If you’re the head of distribution at an asset manager how do you benchmark your team in a world where their clients have massively cut back on face-to-face meetings?

Well, before you even start, you need to know exactly what your clients now want and expect.

Asset managers and fund buyers alike are grappling with new working arrangements and sales heads have widely differing opinions on what they should be asking of their teams.

There are all sorts of questions. Do you set a quota for face-to-face meetings? What should be virtual? Do you now talk about both as ‘meaningful interactions’?

To get some clarity about how buyers are operating in this new flexible world, we asked 100 fund selector delegates at Citywire Berlin how much face-to-face interaction they needed and how much they were happy doing online. Below we compare these with the answers we got to the same question at our previous two pan-European events.

We asked: Would you invest in a fund if you’d never physically met the manager?

The responses charted above bear closer analysis. The segment who prefer to meet a fund manager but will make exceptions has consistently been the biggest over the period covered by our surveys, while the number insisting on an initial meeting seems to be declining.

But as always, there’s a caveat. While 27% say virtual gives them everything they need, this is a sample of fund analysts attending Citywire’s biggest events. So regardless of what they say, they clearly care enough about in-person meetings to spend two-and-a-half days at an event that is all about meeting fund managers face-to-face.

So what about the ongoing interaction, once you’ve made a breakthrough in that first meeting?

We asked: If you’re already invested with a fund manager, how many meetings would you expect a year?

This in-depth chart shows that, more or less, most fund buyers want one in-person meeting a year. How many virtual interactions they want alongside that varies, along the range of one to four, but the new normal is one physical meeting a year.

A very small group of outliers expect to meet a fund manager four times a year, while a larger slice say four virtuals is all they need – but keep in mind our comment on the 27% in the first chart above.

Talking to heads of distribution, while some are setting quotas and others avoiding any kind of contact target, it’s clear that life has changed from the pre-pandemic world where thresholds were seen as unnecessary.

A final point that may give you pause for thought. One of the most senior fund buyers attending Citywire Berlin told us that he’d stopped coming to big events some years back, and generally sent team members instead.

But post-pandemic, he’d found he just didn’t get to see enough people anymore, so he realised he needed to get out to events and meet fund managers again.