Enhancing collaboration between Marketing and Sales to deliver greater client experience

Worked with a leading global financial institution to design tools and frameworks that enabled their marketing and sales teams to collaborate more effectively, align client coverage strategies for seamless client asset management

Client:

Leading Global Financial Institution

Industry:

Banking and Finance

How might we bridge communication gaps between the Marketing and Sales departments to create a more personalised and impactful client experience?

Help marketing and sales teams align their strategies in order to create tailored marketing campaigns.

Understand the evolving needs across the B2B2C value chain and develop an innovative suite of services that deliver more personalised, responsive and relevant content with cross collaboration and client experience in mind.

Opportunity 💡

Process

With a team of research associates and service designers, we aimed at understanding key insights, developing the solution and testing it to ensure quality delivery and impact. This project was solution oriented for our team.

This involved stakeholder management, user research, user personas, strategic development and workshop and solution designing.

Outcomes 📤

  • Financial Strategies

  • Client and User Research

  • Workshops and Toolkit

  • Strategy Development

  • Stakeholder management

  • Financial Research

  • Concept Testing and Iteration

  • Workshop Toolkit and Framework Development

Skills involved 📩

Our focus was on Phase 1, developing and delivering.

Understanding the Users 💬

The toolkit was to be designed for internal use, for the marketing and sales teams in the Asset Management team. But it also needed to take into consideration the needs of wholesale clients and end clients, recognising the importance of creating a superior end-to-end wholesale client experience.

Marketing Team:

  • In charge of creating strategies, campaigns, and content to attract and engage clients and prospects.

  • Supports the Sales team with insights, materials, and positioning to effectively convey investment solutions and firm capabilities.

Sales Team:

  • Builds and maintains relationships with clients to sell investment products and services.

  • Cyclical interaction with marketing team whereby the marketing team supports them with the right type of content for sales and the sales team simultaneously gathers client feedback and market intelligence to inform marketing strategies, product offerings, and portfolio positioning.

Key Insights 📝

🌍 Client categorisation criteria vary on a regional basis

This inconsistency can create confusion, inefficiencies, and gaps in how client needs are understood and prioritised.

📈 Coverage models are highly individualised

Sales teams currently operate with highly personalised approaches to client coverage. This makes proactive planning and collaboration difficult, reducing the ability to consistently deliver a seamless and strategic client experience.

💫 Marketing and Sales touch points exist, but can be optimised

Weekly meetings occur to discuss strategies, but are often unstructured.

Key Objectives 🎯

👩🏼‍🏫 Empowering Marketing to lead collaboration

Equipping the marketing team with facilitation skills to take lead and deliver the engagements to help align content and structure.

🔶 Turning Sales knowledge into actionable insights

Valuing and giving shape to the knowledge of the sales team through the engagements  to inform their day to day work and future strategies.

⌚Considering realistic workflows

Taking the team’s busy schedules into consideration and designing shorter but more frequent engagements.

So how do we strategically make it happen?

Workshops

Classifying wholesale clients into effective groups to improve coverage strategies.

Client Categorisation

Client Overview and Assessment Cards:

  1. The Marketing team would pitch certain pre-selected clients

  2. Other participants will use the Assessment Cards to assess listed potential clients, using the factors listed such as the relationship with JPM, their pipeline funds, growth potential and any others the participants might want to add. 



Quadrant Classification:

Plotting of the clients is done on a quadrant model. Discussions around this activity encourage both the teams to re-evaluate the clients, categorise them further and make way for unseen opportunities as well.

Understanding the preferences and types of contacts in order to create better communication strategies and eventually create highly personalised information

Contact Strategy

  1. Potential contacts are profiled further using a tiering system (technical, strategical, transactional and c-suites).

  2. Participants filter their contacts preferred mode of communication based on prompt questions and their knowledge.

  3. Finally, contacts are plotted on a quadrant model based on classification and their type.  

Toolkit Website

Toolkits for the workshops will be found online with instructions, tips and downloadable materials, tailored for each team, according to their roles.

Information gathered from the previous workshops are also available for viewing and learning purposes on the website, as a long term plan.