The Roadmap to £10bn Podcast

EP 6: You Don't Own Your Audience: Your Distributors Do

Zeyro | Enabling Financial Products to Market to the UK Season 1 Episode 6

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 31:28

You don't own your audience. Your distributors do. So what exactly is a distribution strategy meant to achieve?

In this episode, Wayne and Gareth get into the practical mechanics of building a distribution strategy from the ground up: starting with the two things every portfolio manager needs to define before anything else: what the fund actually does, and who it's really for. They unpack why "our target market is everyone" doesn't survive contact with an actual marketing plan, how to build out three to five genuine client personas rather than one vague catch-all, and why a fund that works for retail doesn't automatically mean it works for institutions: but rarely the reverse.

They explore why messaging matters more than performance in isolation, because performance without context just invites comparison on cost and numbers alone, and why fund groups so rarely tell investors when a fund won't perform well, even though professional buyers consistently ask for exactly that honesty. They also dig into the difference between portfolio managers as people (rarely natural communicators) and portfolio managers as businesses (responsible for turning that into the right message), why platform listings come down to governance and demand rather than performance alone, why chasing likes and views is the wrong metric compared to building real authority and trust, and why something as unglamorous as a wrong OCF on a factsheet can quietly undo months of awareness-building.

The throughline: distribution isn't something that happens to you: even without owning your audience, there's real, meaningful work to be done to influence how they find you.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package

SPEAKER_00

You don't own your audience, your distributors do.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so that's an interesting proposition. Clearly there's a bit to unpack here between product and end customer, whoever that may be. What's the first thing that a portfolio manager ought to be thinking about here?

SPEAKER_00

You've asked for the first thing. I'm going to give you two things. And the first of those two things is what is it that your fund is doing, and therefore who is it going to do it for? So where is it investing? What's the outcome it's trying to achieve, and who is it that it's trying to achieve those outcomes for? So we've talked before about structure, the type of fund, and that will all start to determine who you can sell it to. Is it retail, is it institutional, is it alternative, is it mainstream? And so from there, now you can determine or start to write down a little bit more in detail who your target market might be.

SPEAKER_02

And aren't funds just targeted at everyone?

SPEAKER_00

That's the classic. So you ask people who's your target market, and for years the answer from fund groups has been, but it's everyone. You know, it's it's they they fill in a an EMT uh template and they go it's full retail, it's anybody that wants to buy it. From a regulatory standpoint, that might tick a box. But you ask any marketing professional if your target market is everybody, and they'll think that you've got a little bit simple. The reality is you need to know who it is you're actually selling it to. So you've got to drill down much more into that target market.

SPEAKER_02

And how much drilling do you think is appropriate here?

SPEAKER_00

Enough for you to have probably a range of maybe between three and five uh ideal client profiles or personas. So am I selling to a person on the street who's gonna make a direct investment via you know online platforms or whatever that might be without any advice, etc. Uh, or are you gonna be selling to the same kind of person but that's been given financial advice? So they're advised. Um, is it gonna be for discretionary managers? So the end retail client hasn't really got a clue what's being bought for them until they get their statement through and it's a professional making the decision, or is it just very institutional? So enough that you can picture in your mind and then commit to paper who it is that's actually pressing the buy button and saying, I want this fund.

SPEAKER_02

It's quite complex, isn't it? Because as a portfolio manager thinking about that distribution puzzle, there's almost no difference, there's little difference between a fund that you would say, Great, we'll go heavy straight to retail, and a fund, from a structural perspective at least, that you would go to institutional with. So what do you think like are the main drivers for that decision? And is it possible to cover multiple bases at once?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so if you look at it in one direction, is a re- is a fund aimed directly at retail investors capable of also being marketed and distributed to institutions? The answer is yes. So a broad use it's fund um that's got a very specific purpose or a very broad purpose can be sold to two groups of people. But in the reverse, it's not quite the same. If it's good for institutions, then clearly it doesn't necessarily follow that it's also good for uh retail investors too. So it's what demand is there likely to be in the retail market? If it's not a fund that's gonna be of interest, if it's something quite uh unique, if it's maybe quite an esoteric investment universe, if you just think, you know what, I don't think direct retail clients without advice should be buying this fund really, then it's probably not gonna be for uh be for them. The second point though is who you can actually reach and talk to. So there will be portfolio managers with enormous resource in a marketing and comms perspective, who can not only create comms that are useful to uh retail clients and retail clients, uh, but that are also capable of uh getting those comms out there, of making sure they're compliant, of supporting those investors, because if you've got more direct retail, then you've got to be able to support direct retail in some capacity, usually through through literature. Um so there's a few there's a few different bits and pieces at play there.

