Why Pitch Decks Should be Created by Sales, Not Marketing

An article by our own Katie Martz was recently published in FundFire on why sales decks should be created by sales and not marketing. 

Recently, a salesperson told us about a deal where he went “rogue.” He got an opportunity to present to a major institutional client but didn’t have an up-to-date deck from marketing. So he cobbled together a deck using slides from previous presentations. He knew he was pushing the compliance boundaries, but he needed to land this deal.

His was the first presentation to the client, and he secured their agreement before leaving. As he walked out, three competitors sat in the lobby, waiting for their turn to present. “If I had waited for marketing to send me an updated deck,” he said, “we would have lost that deal because the first sales guy to show them what they needed got the business.”

Sales-created decks are marketing’s worst nightmare. Will they use the right slides? Will the deck be compliant? Will it be on-brand and consistent on every slide? It’s a common practice for marketing to be responsible for the presentation creation and distribution process. Marketing, in collaboration with compliance, places tight controls around customizing sales decks for clients and prospects. This ensures that decks are accurate, compliance approved and on-brand. The problem is, they might not meet the deadlines placed on sales by both clients and competitors. And the decks marketing creates are rarely developed for a specific client, making it difficult for sales to be truly client-centric. And frankly, that can cost the organization substantially in lost deals.

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The following is a guest post by Dan Sondhelm, CEO of Sondhelm Partners.  This post originally appeared on the Sondhelm Partners Blog.

The economic pressure that has weighed down asset managers over the last couple of years will continue to mount in 2019, especially as the tide of market-induced asset growth subsides. The established industry trends – rising passive inflows, fee compression, increased regulation, continuing platform rationalization – are inescapable, threatening profit margins of the least prepared asset managers. In response, firms are intensifying their efforts to streamline distribution costs and improve their offerings, but many still fall short of differentiating themselves among financial advisors, which could be the ultimate key to sustainable profits in this shifting landscape.

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Key Takeaways From Our 2018 Factsheet Production Study

By Rachel Totten

In 2018, we conducted a Mutual Fund Fact Sheet Production Study, where we analyzed 235 factsheets from 47 asset management firms of all shapes and sizes. A few factors observed included publish date, modification date and how the file was produced (manually or with automation). To find the firm’s production method, we turned to the metadata to show us what applications, software, or tools they were using to create the PDFs. After digging deeper into the metadata, we identified some key reasons why firms have longer production durations or later release dates. We were also able to make some observations about what drives efficiency, and the findings were pretty shocking. Read on to get the scoop!

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