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3 Reasons Dynamic Sales Presentations are Essential for Asset Managers

If you’re a sales or marketing professional, your job boils down to good communications. Creating and delivering an effective and engaging presentation is an incredibly important skill that usually starts with the marketing team and ends with the sales team.

The success of your efforts is determined by how well you persuaded your audience to take action.

When asset management marketers create sales presentation and pitchbook materials, they need to be dynamic. In software engineering, “dynamic” is a term we use to define something that is ever-changing. Folks in Financial Services understand this concept better than anybody. That’s because your branding, regulatory guidelines, and financial reporting data are in a constant state of flux.

How do dynamic presentations benefit fund marketers and salespeople?

If you Google the term, “dynamic PowerPoint presentations” you’ll get pages upon pages of tips and tricks for creating powerful, engaging presentations; how-to videos, articles, templates, software solutions – you name it. In fact, this Google search returns over two million page results according to semrush.com.

All of these tips, tricks, and best practices for developing effective presentations are great, but the real challenge is effectively creating and managing presentations when the content is always changing.

There are so many variations and nuances to presentation content that it can be very difficult to manage all of your material while ensuring it’s up-to-date, compliant, and effective all at the same time.

Sharing PowerPoint presentations and incorporating approval processes can be effective, but it becomes problematic as your organization grows and you add more products and salespeople.

In order to “get out of your own way” and put your sales and marketing efforts on a clear path to success, a content management solution can really leverage your efforts. In my experience, companies that streamline this process with a presentation management solution see three major benefits.

1. Reporting data, disclosures, and branding are always current.

Investors demand transparency, accuracy, and detailed product offerings far more than ever before. In fact, according to a 2012 E&Y Global Consumer Survey, 40% of customers lost trust in the financial services industry over the previous year.

Presentations that lack detailed and accurate information or aren’t using the appropriate branding look imprecise, hasty, and will negatively affect a firm’s reputation.

Credibility, not just performance, is a critical component to building successful investor relationships today.

Market data and market trends should always be current, using the most up-to-date data. No exceptions. Your firm will not look credible if the “current market conditions” you’re showing are three or four months old. To ensure presenters are using the most recent data, it should be dynamically pushed out as soon as it becomes available.

Salespeople should not be expected to actively seek-out updates (and your compliance department surely doesn’t want them to) in order to keep presentations fresh.

Updated content that is readily available will improve the performance of your sales team. It will also keep your compliance department happy.

Changing regulatory and compliance requirements may be less obvious to your investor, or even the salespeople themselves; however, all the more reason to push changes dynamically into presentations rather than expecting presenters to keep on top of “the regs”.

2. The Sales Organization is enabled and empowered

The bigger your library of dynamic sales presentations, the more challenging it can be to keep them updated.

Even when that library is well-defined and the update schedule is predictable, it can be quite a chore to scan for all versions that require a particular change. Again, dynamic presentation management can do this work for you.

When you have to make the same change in more than one place, it’s easy to miss something. Take updated disclosure statements for example. If your content management system is dynamic, there is just one place to update your disclosure. It is automatically refreshed in every instance across your slide library.

Content and compliance approvals are much harder to manage when there is a great deal of material to review. Reviewing content one time and automatically applying changes to all presentation materials simultaneously will save a lot of time. Your team will be opened up to do more value-added work.

3. Presentations are more relevant and close more deals

Across the industry, it’s no secret that highly targeted, personalized presentations are more effective at gaining and retaining investor assets. But when marketing teams hear the word “personalization” in regards to sales presentations, it usually means one of two things: marketing will have to spend time manually personalizing the pitchbook, or the salesperson will do it and take the compliance risk.

With a dynamic presentation management solution in place, it’s easy to personalize and tailor your message to a particular investor. Typically, personalization is reserved for high-net-worth or higher-opportunity sales pitches due to the time involved.

A salesperson has the ability to make selections based on different variables that return a tailored presentation for each and every client without having to request this from marketing with a dynamic solution.

In addition, integration with CRMs like Salesforce can provide ready-access to profile data. This includes account history and more, which can further automate the personalization of your presentations.

Let’s face it, you’re spending a lot of time tracking your leads, opportunities, and interactions within your CRM. So, why not use that information to really tailor your pitches?

The best part about dynamic sales presentation management is that “personalization” doesn’t have to mean “more work for me”.

In conclusion

A dynamic sales presentation management solution is key to empower marketing and sales departments. Of course, initial effort is required to plan the templates, business rules, and dynamic elements of this type of pitchbook solution, but it’s well worth the investment.

Once the solution is in place, your marketing and sales efforts can focus on crafting and delivering a persuasive message. You will bring in new business without having to worry about cutting and pasting it into the right PowerPoint files.

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Emilie Totten

Emilie is Chief Marketing Officer at Synthesis. She brings over 15 years of integrated sales and marketing experience working with financial services, SaaS, and health and wellness companies. Her passion is architecting holistic marketing strategies that align with each business function to achieve client experience, employee advocacy, and revenue goals. When she isn't marketing, you can find her rehabbing her home in the Chicago suburbs, practicing yoga, or spending time with her family.

May 2, 2014

Emilie Totten