SPEAKER_02

So there's a bit around operations and can you support direct investment? There seems to be a bit around risk profile of the fund and a little bit around um sort of investment objective policy um world, which is like what does this fund do, how does it do it, and does this product have enough of a narrative to be able to be marketed to retail? Is that fair? Are those sort of the three main touch points?

SPEAKER_00

The the the investment of death and policies, not really in terms of its wording, more it's its um outcomes and how it tries to achieve them. So if you've got something that's investing in um let's say it's uh it's a direct commercial real estate product, maybe it's a long-term asset fund because of the liquidity of that kind of market, that's unlikely to be marketable to a direct retail customer base, particularly a large one at any scale, regardless of how good you are at talking about it to retail investors. So, yes, there's there is there is some some work to do on making sure the objectives and stuff fit for retail, but that's more about just explaining what it is the fund does, doesn't necessarily follow that if you've done that well, it's good for for retail.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so you're you're a portfolio manager, you've you've identified at least one or two, three personas. Maybe there's some overlap, maybe there's some difference there. What are you doing next in terms of distribution channels? Are you picking a few? Are you trying to attack all of them? What are the range of distribution channels that are available to you on that basis?

SPEAKER_00

So, like I guess, like any any marketing plan for any product or service, if you know who your target market is, then you need to know what the channels, the sales channels are to get to those people. And then you want to understand what it is you're gonna do strategically and from a tactical perspective to attract those investors in through the distribution channels. So let's suppose you've got a fund that is um perfectly good for direct retail investors. Um, what channels are you gonna have to use for those direct retail investors? Well, retail platforms are the absolute must. How do you get onto retail platforms? That's what we can talk about in a minute. Um, and how do you talk to end retail clients so that they have an awareness of your product, what it does, why buy it, why buy it when? Um from a from a comms perspective. The concept of having multiple client profiles is definitely one that you would run with. You wouldn't just say this is purely for direct retail clients because you'll never really get the scale for that. So you've got to have multiple different client types. So then you start to move up the scale a bit. Well, if it's good for direct retail clients, it's probably good for advice retail as well. Same infrastructure uh behind that, but then with a perhaps slightly different um set of platforms because they're uh advisor-only platforms that you go to, and then as you move up the scale into wealth managers, same again, but now you're now you're um supporting model portfolios, for example, or discretionary portfolios, so that's a a different kind of messaging, so it's still suitable for the retail, but now you're having to talk to a different, very different kind of buyer, so you want to profile those people, um, and then everybody wants to go for institutions, tier one banks, etc., pension funds, um, which is a much longer, much harder, much more detailed sale still. So, really, it's a case of looking at those different client types, profiling them, then working out how do you get to them. So, what's the distribution channels, how do you talk to them so that they know that you even exist and if you're any good or not, and then going back to look at your business inwardly, how do we actually support all of that? Because it might look like quite a lot.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so you've you've ended up there starting out with defining a persona, a target market, and by doing so it feels like you're saying it makes your life easier after that point, because yes, you've identified that this fund is perfect for that particular target audience, and we're going to attack that target audience through this channel, but everything about that fund has already been designed to meet that target uh distribution channels approach almost, and then in doing so, you can then finesse around the edges the marketing material that gets pushed out that way. Is that is that kind of fair?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, kind of. I mean, you can you can move it around. So at this point, you're unlikely, really, unless you're in the very new design stage, to change what the product does fundamentally to suit a particular target market, you're kind of you're already there. Um, unless this is a brand new design, then you can sort of iterate and circle back a little bit and say, let's tweak this so it's better for that audience that we want to attract. But a lot of the work actually is done in how you talk about the fund and how you present the fund and how you compare the fund. So the really, really important bit is the is the messaging, and what so many fund groups are really really poor at is talking about their fund in a way that resonates with fund buyers of different types, which is a surprise because a lot of fund groups are also fund buyers. If you've got um single strategy funds, you may also have multi-asset funds, but the people selling the single strategy funds might not always be talking to the multi-asset fund buyers or portfolio managers to understand what they want. So, what we've been doing is talking to a range of different professional institutional buyers, multi-asset, DFMs, etc., to ask them what what what do you look for? How do you how is your attention attracted? What is it that you want to hear? And we get quite consistent messages back from that, interestingly.

