The old days of a salesperson telling their boss that ‘I’ve had seven meetings and it’s not even 11am!’ are over.

These days it’s all about the quality of meetings, not the number, according to senior figures in UK distribution.

Our article ‘Know more and stop calling: What selectors want from sales’ sparked an enthusiastic discussion online. The key messages from selectors were: make contact infrequently, understand clients’ businesses, know what not to offer, and know your products well.

Amplify set out to get the other side of the story: do fund salespeople find it easy to deliver what these selectors are asking for? Crucially, are groups setting the right targets when it comes to KPIs?

Here’s a summary of what we were told:

• KPIs based on counting meetings achieve little.
• Winning business through pushy tactics can backfire.
• Better data means salespeople are the last part of the buying journey.

The points raised by selectors hit a nerve with salespeople who, according to Fergus McCarthy (pictured above), Abrdn’s head of UK investments wholesale distribution, wanted it known that it’s the ‘bad eggs that invariably and inevitably get the headline’.

Breakfast club

What has worked well for sales in the past might not be the right approach for today as technology drives change. The demand for salespeople to prove their productivity through the number of calls or meetings could now be out of date.

‘The focus should be on the quality of engagement, not the quantity,’ said Canada Life Asset Management sales director Adam Creed (pictured above).

This sentiment was shared by John Alexander, Castlefield’s head of client engagement. Earlier in his career, Alexander was monitored not only on the number of meetings but also on how many of those took place at breakfast.

‘Salespeople soon find a way of creating meetings and then you’re almost forcing people to go to McDonald’s with you or somewhere else,’ he said. ‘It’s just ridiculous.

‘There’s got to be a more client-centric way of looking at KPIs than: “How many phone calls have you made? How many emails have you sent? How many meetings have you done?” That’s a bit old school.’

Alexander (pictured) said fund selectors were educated technical people, capable of doing their own analysis. ‘It means they will not be easily swayed by traditional sales methods, which they can see straight through.’

However, he said the industry had been changing for several years, and not just because of the pandemic.

PGIM Investments’ head of UK wholesale, Robert Hall, was thankful that ‘the old way of doing things in sales is dead’. This includes a preoccupation with appearances and how salespeople dress, as was the case when he first started over a decade ago.

‘In my first role, I was sat down and told there are only three key rules of sales: one is appearance – polish your shoes, wear double cuffs and under no circumstances have a beard. Two: buy the beers. And three: know your stuff, so have product knowledge.’

Beware the quick win

Today the role of salespeople is more nuanced: understand how you can help, and what your place is within the overall value chain.

John Stainsby (pictured), head of the UK client group at Axa Investment Managers said the aim of KPIs should be to reward good work, not to push salespeople to get money in quickly. Too much hard selling will, ultimately, damage your reputation and lessen the chances of valuable repeat sales.

‘It’s not about a one-off sale and I think if you go down that approach of pushing too much, too early to somebody new in the industry, they’ll only be able to pick the low-hanging fruit, and it won’t be the best.’

That pressure and enthusiasm to sell leads to frequent calls and annoying emails, which selectors end up ignoring and blocking. Hence ‘the tap goes off totally and it won’t come back’.

Stonehage Fleming’s head of UK distribution, Steven Brown (pictured above), said sales managers needed to be included in the day-to-day sales communications rather than delegating it all to their sales team. He thinks this would help end unrealistic sales targets ‘so they can report back to their business [on] the needs of their clients.’

‘What you need to do, is [have] the right amount of communication and an effective way to [reach] the right people. It can’t be measured by numbers.’

Abrdn’s McCarthy (pictured below) remembers being told to always wear ties in meetings and never wear brown shoes in the City – ‘no brown in town’ as the saying goes.

He questioned the ‘construct of these expectations’, comparing them to presenteeism: that those who appear busy at their desks at 7am must be more productive than someone arriving two hours later.

The ultimate goal for sales, he said, was to build long-lasting and meaningful relations in a partnership-kind of approach.

PGIM’s Hall hoped fund buyers appreciated that modern salespeople are trying to add some value and not just ‘flog products’. He said the relationship between salespeople and buyers must become symbiotic.

Alexander added that once upon a time salespeople used to have the upper hand in their interaction with selectors, as they possessed all the information and fact sheets.

‘But now there are so many tools [and] so much online functionality. There are so many search systems like Bloomberg, Morningstar and Citywire that [help] people do their own research without necessarily needing to speak to a salesperson. The salesperson is coming in at the later part of the buying journey.’

Advice

The sales chiefs we spoke to know their onions, having more than 100 years of combined experience. Here’s their advice on how to get (and stay) ahead in the game.

Communication is vital

Introduce yourself as the key contact person. Sounds obvious, maybe, but fund buyers Amplify spoke to said they often feel frustrated having to waste valuable time looking for the right person to deal with. Alexander said salespeople must keep an open line of communication, especially during tricky periods such as the market sell-off this year.

Know your product inside out

Displaying a significant degree of knowledge about your offering is non-negotiable, according to Stonehage Fleming’s Brown. He warned salespeople to avoid ‘highlighting their fund against another fund’. Instead, highlight it against a collective peer group. ‘Fund selectors pick funds for the reasons they’ve picked them. It’s nothing to do with you why they’ve picked the funds,’ he said. ‘So [don’t say] I have funds better than that fund. Don’t go down that route.

‘Fund selectors want to pigeonhole that fund in a certain place – and sometimes a sales guy will say: “It’s brilliant all the time.” No, it’s not. Nothing is brilliant all the time.’

Two ears, one mouth

Having an outgoing nature can be a great strength, but know when to listen more than speak, said Hall (pictured). ‘We have the privilege to be doing what we’re doing, [having] access to some of the smartest people on the planet. So, it’s important to have a hefty dose of humility,’ he said.

‘We are looking after people’s livelihoods at the end of the day, [and] we all have a lot of pressure on our shoulders, whatever we’re doing. But there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be enjoying what we’re doing as well.’