We’re trying out a new survey approach for identifying and monitoring industry trends.  Our first survey addresses the provision of Fund Communications before, during and after the current market disruption.  You can complete the survey here and if you leave your details we’ll email you a summary of the responses once the survey is complete.

The recent and ongoing challenging market conditions have seen Investment Managers adopt a range of new Fund Communications techniques and tools.  Alongside this, the macro-level factors of increased technology adoption, pressure to generate efficiencies, and the emergence of Generation Y clients and staff can be seen to change the dynamics for Fund Communications in the future.  The purpose of the survey is to establish how far these new techniques and tools have gone in the industry, and to see if they will persist beyond the current volatilty.

Click here to take the survey - it shouldn’t take longer than a couple of minutes.

We’ve worked with several clients who have implemented Email Marketing tools and are already experiencing the ROI benefits in just a matter of weeks.  This trend will continue as firms begin to understand the reduced cost of directly engaging with both their key and wider markets, especially as scrutiny on ROI becomes even greater.  With sufficient segmentation and targetting, email can be a very effective channel for maintaining a conversation in a B-to-B industry - one that ensures relationships are nurtured when budgetary pressure may have reduced activity in the past.

The ROI argument for Email Marketing is still compelling despite the volumes of spam that we all receive.  The slide below shows how Email Marketing compares with other channels - a whopping 150% greater ROI than it’s nearest off-line competitor.  While there is a danger in assuming "lies, damned lies…" to be correct - these are US figures and we operate in a notoriously technophobic industry - the recent market conditions and the effectiveness of email market updates and webcasts have demonstrated the benefits of providing accessible content and directing people to it as a way of building a firm’s brand and reputation, as well as protecting existing assets and revenue.

In terms of developing the ROI case further, the critical factor is turning Email Marketing into a prospecting tool and prompt for business conversations.  In our discussions and strategy projects, we see several common and key factors to address:

• developing a relationship between Sales and Marketing.  Our experience is dominated by brokering a set of successful processes and agreements between Sales and Marketing departments.  Sales do very little for too much reward in the eyes of Marketing, while Sales view Marketing as just choosing colours and spending vast amounts on continuous brand relaunches.  Email Marketing and Campaign Management provide a set of processes leading to value that can only be extracted if the traditional dysfunctional relationship can be negotiated to a position of relative trust
• training sales and support staff to utilise digital channels better.  The conversation based on someone clicking a link and visiting your website can go one of two ways; the ‘creepy, big brother is watching’ way or the ‘I’m glad you’ve called, I was just thinking about that’ way.  The main factor in successfully translating clicks into positive business conversations is the understanding of staff around why people are clicking and how they expect to be addressed
• use the technology to automate administration wherever possible.  With lists of names in the tens of thousands, an array of response types and status to track, and activity and progress to be monitored, there is potential for a lot of administrative overhead.  This overhead can weigh down business efforts to the extent where the potential value is ignored in the face of too much required effort

The Client Reporting announcements keep on coming out which is good news for the vendors and firms involved - the software and processes need to keep on evolving, even in the challenging times.  A couple of questions spring to mind:

• how many similar announcements will we see in 6 - 12 months time?  As discretionary spend comes under sever pressure, half-year delivery schedules will need to show value sooner
• what does the next evolution of Client Reporting solution look like, with the emergence of web 2.0, social networking and content management?  The effort to bring data and processes under control will be leveraged by these technologies to the advantage of firms and their clients

Congratulations to Vermilion and Jupiter in the meantime on bringing some control and efficiency to the Institutional Reporting space.

Turning this into a business view, there’s not doubt that projects aiming at improving or introducing new practices and processes are dwindling.  The question is whether the benefits of SaaS (and Open Source to some extent) are compelling enough to get projects restarted.

At Tomtom Consultants, we think that the proposition of technology that is easy to acquire and an almost-immediate configuration to the business needs is a compelling proposition; one that builds on the benefits that Matt points to.  It represents the quickest and cheapest way to get a successful change made to the business structure and processes.

It will be interesting to see if our industry, prospects and clients follow the same route through the coming challenges.

