I had the distinct privilege to participate on a panel at the recent 4th Annual Mutual Fund & ETF Distribution Summit in Boston on April 26th. The topic of our panel was Effective Wholesaling Methods. The panel had a good mix of representatives from research, asset management, and vendor solution firms.
Reliability on data is a common theme when discussing effective wholesaling methods and how best to execute on those strategies. Enabling wholesalers with strategies and tools is only as good as the underlying data. In today’s world, ‘Big Data’ has become its own marketing campaign, but we feel our most successful clients are the ones who focus specifically on ensuring the data they do have is accurate and reliable. When there is confidence in the data, the sales team can execute on the strategies using the tools provided to them. They spend less time sifting, sorting, and combing through data and more time focused on cultivating relationships and selling product.
Many of our clients have a Master Data Management (MDM) strategy. The transactional data that resides in MARS is an integral part of the overall MDM strategy. In additional to the sales and asset transactional data, these clients also leverage MARS to integrate 3rd party data from Market Intelligence sources and RIA data subscriptions. Leveraging our team to cleanse, resolve, aggregate, and integrate these additional data sources produces a centralized location to house and access this information. In the end, this allows our clients to decide how they want to marry and package this data along with other relevant information such as marketing, research and product material so they can deliver a clear concise package to their wholesalers allowing them to execute on their sales strategy.
In the end, the importance of leveraging the data you have, ensuring it is clean, accurate, and reliable will be the cornerstone to any effective and successful sales strategy.
Dave Halligan
