Monthly insights for investment marketing and sales professionals
February-March 2015
Everyone gives lip service to it, but few achieve it consistently. This issue of Excess Returns explores what is perhaps the most effective, least practiced strategy in all of investment marketing: brevity.
With best wishes,
Liz Hecht
Founder, Principal and Director of Research
Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in research and presentation strategy. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.
This happens all the time. I start working with a client on delivering a presentation that I originally helped create years ago when someone says, “It’s too long. Can we make it shorter?”
“Shorter?” I think. “Given the complexity of the story, how could it be shorter than the original version, which was 15 pages?” Then I get a look at the latest version and see that 15 pages have somehow mushroomed to … more than 60 pages! Making matters worse, the pages are now groaning with the weight of excess information. There are titles and subtitles, bullets and sub-bullets, sidebars and explanatory “straplines” sitting like giant footnotes at the bottom of every page. Such length and clutter are untenable. Neither the audience nor the presenters themselves will be able to focus on (or even find) what matters.
Winning the War for Brevity
Presentation books for investment companies are by definition complex. They need to cover philosophy-process-people-performance (a formula) while simultaneously providing a non-formulaic answer to the question, “How is your strategy different from that of competitors?” They must serve as a foundation for in-person meetings while also functioning as stand-alone documents.
Given these competing priorities, brevity is a premium commodity in the investment business. My company is often engaged to help investment managers achieve differentiation in a crowded field of competitors. What I have learned is that brevity itself is a potent form of differentiation. Here are some suggestions for achieving brevity consistently:
Start cutting. Cut pages, bullets, sub-bullets, sidebars and superfluous design elements. Cut unnecessary adjectives such as “very” and “highly.” Won’t “rigorous” get the point across just as well as “highly rigorous”? Keep in mind that people tend to add adjectives when they are uncertain. “Rigorous” is a tired and overused word in the investment business; tacking on “highly” only accentuates its poverty.
Cut out this old saw. “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em” is responsible for a lot of the useless verbiage that I am hired to clean up. While judicious repetition has its place, observing this old saw not only builds in unnecessary repetition, but also can result in unwittingly talking down to your audience (“They just told us that and now they’re telling us the same thing again. They must think we’re idiots!”).
Knowing when to cut may be the most effective
instrument in your company’s marketing toolbox.
Make what’s left work harder. Do you really need a strapline or sidebar? Sometimes, yes, and sidebars can be a productive addition. But too often a strapline or sidebar would not be necessary if the page already had a strong title and subtitle.
Leave yourself something to say. The tragedy of pages overloaded with excess detail is that they leave presenters with nothing to say. It’s all hanging out right there on the page. Anything a presenter might say by definition becomes repetitive. When crafting these pages, it is important to think about the related speaker notes. Every bit as important as what is on the page is what is not on the page.
Be selective — remember that the book is not your presentation. You may be reading this and thinking, “Gee, Liz, thanks. That’s nice. I know my book should be shorter, but I have no control over the length of the book.” This is not the best of all worlds. But take heart. Even with a Moby Dick of a book, you can still give a concise, on-point presentation. How? By preparing carefully, by having something different to say and by selecting only a few key pages to cover. Practice with a timer to be sure you and your team finish at least five minutes ahead of schedule, to allow more time for questions.
Be brief during the Q&A. Business about to be won can be lost in the Q&A. Presenters frequently spend too much time answering one simple question, robbing time from other, possibly more important questions. Spending too much time on one question sends two negative messages: (1) you are incapable of respecting client time constraints and/or (2) you are talking too much because you have something to hide.
Being brief requires understanding the enemies of brevity. They are, respectively: (1) the fear of leaving something out, (2) lack of preparation, as leaving the right things out requires planning and (3) ego, or the belief that what you have to say is more important than your client’s schedule.
In preparing to write this, I read a book about brevity in the hope of being able to recommend it in this newsletter. But I cannot in good conscience recommend the book because it is, paradoxically, too long — and littered with tedious repetition. The point is, brevity is a scarce commodity, difficult to achieve and equally difficult to maintain. Consistently winning the war for brevity can mean winning business — even when your firm’s investment performance is less impressive than that of a competitor.
Elevator Speech?