SPEAKER_02

And it's how much of that is about the message, how much of that is about the distribution strategy, and how much of that is just about, frankly, the performance of the fund itself?

SPEAKER_00

But the performance is important, but it's the performance in context that's important, which is why the messaging is critical. Because if you've got amazing performance, everybody wants to come and look at your fund, and then they drill a little deeper and find that it's because you took some really crazy big bets, you were going a bit off message, nobody could explain why you did what you did, but hey, the numbers are great. That is never that's not going to pass muster anymore. The uh flip side is that your performance might not be great for a period of time, and if it's constantly poor and underperforming a benchmark, if you've got one, I'm sorry we can't help you. You you need to change the way your fund is run. But if there are periods of poor performance, you need to be ahead of the message. So you need to be saying, and this is one of the things that came out from speaking to the professional buyers, not just when your fund will do well, but when will it not do well? So if you're particularly if you're short on a particular um sector of your investment universe for very good, legitimate reasons, it might be risk management or whatever that might be, and you underperform because that sector does well, well, that's okay, because we told you that's what would happen. And probably at some point you will find that that same sector is um one that you should have avoided for good reason and you did, and now it performs poorly, and now you're looking a lot better, so you're smoothing out volatility for those reasons. So that's why the message is important. It's not just here's my graph, here's their graph, here's my objective, there's their objective, our costs, their costs. If you just focus on those things, you will only be compared on those things. What you need to be talking about is more of the uh the process, the mechanics of the fund, and what conditions suit it, and importantly, really importantly, what conditions don't suit it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, okay, that's interesting. Uh and I think it sounds like, and it feels like, portfolio managers are usually very good at putting all the back-end operational stuff into place, making sure they've got a really good portfolio manager running the money, making sure their costs and charges might be in the right place, that their service providers that they've got are all in the right spot, and then they fail to kind of wrap all of that in a consistent, coherent, clear, and easy to understand line of messaging that that really helps people down the chain understand what what's happening and why? And actually, it um is it fair to say that um in this context you mentioned about um funds that might have taken a particular position and said it won't do well in this stuff? Is it fair to say that maybe people have avoided that kind of thinking because they want their fund to be attractive in all environments, or do you think that there's been a case of um people maybe do think about that stuff but just aren't very good at talking about it?

SPEAKER_00

It's probably a bit of both, actually. So if when we talk about portfolio managers, let's split it into two things. There's the portfolio managers, the people doing the job of portfolio management, and there's portfolio managers, the company that are also the distributors and the marketers of that product. Portfolio managers, the people. Yes, it's a difficult conversation to have. When are you not going to be very good? Because let's be honest, there's a lot of egos in that in that area, and there needs to be, you've got to be quite confident in what you're doing. Um difficult to draw that out, but there will be an answer to that, and that's that's with good reason. I wouldn't expect portfolio managers, the people, to also be superb, outwardly um impressive communicators who can talk to those points. There aren't many of those. So, really, then it becomes a job of the marketers, the comms, the salespeople, or whoever you might have in the team, or externals like us if you don't have that, to turn what the portfolio managers say into the right kind of messaging so that it's expressed in the right in the right way, so that now you are saying, Well, I've spoken to them and they they've said, Well, you know, we're not gonna be very good in these particular conditions, and so what you've got to do is work out how to put that into the right context. And no one's saying you have a one-pager that you email to everyone saying, Hey, guess what? We're gonna be really awful in these conditions. It's not, it's balancing out that against when you will be very, very good. And of course, you want to be a bit more on the very good than the very bad. Um, but it's yeah, it's not really I I wouldn't expect portfolio managers to be really great at picking stocks, bonds, funds, uh, and also a really good communicator as well. They they exist, but there's not necessarily that many of them.

