A Few Notes From Our Tailored Shareholder Report Webinar

“Marketing has a very large place at the table.”

“There are a whole host of requirements [around ADA compliance] that aren’t going to be fun.”

“Having good discipline… is especially important as fund boards… make inquiries about the due diligence you are performing.”

“I would not want to be the asset manager that misses the deadline”

In our recent webinar, “Are Your Systems Ready? 6 Questions to Answer About the Tailored Shareholder Rule,” we covered a lot of ground across the areas of compliance, operations and technology, and project management.

In a free-flowing one hour discussion that ran from compliance to operations and technology to project management and execution (view the whole thing here) justice , here are a sampling of the things we discussed.

Client Success Story: A Marketing Team That Can Now Market

Synopsis: $27+ billion asset manager engaged Synthesis to automate their fact sheet production after failed attempts at automation with other vendors. The result?

Quarterly time-to-market with updated collateral fell by 70%, with a corresponding decline in internal resource allocation
Because they were no longer focused on sales product support for 24 weeks a year (the total length of time spent managing quarter-end data production), the Marketing team could focus on core marketing functions
They were able to fully invest themselves in projects which added significant value to the firm’s overall brand
As a result, management approved higher budgets, more staffing, and a significantly broadened project portfolio.

It is easy for asset management marketing and sales teams to understand the benefits of data and marketing collateral automation.

Why? Because automation:

Saves time
Improves efficiency
Reduces opportunity costs, and
Enables stronger alignment across the marketing, sales, and compliance departments.

Understanding is one thing, but convincing upper management to add budget line items for new relationships is often tough – especially when their impact often escapes the usual bottom-line KPIs.

Synthesis has an asset management client with $27+ billion AUM, whose marketing director faced exactly this sort of pushback when the relationship was initiated. Here’s their story:

Beyond Alignment – Marketing & Sales Collaborating Through Content Automation

Guest post by Marianne Hewitt from The Growth Strategy Group.

The conversation about investment marketing and sales alignment began over a decade ago. After ten years, less than 50% of organizations surveyed said they aligned appropriately to achieve the financial results for which they are accountable.

The resistance persists because achieving the synergies between marketing and sales is not viewed as transformational. It does not get the top-down executive support it requires. Nor does it get the governance structure that major transformation initiatives require to succeed.

There was a point in time when alignment between the two organizations made perfect sense. In today’s digital world where buyers prefer digital self-service (Figure 1) and remote human engagement, it is no longer the right way to think about the relationship between marketing and sales.