Another reason many investment company presentations are too long is they lack the bedrock foundation of a well-crafted short story. In the industry, this unfortunately has become known as “the elevator pitch” or, worse yet, “the elevator speech.” At Alpha Partners, we avoid both “pitch” and “speech” because they take the focus off what a good short story should be: a springboard to a conversation — and because the concept of making a speech in an elevator is, frankly, as my British friends would say, cringeworthy.
So what’s my short story? Here is an example:
I see you are with Alpha Partners. What does your company do? Alpha Partners specializes in investment marketing. We help investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management through the power of a strong story well told. We focus on competitive differentiation, which is very difficult for many investment companies. What does your company do?
Like a successful multiproduct investment firm, my company does many different things well. My priority is to find out which things may be of interest to a specific listener before I embark on a big long blab about what we do.
Just Right!
There is a Goldilocks component. On the scale of too little-just right-too much, one can still get it wrong with too little. Alpha Partners has been engaged to add information to a book when insufficient investment process detail resulted in the deciding vote going to another firm.
For more about the merits and rewards of brevity, please visit the following articles in Art & Science and War Stories on the Alpha Partners website:
Alpha Partners LLC Marketing for Excess Returns®
1062 Oakridge Road South | Park City, UT | 84098
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Monthly insights for investment marketing and sales professionals
January 2015
Investment marketing and business development professionals often want to know what their competitors are doing. Where are other investment firms seeing the most results for their marketing dollars — in advertising, webinars, social media, client events or some combination of these efforts? This issue of Excess Returns considers an underutilized marketing strategy that is proven, low in cost and unlikely to be implemented effectively and consistently by competitors.
With best wishes,
Liz Hecht
Founder, Principal and Director of Research
Alpha Partners is an investment marketing firm specializing in research and presentation strategy. Our goal is to create alpha (excess returns) by helping investment firms win, keep and diversify assets under management.
Once upon a time I met with a product manager for a large investment company. He had recently run a search for a marketing firm to help his company tell a stronger story about its competitive advantages. For various reasons, his firm decided not to move ahead with the project. But this gentleman was kind enough to get back to me with a detailed response to my proposal. So I invited him to a breakfast meeting to thank him again for considering Alpha Partners — and to get more feedback about how our proposal had stacked up relative to those of competitors. He told me that he had preferred the Alpha proposal over that of our closest competitor, and he explained why. He also told me, incredibly, that many of the marketing firms he had contacted never followed up with him at all, or promised to follow up with a proposal and never did!
Since this meeting, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of following up: how difficult it can be to follow up well consistently and the consequences of being fitful in one’s follow-up. We live in a world where follow-up can be sporadic, delayed and in many cases nonexistent. My clients also often tell me that they wish their business lives were more clearly focused on outcomes: feeding back and following up, closing the loop and defining the next step.
Are you doomed to inhabit a land of lost opportunities and loose ends? Or does a world where follow-up is rare give you and your company a competitive advantage?
We can all agree that the business world we wish for is not the one we’ve got. Many more people can be counted on to avoid, delay, dismiss and forget than those precious few who follow up on a consistent basis. So let’s step back, take a deep breath, survey the landscape and consider how to wrest competitive advantage from a world where follow-up is increasingly rare.
Have You Got What It Takes to Follow Up Effectively?
Do you have the right people? Follow-up tends to occur one on one between individuals, which means that the quality of the follow-up depends largely on the people. Does your firm have the right people in place to follow up diligently on every new business opportunity? In the early stages of a start-up, the principals of the firm may be able to follow up effectively without a dedicated marketing or sales professional. But as your firm grows, you will need to allocate the resources required for effective follow-up, and that means people who will follow up with your same energy, discipline and care.
Do you have the right materials? People often come to my company looking for help with their new business presentations or client presentations. We rarely receive inquiries about what I think of as follow-up presentations — the meeting after the introductory meeting or the semifinals preceding a finals. There is an optimal sequencing of information that should occur depending on where one is in the follow-up process. To follow up effectively, developing the right materials is critical.