SPEAKER_02

Which is funny because a lot of portfolio managers companies messaging is around filming or recording the portfolio manager talk about what they've done as a main marketing channel, distribution channel for information about that product, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, it is, and it'll probably be quite long form. Um, it'll probably be covering the same sorts of details in every video. So, all right, the the market conditions might change, your holdings might change, but you're probably talking the same metrics and the same sorts of things. Uh, there's a lot of focus as well on why you should be buying that sector now. And I think that's a little bit of a mistake sometimes because, particularly when you're talking to professional buyers, the FMs, uh wealth managed institutions, don't pretend, don't think that they don't know what your sector's about and when's a good or poor time to buy it. They they should I don't think you're going to have a very good job convincing them of that, unless it's a very niche uh sector. So, really, you want to be focusing on the hard-hitting key points. What is it that they're thinking about? I know this sector already, why would I buy your fund? Well, you'd buy our fund because it does these three things very well. It will underperform in these sectors, but that's with good reason. And we know that will happen because we have a really good process, and you can update around that, but those have got to be the the key messages. So, um yeah, as a as an update to investors, customer support, customer understanding, then those kind of videos are fine, but that's not marketing, that's supporting.

SPEAKER_02

And speaking of support and like support infrastructure around distribution in particular, so you obviously mentioned platforms already, so so thinking about that, but thinking about the other kind of distribution support channels that are available. How should a fund manager allocate its attention across those different channels?

SPEAKER_00

In terms of the different distribution channels, you kind of already know who you're trying to get to, and so then you should know what the different channels to them are. But the focus on the distribution channels themselves are concerned with how they uh determine whether your product can be listed there or not. So it becomes more of a technical thinking piece than a creative thinking piece. It's less of an issue for the distribution channels and like platforms, for example, um, about how well your fund performs versus competitors, as long as it's not disastrous. It's more about how well governed it is, the structure of it, how it's set up, who's behind it, who the parties are. And then most critically is is there any demand for it? So there's no demand, you're gonna have a pretty tough time getting anywhere with them.

SPEAKER_02

And are they are there any obvious trips that people can make when thinking about generating that demand or showing people that this fund might be the one that you buy at this point or just generally?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I mean it's it's not a fast process because you're competing with thousands of other funds out there. So you've got to, I think, have um all of your ducts in a row, which is why when we do the roadmap process with people, we're not just talking about one-dimensional pushes on a distribution channel in particular, or a very um one-sided view of the market and how we get to those people, or we're not just talking about how you do nice cons, you've got to look at it all in the round. So when you're trying to get this on a platform, you need demand, but to get demand, you've got to have awareness and interest, um, and only with those things can you then be on a platform. Part of the interest comes from whether you're on the right platform or not, so you're sort of trapped in this kind of catch 22 situation, and so you just have to attack everything on on all fronts at once. So lots of good cons, repeat it all the time. Um you try and get on the platforms that you want to be on, so there might be um parties or stakeholders in your distribution chain or your product chain that can help you with that. So you might have distribution agents, you might have a particular A C D that has good platform relationships, whatever that might be. Use that to try and get on the platforms at the same time. Keep building that awareness, keep doing the content. One of the biggest things I find I I think um there is a weakness in this industry is that there are lots of people who are very technically minded, super logical, they like process. That's how you become a good fund manager. And so what happens is you think about creating content, and then you want to see what the ROI is on that. So I've spent I've spent 10 grand. Where's what's my AUM number now, and what does that mean for revenue in terms of my AMC I'm receiving? Doesn't make a lot of sense. You're not gonna make a direct link like that, certainly not in the short term. This is all about getting the flywheel spinning um and creating that demand on lots of lots of fronts. So yeah, you might you might start doing weekly LinkedIn posts. It it could take you three, four, five, six months to get a lot of traction. You might be focused on how many likes am I getting. I don't think many people are gonna like it. Um, and so there are other metrics. And you've done some work on LinkedIn and exposure and some of the things that are worth worth looking at, haven't you?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's different ways of measuring success, right? And that's got to be true of any product or service. Um for a portfolio manager as the person, or even portfolio manager as a business, what you m ought to really be looking for probably is more around like um, are you a are you a source of influence, are you a credible source of influence, rather than am I reaching 10,000 people through my post? Uh, and being able to identify that um authority as a metric is one in itself that is worth pursuing because when you have authority, then people will trust that when you talk about your product that you know what you're talking about. And trust is the bedrock of a conversion for a sale, right, or for an investment. Once they've identified who you are, they understand what you do, then you've they've got to trust you at that point to make that investment. So identifying the right metrics across platforms and across marketing and distribution channels is critical. One of the things that you want to probably ensure you're doing is avoiding errors, particularly around um the way you talk about the fund, but also the data that you distribute right for that fund. Um, are there any areas in that context that you can see people can do work to help their distribution strategies?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so you so you're you're building exposure but not measuring it by views and likes, you're measuring it by trust um and how influential you are in that in that area. You're supplementing that with um even good old fashioned email campaigns, because you know if the right email arrives in the right inbox at the right time, then that's all it takes. You make sure that you've got the right uh distribution channels open, and if you haven't, that you're plugging away trying to get them so that when demand Arrives the doors ajar already. All of those things are looking great. You've explained your performance, you've got good pitch debt, you've got your five bullet points. A professional buyer sat there thinking, I really like the look of this, it makes me look a bit different. Everyone else is buying the same passives. Let me add some value here. They go onto their system to look at your fund, and to your point, your data's wrong. It's showing the wrong OCF, or it's not got enough performance track record, it only goes back three years when you've got 20 years and so on, and then all of that effort and expenditure all falls to pieces because of something relatively uh relatively minor feeling.

