How Can Funds Use A CRM To Raise And Retain Assets? Part One

Fund marketing has gone digital - a long trend that has been sent into overdrive by Covid-19.

I know, you get it. more than a year into the pandemic and resultant lockdowns – everyone in fund marketing gets this.

But are you doing anything about it?

It’s a situation that means now, more than ever, you need a capable and functioning CRM. And you must produce and distribute a lot of content - emails, videos, social, webinars etc – that your digital audience finds useful, thus producing valuable engagement data for your CRM.

Sounds simple. But actually implementing this – at least in an organised and profitable way - is not.

So, in this series of articles I’m going to break through the confusion that surrounds the issue and show you how to use your CRM in a way that can both raise and retain assets.

Let’s start with a look at what your sales team actually needs to know in terms of prospect/client engagement data, as that’s what ultimately leads to new AuM.

On a broad level this is boiled down into four key points:   

·        Who are the low hanging apples amongst your prospects – those who are highly engaged with pretty much everything you send to them, so are ripe for the picking by sales.

·        Who are the existing clients who want more – customers who are invested in one fund but are engaging with content related to things they are not invested in, thus presenting a cross-selling opportunity.

·        Who are the prospects that have suddenly perked up - and are reengaging with your content after a dormant period, suggesting they may be thinking of investing once again

·        Who are the customers who could be on their way out – they have stopped engaging with your content, suggesting they are a redemption risk and need a call from sales.

This, on a very basic level, is what your CRM is for – getting critical data to your sales team.

And you can harness the power of marketing automation to make this process quicker and easier for you. Automated systems can take information from websites, email, social media accounts, investor portals etc and bring it all together in your CRM – then drill down into the data to establish who are the best people for your sales team to be targeting.

But behind this lies a multi-layered approach to data gathering and analysis, which I’ll start to unpack in the next article in this series.