Do you have the right mindset? If you are the sort of person who follows up diligently, then you are confronted almost daily with the enervating ambiguity of an unresponsive world. Important emails go unanswered and vital communications remain unacknowledged while new business proposals languish in limbo without the courtesy of a response. (Someone once told me that she learned her firm had not been selected for an investment mandate by reading about it in a trade publication. She and her team sent in a proposal and participated in several in-person presentations and neither the consultant nor the prospective client had the courtesy to make a short phone call or send an email to thank them for their time.) In this environment, successful follow-up requires a system combined with ingenuity and a mindset that is at once humble, optimistic and resolute. To follow up effectively is at once an act of faith and empathy: I believe my efforts to reach you are important and something good will come to both of us if I persist (that’s the faith part), and I totally understand that you have been too busy to contact me (I know what that’s like!).
Have you defined the next steps? One needs to ask constantly, "What is the next step?" Every meeting, call or email should embed a next step or desired outcome. This should happen not only in a new business development context but also as part of the everyday life of a firm. I like to think that I am good at following up, but in researching this article I kept thinking of situations where my own follow-up could have been faster, more thoughtful and more diligent simply by linking a series of clearly defined next steps. Often, especially given the delays that can occur between intention and action, following up successfully is a matter of taking good notes, concluding each set of notes with a brief summary of next steps and then referring back frequently to said notes. It sounds boring and humdrum, but I am often surprised at how grateful people are when I start a call with a concise summary of the last call — and when I conclude a meeting by briefly confirming next steps. I also am amazed when seasoned investment company professionals will conclude a meeting with, "Well, that’s it for now" or "I see we are out of time. Do you have any questions?" — as opposed to confirming and summarizing a set of next steps in relation to a desired result.
When should you not follow up? In a new business development context, following up successfully does not mean dogging every opportunity — only the right opportunities. Some clients may not be a good fit for you and your organization for any number of reasons. You need to carefully weigh the nature of the opportunity against the time and cost involved in responding to an RFP, preparing for due diligence meetings and traveling with several people to a finals and a semifinals.
So whatever happened to the prospective client who was kind enough to join me for breakfast? Shamefully, I do not know because I did not follow up. I failed to define and implement a next step. But it’s a brand-new year and I have a new system that will prevent such lax behavior in the future!
A System for Following Up
Having a system takes the frustration out of following up. Here are some questions that will help you develop such a system or improve your existing approach. How many times will you follow up regarding a new business inquiry before you risk seeming like a stalker? (I say three maximum, but the number does vary with the situation.) What materials do you plan to use at each stage of the follow-up process and how will you customize these materials to different audiences? What is your process for providing a steady stream of valuable information to new business prospects such that they come to see you and your firm as a resource? How do you share information with your team, ensuring that others learn from your experiences with a given prospect or consultant? Does everyone on your new business development team regularly update your CRM database, sharing information that could be helpful in preparing for future meetings? Do you maintain a list of new business and consultant meetings with defined next steps noted after each meeting and a clear understanding of who will implement each step? As you start to act more systematically — in developing new business and in all aspects of your life — you are likely to realize the joys and benefits that come to those rare few who follow up.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
The following passage from Greg McKeown’s great book, Essentialism, confirms my suspicion that people today are so busy tweeting and texting and blogging and posting that they sometimes fail to follow up on business opportunities right under their noses:
"I ran into a former classmate of mine years after graduating from Stanford. I was on campus doing some work on a computer in one of the offices when he came over to me to say hi. After a minute of pleasantries he told me he was between jobs. He explained a little about the job he was looking for and asked if I could help him. I started asking some questions to see how I could be helpful to him, but twenty seconds into the conversation he got a text on his phone. Without saying a word, he looked down and started responding to it. I did what I typically do when that happens. I paused and waited.
Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. I simply stood there as he continued to text away furiously. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t acknowledge me. Out of curiosity I waited to see how long it would go on. But after two full minutes, which is quite a lot of time when you are standing waiting for someone, I gave up, walked back to my desk, and went back to my work. After another five minutes, he became present again, interrupting me for the second time. Now he wanted to resume the conversation, to ask for help with his job search again. Initially I had been ready to recommend him for a job opening I knew of, but after this incident I admit to feeling hesitant to recommending him for an interview where he might suddenly not be present."
This passage comes from my favorite chapter in the book, which is entitled: "FOCUS: What’s Important Now." This book is a godsend for busy people who need to prioritize their time by focusing on what is essential. But Essentialism is less about time management tactics than about developing a mindset that makes effective time management a way of life.
Knowing when to cut may be the most effective