SPEAKER_02

Which goes back to that point earlier, right, about performance isn't the be-all and end all, it's part of the story as long as it's in context of everything else. But actually, everything else can be the thing that stops. Yeah. You can have everything else in place, but the performance can be the thing that stops it, right? Yeah. But not because it's bad, just because it's not showing correctly. It feels like a game, a whack-a-mole, right? There's always something that you need to be solving for at any particular time, whether it's your messaging, whether it's like the platform that you're distributing through, making sure the data gets there properly. And you've got, I suppose, a a problem to address in terms of control of your message and marketing as well, right? Like your pl your fund data will end up in places you don't even know.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Or your literature might be on a website in jurisdictions you don't even market in because it's just getting sucked out through bots or through people just raiding Morningstar or whatever to try and get fund info onto their website, right? So having control of your message is also really important and as time consuming. To your point, it doesn't have a great ROI. It's resource intensive, it's very manual. You can't just automate the correction of data across places, or you can't automate the taking down of your fund info from a website that is listing it in a jurisdiction you don't even sell in. So all of that actually is just a time-consuming job, but actually is fundamental, probably increasingly as you get through the stages of the roadmap growth, right? So stage one funds probably need a certain level of trust, but that comes from narrative and there's a bit of room to grow. But when you're at a stage five fund, right, that's that can't happen, right?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and um if you've approached this with us on the roadmap sessions and seen the number of things that we cover and it looks a bit overwhelming, then what you can try to do is work out what are the sort of three or four biggest wins. It's not necessarily low-hanging fruit, though there might be some, um, but what are the things that are gonna change things the most efficiently and most quickly? So if nobody knows about you, nobody knows your fund exists, then it sort of doesn't matter whether your data's any good or not, because nobody's trying to find it anyway. So make people aware that you you exist is the first piece. If they know you exist and you're not on the right platforms, then you keep generating that content, keep generating the the awareness and therefore the demand, and try and get it on the right platforms, which is no mean fee, it's not easy, there's DD to be done and so on, but be prepared for that. If you've got those two things nailed on, and then it turns out your data's wrong, then all of the first two points start to look a little bit pointless because anyone who's you know sat with a client doing an illustration and the OCF pops up for the wrong share class on your uh lower cost version and suddenly it looks expensive, they're not gonna they're not gonna do it. You have to hope they're gonna come and ask you the question and not just walk away from it. So you've you've got to look at you know what's the what's the most important bit. It's like it's if if loads of people want to buy your fund, if the message is like superb and you've got loads and loads of interest and someone says, Oh, your OCF's wrong on Morningstar, it's not a bad place to be, right? You can just fix the fix the OCF on Morningstar and then hopefully the floodgates open. But um, yeah, there is a there is a bit of prioritization that needs to be done.

