In brief
How can Marketing flow seamlessly into Sales? See your pre-sale client experience as a set of client behaviors you can stimulate and convert. This way encourages collaboration and avoids a disjointed and leaky funnel. You will know your funnel is working when clients give more time and money to your brand than to the average asset management firm. This is precisely what the Client Behavior Benchmark will tell you.
The pre-sale client experience
Seen through the lens of client behavior, the pre-sale client experience (aka the sales funnel) comprises ‘Gifts of Time’ and a ‘Transfer of Money’. While the sales funnel only includes one dollarizable client behavior (buying), clients’ preceding digital and in-person engagement includes many gifts of time.
From the seconds they spend clicking on your corporate emails, to the minutes they give to watching your investment-related videos, and to the hours they dedicate to attending one of your client events or reviewing your response to their RFP.
Within your asset management organization, ownership for the processes that support these parts of the pre-sale client experience switches between teams – often multiple times. Looking at client behaviors from the smallest to largest, Marketing typically owns email marketing, social media, and web engagement; Sales owns relations with distributors and investment consultants; Marketing owns events; with ownership returning to Sales for RFPs, relationship management, and pitching.
Marketing and Sales must be strategic partners
You mustn’t overlook this shared ownership because (for good or bad) your clients have a single pre-sale experience with your firm. Therefore, marketing and Sales must work together as strategic partners to create a single, coherent, and outperforming sales funnel.
However, unless you deliberately monitor the performance of your funnel from top to bottom, the natural state will tend towards disjointedness, abnormal client leakage, and sometimes even distrust between teams.
Therefore, adopting an ‘organization first, client second’ approach is a mistake: if your pre-sale client experience underperforms at engaging clients, they will give their time to your competitors … and then their money.
Only Marketing has the client insights that Sales needs
What does success look like?
Because most clients are not ready to buy, Marketing’s first role is to create and maintain awareness of your brand in ‘tomorrow’s clients’: show them how to engage and promote attractive opportunities and innovations that, when the time is right for them, stimulate their engagement.
And because we can all stimulate behavior in other people, Marketing’s other roles are to convert one Gift of Time into another and to identify the ‘superfans’ who give abnormal amounts of time to your brand. At Accomplish, we hypothesise that the superfans will be those who display the most ‘follow-through behaviors’ – these are actions that escalate a client’s level of engagement and advance their position in your sales funnel.
Highlighting these superfans to the Sales team ensures Marketing activities flow seamlessly into Sales and informs the way business development staff prioritize their time and effort.
You will know your funnel is working when clients give more time and money to your brand than to the average asset management firm. This is precisely what the Client Behavior Benchmark will tell you.
Four essential ingredients for an outperforming sales funnel
Achieving outperformance certainly involves many things, but Accomplish’s first-hand insight into how outperforming asset managers work makes us believe it is almost impossible without four essential ingredients:
1. Measurement of the performance of your pre-sale client experience in time and money. Without this, you will be guessing, which is the path to trouble in a data-led era. But how do you know what to measure? Use the free CX data dictionary – the Helix© – that the firms in the Client Behavior Benchmark maintain to ensure consistency and best practices.
2. Comparison – your results against other asset managers:
- See your firm the way clients see you and be informed about the relative strengths and weaknesses of your marketing and sales capabilities.
- Because the Client Behavior Benchmark now exists, you no longer need to guess what a good outcome looks like for a client.
- You can now discover, at the click of a button, if others are outperforming you. You can be sure they will be trying.
3. Optimization – use the Benchmark to optimize your activities into a single coherent sales funnel, minimize client leakage, and increase the value your pre-sale client experience provides. You can then use the information to create the case for future budgets that will enable you to continue outperforming.
4. Collaboration – cross-functional internal organizational groupings that bring Marketing and Sales together to perform their shared responsibility for the pre-sale client experience. Examples include an executive-level Client Committee and underlying working groups that coordinate day-to-day activities and campaigns.
3 steps to CX excellence
We hope you found this article useful. If you would like to act further, here are Accomplish’s 3 steps to CX excellence:
- Book a personal tour.
- Check the readiness of your CX data.
- Pinpoint, in time and money, where your pre-sale client experience out and underperforms at engaging clients – because every time you outperform, you keep your sales funnel wider for longer.
