The financial services industry is going digital at a fast pace. As clients move from traditional in-person engagements to the digital-first world, investment banks need to transform in order to grow alongside their clients. Today, 75% of investment banking clients expect highly personalized experiences with deal teams.
Although client expectations are evolving, bankers don’t need to work long nights and weekends to meet their needs. Digital transformation can help banks improve their client relationships by increasing productivity and efficiency through automation and artificial intelligence.
In this post, we’ll share how investment bankers can use digital tools and skills to engage their clients in the digital-first world.
What your clients expect
Today, clients want investment bankers to offer the same experiences they’ve come to expect on digital channels. As fewer engagements take place in person, your clients want highly-personalized experiences that allow them to build trust and stronger relationships.
The pivot from traditional in-person engagements to digital-first engagements isn’t simple. Learning to substitute a client dinner with an engaging, personalized email or pitchbook can take time. Enablement software can help.
Why enablement software is a must-have for investment bankers
Modern enablement technology can investment banks create personalized, digital experiences quickly, compliantly, and cost-efficiently, while also providing the means to measure its effectiveness for further improvements.
As it stands, investment bankers spend an outsized portion of their time managing manual processes. Personalizing decks and pitchbooks on a client-by-client basis is time-consuming and, without the right technology, bankers lack visibility into whether their clients review the materials.
With enablement technology, investment bankers can easily streamline routine, repeatable workflows, freeing up time for higher-value activities that require their expertise, build relationships and drive growth.
Develop digital skills
Investment bankers need to develop new skills as they transition to digital-first engagements. Learning and coaching tools enable them to develop the skills and knowledge they need to build stronger relationships with their clients.
Learning and coaching should be managed with investment bankers in mind. Instead of lengthy training sessions, short, bite-sized learning programs allow investment bankers to get up to speed, quickly and efficiently.
Digital sales rooms to engage clients
Replicating in-person engagement is one of the biggest challenges in our current landscape. Without the same human element, it’s difficult to read the cues and reactions of your clients.
Digital sales rooms (DSR) provide an alternative to in-person engagement. DSRs are a centralized hub where investment bankers can share with their clients all of the resources, content, and stakeholder information. As a result, bankers can create stronger relationships with fewer emails, all while delivering a better digital experience.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can improve engagement
Understanding how and when clients interact with your content has a tremendous impact on your client relationships. Every time a client opens and reads a report, valuable data is generated. Clicks on a report can indicate interest and the insights from your content can tell you what your clients want you to produce more of, as well as what needs to be tweaked.
AI-driven insights help remove the guesswork from content performance. If more clients interact with a specific asset, or if content generates more engagement at a certain time, AI can identify these patterns and generate intelligent insights regarding how and when to reach your clients. As you gather more data, over time, you can use AI to optimize and create more compelling content, as well as improve deal speed.
How Seismic can help
The Seismic Sales Enablement platform is trusted by more than 400 financial services organizations. Nine of the top 10 US Banks turn to Seismic to deliver a world-class experience to banks, investment bankers, and their clients through every interaction and touchpoint.
Our platform supports investment bankers by allowing them to identify relationships with limited engagement and find value-add content to share. Automation capabilities streamline content personalization such as pitch decks and quarterly commentary.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can engage your clients in the digital-first era, download our eBook, “Rewriting the Rules of Engagement for the Modern Financial Services Client.”