SPEAKER_02

And I suppose I think the thing we've seen probably from the roadmap sessions is the solution is normally very obvious. And in fact, the problem's actually also quite easy to identify. I've been surprised actually when we've done these things how easy it is to find where the the blocks are. But actually, sometimes having the permission almost or having a strategic narrative around the fix is actually the thing most people need to get it over the line and get it solved for. Is that is that fair? Is that is that how you've experienced those conversations?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's um it's joining up the dots between the distribution of data and the impact that has on sales. There's not many people who will do that. The the the data point is often a problem that arises later when someone already holds the fund. That's when you learn about it. You you don't know how many people haven't bought the fund because of a data problem because they don't tell you, they don't really ask. The um point about it usually being really obvious is that it kind of is to us because we're looking across the whole piece, whereas a lot of businesses are very, very busy, the people in them are super busy just running the business, and so it's not often that you have I don't know, compliance people, marketing people, salespeople, portfolio managers, etc., together, um looking across the whole piece, and it doesn't have to be everyone in those teams, it can be a subset of those different teams, but you'll often find that one person or one team in the room with us is nodding their heads and the other one are wondering what you're talking about, and then you get further down into some different sector, and the other people are now nodding their heads, and the first ones don't know what you're talking about, and it's just kind of joining those dots, which why it's why it seems quite clear, but um that's because in your in your in your when you're in your lane or in a little silo dealing with your piece, if if if um I don't know compliance teams are worried about the the the kid and the fact sheet and the emt going out on time being correct, they're not thinking about the distribution impact. When the distribution or the salespeople are sort of aware of this thing called the MT, um but to them it's just a rule that says you've got to fill a spreadsheet in, but might not be aware of what impact it has when you're trying to talk about the fund and sell it?

SPEAKER_02

Okay, now I'll end with one more question. We spoke about at the start about that you don't own your audience, that your distributors do. Does that mean that all of this distribution strategy stuff is kind of pointless, that you just let the market take its course, let your distribution agents do their thing, let the platforms do their thing, or can you meaningfully impact their work?

SPEAKER_00

You definitely can meaningfully impact your work, and I think we're getting to a point, probably, certainly for certain kinds of funds where the opportunity now is bigger than it has been for some time. So a lot of a lot of fungal, a lot of this industry has allowed the distributors to control things and the market to control things. They've not owned any messaging, they've just let the numbers do the talking. So what happens? People think, well, I'll just buy passive. Because I can't be wrong then, can I? Because I do what the market's doing, so all I have to decide is which one they're cheap, so you know my value justification is pretty easy, isn't it? Because I've bought the cheap stuff, um, and that's where we are now. There's tons and tons of assets flowing into passive stuff, and don't get me wrong, I have nothing against them. I have a lot of them myself, my own pension, right? I think they they do a really good job, but there are other funds out there, and there are other products and other sectors where you don't really want passive, you don't want to buy everything in that area, and you do want some brains behind this stuff that are picking and choosing the right thing, and you should be willing to pay for that. But if no one's telling me it's there, then I'm not gonna do that, are I? Am I? So a lot a lot of the work that we do is relevant to any fund type: passive, active, thematic, broad, geographic, multi-asset, whatever you want to do, whatever it is, very relevant to all of those. But the ones where you can actually make the biggest uh jump in momentum are the um slightly more specialist or thematic or the actively managed uh funds because there you've got much more that you can do and say about uh the funds of the sector, you know. You can you can talk stories instead of just ratios and performance percentages and costs. You've got more to say that differentiates. But if you don't do that and most don't, then you're just another fact sheet. And so basically, it's only going to work if you get all of those things done in tandem.

SPEAKER_02

Well, thanks very much for joining us on the Road to Ten Billion podcast. We'll see you next time.