This piece is part of “The Future of Client Coverage and Distribution” series.

Earlier this year, we published our views on what we believe will ultimately be the three major areas of innovation when it comes to the future of communication and client coverage tools and technology in Capital Markets.

We believe that:

• Augmentation and automation will scale distribution

• Personalization will be the differentiating experience

• Email will evolve into an industry specific communication platform

You can read more about our core views in: The Future of Client Coverage and Distribution.

The first area we want to focus on is on augmentation and exploring the tactical impact it will have. As we previously mentioned, augmentation will drive better outcomes for all those involved by pairing the current workflows and processes of high touch engagement with new applications and technology. On that thread, we come to our first practical example: smart deal distribution.

Current Deal Distribution

The current workflow for most deal distribution leverages email as the primary communication channel, which is then followed up with targeted phone calls.

The sales team gathers relevant information from various internal stakeholders, puts it together in an email (which could be just after the close), and then sends out that information to their respective clients.

From there, they begin the process of reacting to responses via email, and proactively reaching out to clients based on the additional context of client interests (whether that is stored in the CRM, their memory, or some other place).

Thus, there are two core steps to this process:

1. Distribute details via email to prospective clients

1. Follow up on email distribution to a targeted subset of clients, based on additional information

Firms can take their existing process and augment it by leveraging technology and tools, such as Street Contxt, to make the process more efficient and effective for distributors and clients alike.

Smart Deal Distribution

Our view is that with the right tools and technology, this process can be augmented to become more effective and efficient – combining the existing human knowledge with machine assistance.

First, by distributing the deal through an intelligent pipe, salespeople can immediately know two things:

1. the email went out quickly (delivery can take much longer than most people think),

2. and, more importantly, who has (or has not) seen and consumed it yet (both of which prove to be important).

In a situation like a deal (or any other urgent situation), time is of the essence. There is only so much time to make calls, and thus a cap on the number of clients that can be called. Our proposition is that by augmenting the first step (distribution of details), you can make the second step (calling and following up) much more effective and targeted.

Drive More Targeted and Intelligent Calls

By leveraging engagement data, the salesperson can add two important data points to their decision making process:

1. They can identify who has seen the details and chosen not to respond. If someone has read the deal details, and not responded, it may be an indication that they are not interested. At the very least, they know the recipient has seen the information. At this point, the salesperson could pull additional information to decide if it still warrants a call, but perhaps might find it does not, thus saving them valuable time.

2. They can identify who has not read the details – which is equally important. When clients are receiving thousands upon thousands of emails a day, it is very easy to miss one. Identifying recipients who haven’t seen or read the details, combined with their own additional context and insight, allows the salesperson to decide if a follow up call to highlight the deal is necessary.

Leveraging a smart distribution platform, salespeople and others in a distribution capacity can utilize data to drive more targeted and intelligent calls to their clients.

This, in turn, makes the salesperson more effective, but also delivers a better experience to the client.

Improve Your Follow Up

Having the follow up process take their engagement into account is a simple yet profound change. We can’t count the number of success stories we’ve heard first hand from our users about situations where clients were travelling, or out of office, and hadn’t seen the deal details, and the salesperson made a follow up call.

Clients always appreciated the personal follow up (making sure they didn’t miss it), and often had simply missed the email. Sometimes the salesperson even ended up getting an order. The client may have missed the deal, and the salesperson the order, without that targeted follow up.

The concept of Smart Deal Distribution is just one small example of how augmentation is empowering specific workflows, making the process more effective and efficient for the brokerage, and more personalized and targeted for the client.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue to delve into other examples of how augmentation and automation are driving more effective and efficient communications between both sides of the Street and represent a powerful shift towards the future of client coverage and distribution in Capital Markets.

Read the other volumes in this series:

Volume 1: The Future of Client Coverage and Distribution

Volume 3: Augmentation in Capital Markets