Another Client Reporting decision that fits with the overall strategy of Client Communications as a component of the strategic technology platform.  The use of a single solution across multiple geographies will introduce even greater efficiencies as each implementation leverages the experience of others.  We’ll keep an eye out for when the implementation has been completed and will report back.

With salesforce.com, each release provides something for developers, administrators and users that makes life a little easier - either a new feature or a fix for a bug (or an idea as salesforce.com would like to brand them). It might not be that all your issues are solved overnight, but it does feel like the software improves with each release without the IT cost that is usually involved.  Of course, your subscription pays for the process so they don’t come for "free" but the upgrade is far more frequent and immediate than most traditional software clients/users experience.

The details of the Winter ‘09 release have been released on the successforce.com website now - www.salesforce.com/products/previews/winter09/ - and we’ve picked out some of our early highlights:

• Schedule and Email Reports; at last, we can get MI in front of Senior and Exec Management at the time they need it, and Lotus Notes users will be able to see the images on dashboard emails
• Campaign Influence Reports and Remove Campaign Members; some welcome improvements to Campaigns although there are many more that we would like to see to help Marketing make the most of the platform
• Cross-object formulas for self-relationships; Parent Account has always been infuriatingly close without being usefully in reach.  Now we can actually do something with it.
• Workflow and activities on Many-To-Many Objects; There are a lot of Many-To-Many relationships in our industry - IFAs and Networks, Consultants and Pension Schemes - so any functionality that helps us interrogate these is great.  More please!

There are many more developer improvements to the force.com platform which we’ll work through over the coming weeks.

The Winter 09 release details have only just been announced so we expect more features to become apparent as we begin to apply them to business challenges.  Our Support package includes a detailed review of release features and we’ll publish some more thoughts and ideas after the October release date.

We’re undertaking a vendor selection for a client seeking a Marketing Automation and Email Marketing solution.  They want to introduce efficiencies into an already very busy Marketing department while improving the service that they provide to the wider Sales and Servicing communities.

Potential vendors

Based upon an initial criteria of integration with salesforce.com CRM, the shortlist comprises the following:

All of these vendors have some integration with salesforce.com and Investment Management experience.  However, this is a very immature software category in the Investment Management industry.  The salesforce.com integration is a key factor so there are no other vendors in play at present.  However as the industry and software matures, maybe there are some emerging solutions that need to be considered in future.

A wider net

So has anyone experience with other Marketing Automation vendors?  Are there some that don’t currently integrate with salesforce.com but are a strong enough proposition to be considered in isolation? We welcome all suggestions and comments.  In return, we’ll happily share our experience of Marketing Automation within the Investment Management industry with you.

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Microsoft CRM has been an on-site offering for a while and VARs have provided hosted versions as ‘competitors’ to the salesforce.com offering.  However, in Financial Services we’ve seen little headway made by the On-Site offering and the leverage provided by the SaaS community around salesforce.com and it’s new Cloud Computing offering, force.com has increasingly steamrollered the hosted approach – not just for Microsoft but for all ASP providers.

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In general, when carrying out vendor selection or market research projects, our experience is that firms select Microsoft when budget is tight or when the “We’re a Microsoft house” badge carries sufficient weight that IT overrule any other factors.

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However, the release of an SaaS offering, albeit from the same software family, has to be considered separately from the legacy offering.  It’s now in the land of the application alongside salesforce.com, Google docs, eBay, Facebook and the rest.  It will be interesting to see how it fares.  On first glance, our analysis draws the following initial conclusions on the Microsoft CRM Online solution.

+ves

• SasS offering is now available
• Weight of Microsoft marketing and budget behind it – business users are bound to see some advertising if Microsoft throw their dollars behind it
• 99.9% of companies have a relationship with Microsoft – Linux desktop or OpenOffice are yet to make that big a dent
• While it’s not IBM, most IT departments are comfortable with buying Microsoft

-ves

• Change the name – it’s too long and doesn’t make it clear what it does.  It tells us what it is, but to the business user it falls behind salesforce.com in terms of who uses it and how.
• VAR-led distribution > the ability to execute depends upon the quality of the VAR not Microsoft, and there are a lot of VARs with little or no CRM experience in the network
• Little penetration of the Investment Management market
• Development resources required for onsite application
• SaaS is very new
• Microsoft limited track record of providing Enterprise-level applications