This follows on from the idea of tech being something all your teams have access to and take ownership of. But this should be true of all aspects of running your firm.
You can’t afford for your teams to be too one-eyed and focused on their specific task – as that can lead to confusion. When teams understand what is happening across the board then it serves clients much better.
This is most urgent in relation to sales and marketing. It’s vital for these teams to come together as they are working on a common cause – that of raising and retaining assets.
Savvy marketers introduce cohesive and collaborative practices that bring sales and marketing together and effectively turn them into one cross-functional team, with each department understanding, appreciating and even participating in the work of the other. This creates an asset-raising powerhouse. Because when sales and marketing align, the sales cycle shortens, and efficiency and productivity rise – as more leads are successfully closed and fewer opportunities are lost.
Company-wide integration
Although it must be your priority, you must go wider than sales and marketing integration. Because everyone who works at a fund – whether they are talking to clients, analysing data, handling payroll, or making the lunchtime sandwiches – must understand the ethos of the company and how it works.
And, again, this has been brought into focus by the work-from-home revolution that started in 2020, which showed the importance of coming together as a team and improving inter-departmental cooperation. Suddenly, if you were in marketing – for example – you could no longer rely on a colleague next to you to know what’s going on in the sales department – it was down to you. So, everybody discovered the need for contacts and cooperation across a firm. In the most successful funds this has led to greater cooperation between marketing, sales, operations and investing, with a consequent boost to AuM.
Clever Recruitment
As little as twenty years ago the most important person you could recruit to your fund – at least in sales and marketing terms – was a relationship manager.
A good relationship manager could make a major difference in terms of client relationships and asset raising.
But fast forward two decades and the role of the relationship manager is rapidly becoming redundant. Deals are no longer being done in Mayfair restaurants and corporate boxes, they are developing in the digital ether. OK, a sales conversation is still needed to tick the final box, but the hard work is being done during an investor journey that is now almost entirely digital – with many different touchpoints along the way. It is not the linear, face-to-face journey of old.
This means that arguably the most important person you can now recruit to your firm is a data scientist – someone who explores data, makes predictions and finds structure. It is these skills that will increasingly drive your marketing strategy and operations, so recruits with this type of background are an investment in future growth.
A data scientist will complement and build on the skills of the rest of your marketing team, not replace them, so you must still recruit those with a more traditional marketing background.
But another thing to remember in regard to recruitment is that it’s wise to look for people from a diverse range of backgrounds. They don’t necessarily need an in-depth knowledge of the asset management sector. That can be useful, but it shouldn’t be a pre-requisite, as a reliance on sector experience severely limits your recruitment. Having different people from different professional backgrounds in your team means you benefit from fresh perspectives and don’t become too inward looking.
It’s far more important that a data scientist, for example, has experience and knowledge of data, automations and analysis, than the ins and outs of asset management.
