As Ben Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Preparation is critical to the outcome of a content automation initiative. There’s always a possibility implementation will go awry if the project plan is disorganized. Organization and planning are challenging, for it takes specific business and leadership skills to run this kind of technical project. Many departments need to get involved, including marketing, IT, sales, and compliance. Stakeholders from each department must re-examine their processes and work together to re-create them for automation. The goal is to improve the process fundamentally and permanently within the boundaries of a systemized solution. More often than not, this is easier said than done, and may require professional assistance. Here are 5 best practices to prime your team for content automation.

Read More

Guest post by Meghan Rees, Digital Communications at Mediafly

Sales and marketing teams in the financial services industry have their work cut out for them. Marketing teams struggle to create content and processes that will be well-received by the sales group. Salespeople, in an effort to be more client-centric, tweak materials themselves, creating “rogue” content that is not compliant with regulatory and brand standards. When compliance approvals and procedures are bypassed, the firm is exposed to significant risk.

To some extent, all investment firms struggle to create and present client-focused content that is on-brand and compliant. Weighed-down by the risk of penalties and the pressure of working in a competitive business environment, financial services companies are turning to digital platforms to streamline their efforts and improve engagement with prospective clients.

Adopting a sales enablement solution may be the obvious choice to help with content automation and effective sales engagement, but building a case internally and setting expectations with the teams are crucial to a successful implementation.

Read More

Synthesis Technology celebrates 20 years in business this month.  For me, this event calls for both reflection on the past and reaffirmation of our vision for the future.

These 20 years came and went in what feels like the blink of an eye. It feels like a blur of RFPs, client meetings, implementations, contract negotiations, partnerships, financial reports, and company picnics. However, when you take time to look more closely, you see more than just a fog of work. You begin to see key events that really made the difference; Hiring of people who turned out to be key leaders or fantastic engineers, finding partners who understood our value proposition and helped us take it to market, and landing clients who understood bigger is not necessarily better… better is better.

An organization is only as good as the people they hire, especially in a business of our nature.  We’ve been fortunate in that regard. Credit for our success and longevity boils down to the amazing, intelligent and hardworking team members we’ve been lucky enough to hire. Several have been with us for 15 years or more. Their passion and dedication set us apart in this industry.  I’ve never known staff to be as committed and loyal as the teams we have here at Synthesis. I am truly thankful for the people that we have, even those no longer with us, for the positive mark they’ve left. I’m also thankful for our clients who treat us as true partners where “mutual” is the keyword in our success.  I thank you all for your hard work, loyalty, and service, and I look forward to what we can accomplish together in the future!Read More

In the heavily-regulated world of investment management, consistency and harmony between functional areas, including marketing, sales and compliance, are key goals for competitive advantage. However, blending customization and compliance is difficult to achieve.

Many disconnects happen at investment companies when marketing creates collateral which, from the sales perspective, misses the mark on client-focus and relevance—all before a compliance review. Ultimately, in the name of making the sale, salespeople customize presentations, creating multiple versions along the way that are difficult to track. This unwieldy process can cause compliance, branding, and messaging nightmares that may lead to fines, outflows, and lost revenue.

Firms are almost always aware that these disconnects exist and want to fix them, yet don’t know where to start. We recently held a webinar; The Sales Success Formula in Financial Services: Blending Customization and Compliance, to discuss this very topic. It was a Q&A session moderated by investment marketing expert Andrew Corn of E5A Integrated Marketing and explored the ways in which firms are using digital transformation to disrupt the status quo and gain competitive advantage.Read More