefer them to work on other tasks?
If they did, would this add greater value to the firm?
Marketing near-sourcing is a viable solution for many marketing teams facing these issues and provides a means to tap into a talent pool that, until now, has been difficult for marketing leaders to access. The comparatively low cost of these services opens the opportunity to exploit near-sourcing as a strategic option allowing managers to consider outsourcing often-repetitive, executional work that until now, has been executed inhouse or with relatively high-cost outsource partners in the home-market. Tasks such as desk-top publishing, layouting, design, presentation beautification, updating web pages, social media execution and monitoring and so on, can be deployed to a near-source partner in a low-cost location that offers the skills, professionalism and quality equal to those available on the ‘home’ market and at a highly economic cost.
In here’s the crux: deploying executional tasks to be managed by right-skilled team members in a low-cost location allows you to free up the time of home based, highly skilled and experienced resources, to focus more time and effort on strategic initiatives and activities that will help drive the growth and prosperity of your firm.
Put simply, it’s about allocating the right work to the right skills-set in the right location at the right price, while increasing the motivation of your team by focusing them on work that really has a high value impact on the business.
