Large Sales Force Produces More Effective and Highly Customized Retirement Plan Proposals using Automation

Summary:

An internal sales team, selling retirement plan management services to plan sponsors, produces elaborate custom pricing proposals for each potential client.

The Opportunity:

Customized proposals lie at the heart of efforts to market retirement plan solutions to plan sponsors.  For one large mid-market-focused plan management company the goal became to significantly streamline custom proposal generation and to still be able to quickly handle data, product, pricing, and branding changes without significant redevelopment effort.  Additionally, their implementation of Saleforce CRM should be integrated into this process enabling close-rate analysis and other operational reporting.  Proposals need to be produced in real-time and support both electronic and print delivery.

The Solution:

Synthesis provides an ideal systems integration point for this solution, connecting multiple systems together and providing users with a straight-forward process.

• The resulting workflow integrates data from multiple systems with dynamic composition and on-demand print ordering.
• Leveraging the existing Salesforce.com implementation, users begin with a new or existing Opportunity.  From there, they link to a new Proposal request – a custom UI provided.
• Leveraging the existing pricing approval process, users upload an Excel file containing approved client-specific pricing parameters and calculations.
• Users make a few additional selections and can then immediately preview the proposal.
• As soon as the proposal is finalized, the user links to the print ordering system, provided by MerrillConnect, and relevant data is automatically uploaded back to Salesforce.com.

The proposal itself consists of a custom cover page, custom pricing pages, an explanation of services and fees (which is customized based on selected fund options), fund fees and performance based on fund options and dynamic disclosures.  When delivered in hard-copy, the proposal is included in a custom-selected folder of educational material with applicable supplemental brochures determined by product selections.

In addition to handling multiple product lines with different business rules, this system has been able to flex with pricing sheet changes and new product launches.  Fund data is provided by a feed from Morningstar which is loaded and staged by a quarterly process that is almost completely transparent to the sales team.

Results:

A pilot version of this system to support a new product line was launched in under two months.  The fully integrated system supporting all product lines was up and running shortly after that.  The sales desk is now able to easily respond to pricing requests and has been able to focus on product and messaging improvements to further improve their sales.

For more details on this case study or to learn more about our automation solutions, get in touch!

Getting Buy-in from IT for Fund Fact Sheet Automation

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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Global Asset and Wealth Manager Uses Data Automation to Achieve Marketing Goals

Summary:

Our client is one of the largest asset and wealth managers in the world, with $1.5 trillion assets under management. In order to maintain their prestigious reputation with their global investors, accurate data and a quick time-to-market are of the utmost importance to the executive marketing team.

The client’s goals were to:

• Increase the marketing department’s ability to turnaround website and marketing collateral materials quickly
• Reduce their overall vendor/solution count and related costs
• Identify and resolve data issues quickly
• Clarify the role of the internal solution
• Create more reliable flows of data both to and from the internal data warehouse

The Opportunity:

As with many financial services firms, this mutual fund company found itself with a couple key challenges: 1) An internal product data warehousing project which was sub-optimal for supporting marketing needs. 2) An external data automation specialty firm that was very rigid and unresponsive to the evolving needs and timelines of the marketing organization. In response to these challenges, Synthesis had the opportunity to develop a data management solution to help them streamline their data aggregation process, reduce errors, and improve time-to-market. In order to do so, we first identified the client’s needs:

• An efficient and accurate solution for processing a large amount of fund data – over 1 million data points per quarter.
• A solution for feeding clean, consistent data into the Synthesis automation platform, which produces over 35 document sets every quarter.
• Accurate and timely data to meet critical deadlines.
• A scalable and flexible solution that allows for any future changes or modifications.
• A solution that could easily integrate with other 3rd parties that handle other aspects of their communication strategy.

The Solution:

Synthesis’ data management solution (DMS) presented the ideal solution to this challenge. Based on the strength of our product and our excellent client services team, the DBS was selected to act as the principal data aggregator for all mutual fund product data. Synthesis conducted a thorough analysis of every data point to create a scalable solution that could be easily updated and modified without being cost prohibitive. We worked hand-in-hand with the client to define business and data validation rules to deliver clean, accurate, timely and consistent data to their marketing team. It pushes out data to the Synthesis publishing solution and also delivers custom feeds to the website, and the internal data warehouse.

The Results:

The marketing team is no longer bogged down by their data process. The responsibility is taken off of marketing and put back in the hands of the data owners.

• Clean, consistent data: The marketing team never has to worry about inaccurate or inconsistent data. Data is perfect and delivered on time.
• Faster turn-around times: As soon as each data set is ready, it is automatically delivered to the Synthesis automation platform for updates to marketing documents like fund factsheets and product guides, which has improved turnaround times.
• Improved workflow: The high visibility of the  platform has greatly improved the client’s internal organization and workflow structure.
• Custom reporting: Reporting functionality is customized to track any statistics required by the client including total number of data points reported, number of funds, number of share classes, and more.
• Reverse data-feed functionality: The clean data produced by feeds into other 3rd party vendor systems to ensure consistency across all of the client’s communication channels.