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The following post is courtesy of Diane Harrison who is principal and owner of Panegyric Marketing, a strategic marketing communications firm founded in 2002 specializing in alternative assets.
Ask any start up or growing fund manager looking at raising more assets about the importance of effective communicating with prospects, and they will all agree that having a clear program of informative channels that get across the fund’s value and strategy is a top priority for the sales effort. Where many of these diligent fund managers go off track, however, is in the delivery of this information. Too often, they are concerned with describing the what: What is the strategy approach? What are the market research activities? What risk controls are in force?
While this information is a component of what prospects need to learn, it must come wrapped within a more important focus: the why? Why is this strategy approach an opportunity for them at this time and into the future? Why are our access points into these market segments better/more suited to our investors’ ultimate results? Why have our risk controls delivered the downside protection every investor desires from their asset managers?
Investors are less interested in what you can do when compared to why that will matter to them should you do it on their behalf. We all know this, but somehow, a great majority of new managers put too much of their focus on selling themselves and their skills without connecting the vital dots to how these actions relate to the people whose money they are investing.
LOOK WITHIN
A good way to run a self diagnostic on your selling communication platform is to review each area where there is client or prospect outreach and see where the focus lies. For example, if you’ve recently re-engineered your web presence to attract new visitors and capture better data about the site traffic, ask yourself why this benefits the ultimate goal of retaining solid clients and bringing in new ones. Provide these users with market insights, investor tips or updates, educational articles, and other such reasons for coming to the site to learn something while they are giving the fund manager information about themselves.
If you think now is the time to craft a better sales pitch as you extend your reach out to a wider band of potential investors, take some time to think about prior conversations you’ve had with investors who decided to invest with you, and what convinced them to come. Did they feel you solved some form of investment goal they had, or increased their ability to gain skilled exposure to the markets you cover? If you can describe the client need or want and how you are a solution to fill that situation, others will be able to see their own needs or wants potentially being fulfilled by you as well.
Task the individuals in your firm who are responsible for outreach, whether it’s sales or client relations, with capturing examples of these types of investor satisfaction episodes, and make a habit of having regular reviews internally of the growing list. You will be surprised at how well these illustrations can point your firm in the direction of doing and saying more of what clients want versus what you ‘think’ they might want.
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