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Why do sales departments fight presentation automation? Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to asset management marketers about pitchbooks. The typical sentiment is that these sales tools are a pain to update and manage. Also, they are a point of contention between the marketing and sales teams. Marketers spend a lot of time keeping their slide library up-to-date and organized. But often times, these beautiful and compliant pitch materials become compromised once they get into the hands of the sales force. “It’s total piracy!” said one Product Management Executive we spoke to.

It’s true though. Salespeople are notorious for going rogue. They like customizing their own decks or using old versions saved on their desktop without thinking twice about branding or compliance.Read More

By Kim Rebecca

Automating the quarter-end production of fund fact sheets and other marketing materials can be a life saver for marketers. It dramatically reduces errors and improves time-to-market. However, convincing your organization to get on board with an automation initiative isn’t always easy. Making a solid business case to leadership and key stakeholders is essential. At most firms, the IT group is often the hardest to convince, but their buy-in is absolutely critical. You simply cannot move forward on this type of project without dedicated resources from IT. The IT manager will want to be sure that outsourcing a solution to a vendor is the right move and that dedicating resources to an automation project is a good investment. So, how should you present your case to IT decision makers?

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Creating and maintaining pitchbooks can be the bane of a marketing team’s existence. Product managers are always finding new ways to spin or illustrate their products. Sales teams and firm partners are always insisting that one more chart or illustration is absolutely critical to their pitch. And of course, there is the simple drudgery of making sure the standard data, disclosures, and charts are up-to-date and refreshed on time.

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These days you hear how “content is king” and that data and content are being generated at more than exponential rates. It is a constant challenge for investment marketers to keep up with the demand for compelling and current content. When it comes to fund marketing communications like fact sheets, commentaries, and pitchbooks, managing the dynamic and diverse information that feeds them can become a recurring hassle month after month, quarter after quarter. To break the vicious cycle, marketers must leverage their information (and their efforts to organize it) from one document to the next. Their goal? To fix recurring document problems.

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