M&G

Changing the perception of marketing and making it a revenue stream

Traditionally, investment management organisations have been very "Sales Team driven," with marketing seen as a content generating function supporting sales.

At a senior level within M&G, there was a desire to move away from this and make marketing a revenue generator in its own right.

Given the nature of the B2B business, the sales team are integral to closing large new investments but they faced two challenges: how to prioritise their time to ensure maximum conversion and how to reach out to the high volume smaller investment potential.

Problem

We wanted to shift the mindset from: “I have a list of regular, familiar clients that I need to speak to about the products the business is pushing” to “I know what all my clients have been engaging with recently, how likely they are to buy, what the opportunity is and I can see that this is a change in behaviour outside their normal interactions. I should give them a call to talk to them about specific products or themes.”

Solution

We used data from a variety of different sources including conferences, website, marketing and sales to build a suite of product related engagement scores. These were then used to help co-ordinate and inform not just the Sales & Marketing strategies but also the hand-off point between these two functions.

Results

Implementing data science in this way led to a 550% improvement in sales call success rates.