In brief
Welcome to our blog series on what you (the asset manager) can do with the Behavioral Benchmark.
Across five articles, we explore how you can now dollarize asset management business intelligence, cater for regional differences in behavior, make science-based improvements to your client journeys, connect your distribution strategies, and alleviate clients’ survey fatigue.
To kick off, this article explores how you can use the behavioral benchmark to connect your distribution strategy.
Effective distribution strategies stimulate behavior
Heads of distribution aim to attract and retain clients, and they do this with strategies that combine marketing, sales, and service.
Looking at their task from the behavioral perspective, marketing is about capturing and holding clients’ attention, sales is about getting them to say ‘yes’, and service is about encouraging clients to stay with you.
These are fundamental behaviors that you can observe and measure.
But what if you could hold their attention for longer? Get them to say ‘yes’ in greater numbers? And, once onboard, get them to stay for longer and deepen their relationship?
You can, and the first step is to design your distribution strategies that way.
Re-design your distribution strategy to encourage specific behaviors
Every human can stimulate behaviors in others and, at Accomplish, we believe this should be the purpose of an effective distribution strategy.
For example, the behavioral benchmark indicates significant variation in firms’ sales conversion rates – or, in plain speak, getting prospects to say ‘yes’. Indeed, at the latest count, the winners are converting twice as many sales opportunities as the average.
No one can make a client give them assets to manage, though, so how are these out-performers doing it? Quite simply, they have re-designed their strategies from being about what they want from clients, to focusing on the behaviors they want to stimulate. Campaigns should create purposeful spikes in web visits, holding visitors’ attention for longer and translating this awareness of your services into more targeted actions that let them evaluate you more fully. These include reading more detailed analyses, attending events, downloading podcasts, requesting meetings, issuing RFPs, and requesting pitches.
This scenario highlights the key behaviors that prospects tend to display on their way to saying ‘yes’. We also help asset managers conduct the same exercise for existing clients, whom they want to come back for more (increase product per client ratio) and stay for longer (extend client tenure).
The winners, therefore, are re-designing their distribution strategies to focus on achieving the client behaviors they need to be successful.
Now connect your distribution strategy
Execution is everything, though, and success takes more than just a well-designed strategy.
Once you have identified the behaviors you want to stimulate in your clients, you need to allocate them and begin measuring so you can track progress.
This monitoring will tell you the effect individual teams have had on client behavior, as well as the overall effect of the strategy. Industry-level data from the benchmark will then tell you how your firm compares at each client touchpoint and, indeed, whether you are even in the same ballpark as your peers.
Once you begin measuring, you can also use the benchmark to look for relationships between the many input behaviors (like visiting a website, attending an event, or requesting a meeting) and the few strategic and ‘dollarizable’ output behaviors (like saying ‘yes’ to your pitch).
At this point, not only will you have an effective distribution strategy, you will also be able to connect it across multiple teams by tracking and managing the relationships of input behaviors from one team to an output behavior in another.
This is not theory
Because actions speak louder than words, we are seeing more and more Heads of Distribution, Distribution COOs, and Heads of Business Intelligence engaging in the behavioral benchmark.
Indeed, at the leading edge, we are feeding behavioral benchmark data into firms’ BI systems so they can perform the tasks discussed above as efficiently as possible.
If you are interested in learning more, download a brochure so you can reflect on it in your own time.
The full blog series
In our opinion, not all asset management business intelligence is equal, so we hope you enjoyed this article and that it got you thinking about the client behaviors you will need to stimulate to achieve your targets and how you can connect your distribution strategy.
If you would like to learn about other things you can achieve for your firm with the behavioral benchmark, here is the full blog series:
- Your client behaviour is now dollarizable.
- Regional differences in client behavior.
- Science-based decision-making.
- Connect your distribution strategies.
- Alleviate clients’ survey fatigue.
Book a demo with the founder of the Behavioral Benchmark if you would like to see it in action.
