BLOG. 3 min read
Knowing where to focus an asset manager’s sales resources—as well as where not to expend those resources—is essential to building effective and efficient advantages over competitors. If done correctly, it is likely the most impactful distribution benefit of leveraging market data.
In our "How Can You Beat Your Competition If You Can’t See Your Competition?" post, we considered the benefits of visualizing opportunities within a sales territory to easily see how well your sales team is performing compared to competitors and how SS&C Distribution Solutions can help you do that. Let’s drill deeper. Leveraging data available from SS&C to visualize opportunity, we can compare the performance of a sales team to their competitors at advisor offices.
For example, in our "Industry Top Offices for Mutual Funds" study based on our WalletShare data, we compared the top 10% of offices to the bottom 90% to examine whether the 80/20 rule is at play in the industry (it’s more like a 90/10 rule) and how a thoughtful approach to data is essential when determining which offices or advisors to focus on. We ranked offices on gross sales, net sales and assets, as well as within specific asset classes, channels, categories and geographies. We looked at market share, concentration, sales growth, and average number of managers, as well as a number of other metrics. The results uncovered some interesting insights into what makes a top office and how shifting the lens of how you prioritize sales targets can make a big difference. For example, just because an office is ranked in the top 10% by gross sales doesn’t mean that it is also a top-performing office in terms of net sales.
To be truly targeted, a distribution team should prioritize offices based on their specific products and distribution strategy. These are some questions to think about:
- Would being able to benchmark your performance at your focus firms against competitors help you reframe decisions when building focus lists?
- Would finding sets of advisors where you have an immediate competitive advantage help build more robust focus lists?
- Would being able to examine your sales performance against a designated set of peers in your territory help you better define your strategy?
- Would being able to see top opportunities for each region or territory make it easier to plan in your territories?
As an example, a fixed-income-centric firm focused on retention may want to restrict the universe of opportunities to the top advisors/offices that have the best fixed-income net sales. They may also want to restrict their opportunity set to only the distributors that they work with. They could look at rankings against peers within their defined territories to hone in on those advisors that are most likely to generate efficient sales.
Consortium members in our WalletShare for Mutual Funds service can now do exactly that with customizable “Top Offices” reports. With a custom report, we can overlay your criteria into screening for offices that meet your objectives. We work with clients to control how the data is ranked, how it is filtered and grouped, and which metrics are compared in a combination that works best for their firm. This can include one or more of the options listed below.
Being able to understand what data is available, how it can be used, and how it can benefit your sales organization can transform your distribution strategy. Contact SS&C to get the conversation started around custom reports to help you identify your top offices and to assist in using data to help move your sales organization in the right direction.
