For many smaller investment firms, growing a fund’s assets can be an enormous challenge, typically constrained by labor-intensive lead generation and qualification processes, lengthy sales cycles, and limited resources. One Boston-based firm found a way to eliminate these bottlenecks—and nearly double their assets as a result.
Robeco Investment Management wanted to generate greater publicity and advisor interest in its Robeco Boston Partners Long/Short Research Fund. The fund seeks long-term capital appreciation with reduced equity market risk by actively investing in long positions in undervalued stocks and taking short positions in overvalued stocks.
“In terms of execution, technical integration, content flow, professionalism, client service, and, most importantly, lead generation, Advisor Perspectives more than exceeded our expectations.”
-- Jon Davis, Principal, Intermediary Sales, Robeco Investment Management.The fund’s performance had been impressive. The problem: not enough people knew about it.
Over 65% of the fund’s business comes from intermediaries, most of it from RIAs and consultants. Since the fund’s inception in 2010, Robeco’s small intermediary sales team had relied on traditional outbound marketing approaches to contact and qualify leads, but as the fund grew this process was becoming increasingly inefficient and time-consuming, according to Jon Davis, Principal, Intermediary Sales for Robeco Investment Management.
Robeco decided that they needed a more targeted, top-down strategy that would get the word out about the fund to large numbers of qualified advisors at the same time.
For the solution, they turned to Advisor Perspectives.
“We had been working with Advisor Perspectives marketing team in the past on promotional initiatives, and we’ve always been very impressed with their hands-on approach,” says Davis.
After discussing various alternatives, Robeco and Advisor Perspectives agreed that a webinar would offer a cost-effective platform to help the firm achieve its three main objectives:
- attract a broad range of qualified advisors, wealth managers and consultants;
- use the webinar to educate attendees on long/short investing and generate greater awareness of the fund; and
- gain access to detailed information about webinar attendees that could be used for follow-up sales activities.
It was important to create a compelling case for long/short investing without appearing to be overly promotional. To achieve this goal, Robeco chose a roundtable format, featuring Long/Short Research Fund manager Jay Feeney and two investment analysts from Fortigent, LLC, a nationally recognized investment research firm, to provide a deeper perspective on the long/short strategy. The Advisor Perspectives team handled all of the pre-production logistics.
“We had never hosted a webinar before, and the Advisor Perspectives team was at our side through every step of the planning process. They provided useful feedback about the content, created a production schedule with clearly defined deliverable dates, and led us through a dress rehearsal, which helped the speakers became comfortable with the technology and the format,” says Davis.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Advisor Perspectives promoted the webinar on its web site, in its weekly electronic newsletters and sent a dedicated email invitation, providing publicity to more than 250,000 advisors, wealth management firms and consultants. Follow-up messages were sent to recipients who hadn’t opened the initial message.
Four hundred and nineteen people registered for the webinar. The registration process captured information about their firms and their assets under management, which was provided to Robeco to qualify and prioritize follow-up activities.
Hosted by Advisor Perspectives CEO Robert Huebscher, the webinar, An Inside Look at Long/Short Mutual Funds, was held on March 22, 2012, with 238 advisors in attendance. Another 165 watched a recording of the session.
For Robeco, the event was extremely successful, generating more than 250 inquiries from qualified advisors. It also contributed to a significant increase in new business. Before the webinar, the Fund had $157 million in assets, as of March 31, 2012. As of August 27, 2012, it had grown to $300 million, with much of these inflows coming from advisors who knew very little about the Fund until they viewed the webinar.
Both Davis and Robeco Investment Management have been thrilled with the results.
“In terms of execution, technical integration, content flow, professionalism, client service, and, most importantly, lead generation, Advisor Perspectives more than exceeded our expectations,” says Davis.
To learn how Advisor Perspectives can help your firm harness the power of online marketing to achieve its business goals, contact .
To view the Robeco presentation, visit http://www.advisorperspectives.com/robeco/insidelook
