Communicate on a Consistent Basis

Make a point of updating intermediaries about your firm and its business—preferably at regularly scheduled intervals so as to afford them a predictable, reliable drumbeat of briefings. The frequency could be weekly, monthly, or quarterly—whatever you see fit given your volume of updates, the intermediary's needs, and the nature of your particular relationship.

Consider announcements about any combination of the following:

• Firm news, including key hires, management changes, and any other organizational updates of interest
• Product news, including the introduction of new funds, strategies, or vehicles; changes to existing funds, strategies, or investment personnel; updates on current matters affecting a firm's offerings, such as market events or new regulations; calendric milestones such as close dates of private funds; commentary on your investment performance; and other product‐related affairs
• A roundup of recently published investment literature by your firm, including timely articles—or links to them—about topical issues of interest to investors and consultants, long‐form research papers, case studies, capability brochures, blogs, infographics, and product profiles
• A calendar of upcoming events and broadcasts such as client webinars, webcasts, podcasts, and conferences—whether those your firm will host or those in which it will participate

Here's one example of what the opening summary of a newsletter for institutional investor consultants (which can also be formatted as a series of bullets for those who prefer that typographical approach) could look like:

Crystallize the Details of Your Firm's Offerings

Toward their rigorous assessment of your firm, intermediaries demand a lucid, precise, and inclusive articulation of all the foundational elements of your firm's investment strategies, capabilities, and investment teams. They expect you to verbalize a cogent investment philosophy undergirding each strategy. They seek to understand the modus operandi your managers follow for identifying opportunities, evaluating them, making investment decisions, and running portfolios. They want a clear and visible account of your holdings and performance to validate your investment philosophy and process. And they require other such information as your risk‐management practices, portfolio turnover, staff turnover, fund capacity, personnel skill sets, organizational infrastructure, and more.

Naturally, they also expect to learn about your firm's performance history. All the same, they understand that financial markets run in cycles—and that no one investment strategy can be designed to perpetually outperform all others. For this reason, they place a premium on the transparency and timeliness of your communications on all matters—not just your track record. The value of strong intermediary communications cannot be overstated.

For detailed guidance on articulating investment capabilities and strategies, refer to Chapter 5, Part 1.

Provide Timely, Turnkey Investment Literature

Approach your intermediary relationship as a partnership. Yes, advisors and consultants seek specific information from you to evaluate your firm for their clients—but they also expect your continuing support. As the mouthpiece of an investment firm that develops and manages strategies, conducts research, and offers analysis, you are in a position to aid their practice. By providing intermediaries with insightful literature that they and their clients can use to stay informed, you facilitate, shape, and enrich their dialogue with investors. You help them deliver more productive counsel. You also contribute to their arsenal of tools for client prospecting, outreach, and retention.

Offer them turnkey investment content—the kind that's packaged for immediate use, that they can efficiently consume and readily share with investors without having to do extra research or legwork. (Refer to Chapter 5 for more on forms of investment literature.)

It's okay to provide literature that has a long shelf life—but make sure to also include content that's timely and topical. The intermediary business, much like investment management, is event‐driven. Advisors and consultants find such content useful for client engagements in response to market developments as they try to figure out how a given event may affect their clients' portfolios—and how their clients should respond. Conversely, timely and topical content could plant the seed of outreach in their heads, galvanize them to contact their clients in short order, and use your literature as the basis of a discussion.

When appropriate, make your literature prescriptive by offering investment recommendations or solutions that they can relay to their clients or use in their consultations. What specifically do intermediaries look for? It varies.

Advisors of private clients focus on household financial planning and wealth management. They develop strategies to allocate money between different asset classes (such as stocks and bonds) that help individuals reach their financial objectives. These advisors favor opportune pointers. For example, if your firm finds that market fundamentals bode well for technology, energy, and consumer‐staples stocks, you can offer them an investment perspective on “three stock sectors that may be poised for growth.” A dislocation in the senior loan market, as another example, could warrant a paper on “why the time may be right to invest in senior loans with attractive risk/return characteristics.”

The topics you cover should resonate with advisors and their clients (see Part 2 of Chapter 5 for examples)—and your story angles need to be incisive. Suppose, for instance, that country X enacted a fiscal stimulus plan that bodes well for its financial markets. A feature on “how X's fiscal stimulus plan could reignite markets” could be good, but one on “an investment strategy to consider on the heels of X's stimulus plan” could be even better. Don't hold back on sharing perspectives that go against the consensus, assuming you have solid arguments to back them up. Contrarian opinions actually have a greater chance of standing out in the advisor's inbox and getting read.

Consultants of institutional investors can benefit from similar content. Yet they also require more sophisticated literature that provides technical solutions to the complex challenges their clients' portfolios face in the short, medium, and long term. For instance, they may take interest in a paper on portfolio‐overlay strategies for managing currency exposure, or interest in, say, a beta‐management strategy for multi‐asset‐class portfolios aimed at curbing risk imbalances and improving capital efficiency.

As an aside, there are also consultants who provide counsel to sponsors of defined‐contribution retirement plans, which are a type of plan in which the employer, employee, or both make contributions on a regular basis, such as 401(k) plans in the United States. Unlike sponsors of defined‐benefit retirement plans (mentioned in the list of institutional investors in Chapter 2), sponsors of defined‐contribution plans aren't actual investors. However, as employers, they have a fiduciary responsibility to evaluate and construct the most suitable retirement plans for their employees—and they tap consultants to help them accomplish this objective. Investment firms communicate to those consultants in an effort to get their funds evaluated for inclusion in plan menus.

Like their brethren who serve private and institutional investors, consultants of defined‐contribution plan sponsors can benefit from instructive literature to use with their clients. For example, the growing popularity of low‐cost, exchange‐traded funds (ETFs) prompted one firm to publish a paper for consultants on how sponsors can reconfigure the fund lineups of their plans to incorporate ETFs, lower plan costs, and offer employees a rounded selection of options.

Keep Your Communications Targeted

Sure, intermediaries expect a detailed account of everything they need to know—but no more. Between managing investments and client relationships, prospecting for new clients and growing their practice, setting aside the time for meetings and phone calls, and the administrative day‐to‐day chores entailed in running their business, advisors are time‐starved, as are institutional investor consultants. To open the floodgates of information and inundate them would be worse than a breach of good taste; it could actually jeopardize your firm's intermediary relationships. (E‐mail overload, for instance, can be anathema to them.)

Communicate comprehensively—but keep your writing focused and your communications selective. Ensure that they are of immediate relevance to the needs of advisors' clients. For example, rather than offering advisors a paper on how inflation is affected by central‐bank policies and why it may pick up, you may consider a more targeted paper explaining what the prospect of inflation means for investors' portfolios—and what anticipatory strategies they could pursue. Likewise, consider supplementing market commentary and prognostications with your views on investment strategies to consider in light of your outlook.

As earlier mentioned, the content needs of institutional investor consultants are broader and more complex than those of private‐client advisors. But they, too, require a focus on the current, the pertinent, and the practical.

Many advisors and consultants seek managers who offer strategies that complement their menu of offerings or fall neatly into specific categories of investment objectives (such as inflation protection, growth, or volatility mitigation) that dovetail with, or fit into, the investment model they envision for their clients. There may also be products—especially of a new and unfamiliar type—that advisors don't even know they can't live without. If that's the case, lead them to the foregoing conclusion.