After the end of every quarter, marketing teams at asset management firms seem like characters from Greek mythology.
No, they’re not the beautiful and powerful gods and goddesses up on Mount Olympus. They’re more like Sisyphus. He’s the guy the gods punished by making him roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this activity for all of eternity.
When it comes time to produce quarterly updates, marketers can certainly relate to Sisyphus’ situation. Like him, they’re forced to do a difficult, manual and tedious task over and over again.
The quarterly update challenge is common among asset management and wealth advisory firms. Specifically, the problem is the time it takes their marketing teams to get accurate and updated materials into the hands of their salespeople. This includes:
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Gathering, compiling and triple- and quadruple-checking items such as fund performance and AUM numbers, performance notes and market commentary, and fund manager biographies
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Manually cutting-and-pasting to create the right subset of items that need to be included in all the different deliverables that are required
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Managing the materials on the round trip through their firms’ Compliance departments
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Finally, steering all of this through production and into distribution
Fast forward several weeks, to the end of the next quarter, and the whole process begins again, with the boulder at the bottom of the hill.
For firms, this is a time-consuming and therefore expensive process. And even for the best, most energetic marketing people, this tedious quarterly chore can be de-motivating. But more importantly, it pulls them away from more strategic, creative and productive marketing activities.
For sales teams, this largely manual process means they have to wait for several weeks after quarter close to get accurate, up-to-date marketing materials. This lag time means lost or delayed opportunities, and competitive disadvantages.
Asset management and wealth advisory firms can address this quarterly update problem. Leading firms are doing just that by using a crop of relatively new, sales enablement solutions. These systems can help firms cut their turnaround times for fully updated and compliance-approved marketing materials from several weeks to several days.
These systems give marketing and sales teams a faster and easier way to create, modify and assemble the right content for the right customer at the right time, and deliver it the right way.
Help your firm’s marketing team members to be more god-like, and less like the guy pushing the boulder. With the right sales enablement solution and strategy, your team will be able to not only crush the quarterly update boulder, they’ll eliminate the hill.
