A new sales and marketing platform for asset managers aims to bolster internal communication with Web applications borrowed from consumer culture and the media. The SAVO Group product – actually a significant upgrade to an existing sales enablement system – is designed to help managers maintain compliance, centralize sales efforts and share crucial information between teams.
Observers say the platform addresses genuine needs in an industry that has struggled to make effective internal use of the Web for marketing and relationship management
SAVO says its product, dubbed “sales enablement 2.0,” drives savings in cost and time for users. But clients and prospects might expect to see some benefit, too, if managers can parlay new technology into a more consistent, tailored marketing strategy.
“At the end of the day, all we’re trying to do is drive better conversations between sellers and buyers, or relationship managers and buyers,” says executive v.p. Jeff Summers, SAVO’s chief marketing officer.
With clients like AutoTrader.com and FedEx Kinkos, SAVO’s broad focus could put off institutional managers, which tend to favor technology solutions crafted exclusively for their market. But the company has seen traction in the space, counting Morgan Stanley, William Blair & Co. and Marshall and Ilsley’s (M&I) wealth management division among its 65 clients.
The on-demand platform is hosted on the Web, with the interface of an online dashboard. It connects to a firm’s existing client relationship management (CRM) system and any repository of compliance-checked information, such as a library of PowerPoint slides or pages of a pitch book, to grant a sales team easy access to contacts and marketing materials.
But this sixth-generation upgrade to SAVO’s previous offering, Sales Asset Manager (SAM), has learned quite a bit from the Web innovations of the last few years. The system is searchable, and with a series of questions an automated feature can assist users who know the slide they want but can’t remember it by name. That’s a nod to sites like Amazon and Netflix.
“Rather than 250 things appearing from keyword searches, they would see five to seven [files] that our best sales people use in those situations,” says Summers.
The platform has also taken on some of the features of social networking sites, such as Facebook. Users can contribute slides and documents or can customize existing materials on their own. They can provide feedback on the quality or effectiveness of those materials, and a rating system – which seems to parallel the Web community Digg – allows the most helpful materials to make their way to the top of the pile.
Team leaders can monitor sales efforts with an analytics feature that keeps track of users and the files or functions they employ.
Marketing teams can also tap resources outside of their division. Summers suggests a firm’s analysts, portfolio managers or economists could use the system to respond to questions from the sales force or to post opinions about broad investment trends.
Marketing support manager Gloria Vitro, of William Blair, says the new rollout is “pretty phenomenal,” although her firm has not yet migrated. User-friendly features take a lot of the work out of building PowerPoint presentations, she says.
“It frees us not only to spend the time that we should be spending on the content management but also on the development of the content for new products and services,” says Vitro. “We can focus more on the creative process and the content management rather than worrying about the production end.”
Licensed users will migrate to the new system at no extra cost.
SAVO’s offering seems to be unique – at least as an integrated platform. Analysts say a few managers have built some of these functions, either through in-house technology teams or outside vendors. CRM providers, for example, have begun to build more interactive features into their products.
But so-called Web 2.0 applications have not taken hold in the institutional space overall.
In a December 2007 report, technology consultancy kasina suggests asset managers are akin to “twenty-first century Luddites” because they’ve viewed Web 2.0 with a jaundiced eye, even as other industries embrace the new technology with enthusiasm.
“Asset managers continue to believe that compliance and other restraints make implementation of Web 2.0 concepts and technologies impossible or prohibitively complicated for them, outweighing the myriad potential benefits,” the report says.
Only a few managers have warmed to interactive web features like wikis, weblogs and message boards. Wells Fargo is one. “They’ve seen great internal adoption,” says kasina consultant Lindsay Geimer, largely because Wells Fargo set up its internal blogging platform but imposed no restrictions on its use, allowing employees to develop the system on their own. “They’ve just had this very organic growth within the company.”
Gabelli Funds also runs a blog, as does T. Rowe Price. And one institutional manager – which kasina cannot name – runs a trader blog on its client Web site.
Industry trends may push more firms in that direction, however. Callan Associates senior v.p. Nicole Torkelsen says large managers are looking for ways to centralize their communications in order to impose greater control and consistency on their sales and marketing materials, much like a boutique would.
That’s led some managers to reverse course on outsourcing, which analysts have said for years could help firms to cut costs on technology. Firms may still outsource the grunt work of their sales efforts – such as printing materials – but Torkelsen expects them to hold on to content, which might spark demand for products like SAVO’s.
“I think that people are figuring out ways to develop this type of system and technology internally, so they’re using much more of their own internal Web site to be able to house a presentation template, or to house different things,” she says.