The market swings from good to bad and sometimes, even sideways. How can asset managers prepare a distribution strategy that will weather market swings? This article shares how a combination of sales, top performer, and advisor team data can help you find opportunities in any market, focus distribution and marketing efforts, and retain and gain A-list clients.
Retention: Avoid losing A-list clients
To avoid losing an A-list client you first have to know who they are. Your active clients, you know from the transactions, flows, and assets that come through your transfer agent, platforms, clearing firms, or software and services like SalesPage that process and reconcile these feeds and give you visibility into who’s doing business with you. As the market shifts and your products slide out of favor, waiting for the market to rebound before reaching out to A-list clients will be too late. Connect with those that may be thinking about jumping ship right away and reassure them. Support the different roles in each advisor team and help your client understand that you know their unique needs. Not sure who to reach out to first? This is where sales, top performers, and advisor team data help.
What is the difference between an advisor team and a partnership? A team is a group of individuals working together to achieve a common sales goal; each team may include reps and partnerships from an office, but it can also include office contacts who support the team’s efforts. A partnership is a group of reps working together to sell one or more products and have a trading ID or alias unique to it. A team may have none to one or more partnerships associated with it.
Aggregating sales data (who’s doing business with you) with top performer data (e.g., Barron’s, Financial Times, and Forbes) and advisor teams (e.g., Advisor Atlas), helps you identify who has the highest value and could incur the biggest hit if they redeemed. How do you do this? People, processes, data, and technology. Whether you’re working with us or have an internal team of data stewards, BI professionals, and programmers, your end game will be to bring the data together, analyze it, and make it actionable by serving it up to sales and marketing so they can engage in a timely manner. What does it look like when you’re successful? Let’s look at a use case with top performers and team data from Advisor Atlas.
Acquisition: Target high-net-worth teams and professional designations
High-net-worth teams are the best of the best. Most top advisors form teams to help with all the support required for larger clients as well as obtaining new clients. These teams can be influential to other teams and advisors in an office. Top advisors are in high demand and get bombarded by sales and marketing teams. So how can you stand out for all the right reasons? Start by knowing where the high-net-worth teams are, who is on them, and what role each member plays.
Knowing which members of a team have key professional designations helps you understand who you should be targeting and what products and messages would be most appropriate. As the market shifts or a pandemic hit, who you reach out to may need to change. Having this data on hand, your sales and marketing teams can pivot and provide the best experience for your clients. Looking at the USA, the areas with more orange show higher concentrations of team members with these designations.
Whether you source your team data internally, from Advisor Atlas, or another source, incorporating it with your first (e.g., sales, marketing) and third-party (e.g., top performers, demographic) data helps you better understand who to engage with, and when, and with what message. The ultimate benefit is a great experience for your existing and future clients, so they join and stay with you through the good and bad.
How should my sales approach change with fluctuations in the market?
Good market conditions: Strengthen relationships with your main contacts and grow business through favorable investment opportunities.
Bad or bear market: Reach out to a variety of individuals to provide education and share assurances that they can use as a guide for talking with their clients.
When the market goes sideways: Example 1: A competitor product just crashed, and an opportunity opened to snag business from folks that may be considering buying elsewhere. Example 2: A pandemic hits and your main contacts aren’t as accessible as they used to be. For both examples, be strategic on who to reach first using advisor team data. Depending on the makeup of the team, your best point of entry could be the main contact or Analyst, CSA, or Admin
Why is it important to get the whole picture with advisor team data?
Top advisors surround themselves with people who know their business. Understanding where teams are forming and what roles team members play is essential as it informs asset managers about who they should be engaging with, how they should be attributing sales and activity, and where they should be focusing effort. The challenge is that teams are constantly changing; whether a team moves to another firm, the member composition of the team shifts or one or more of its members has a title or role update.
Want to learn more about the people, process, data, and technology that SalesPage employs to help our clients navigate market swings and gain and retain clients? We love to educate! Check out the resources below and contact us.
