Karen Morgan, SS&C Tier1 Head of Marketing, sat down with Bonnie Cheung, to take a deeper dive into the importance of this effort and the broader impact to the industry.
Tell us about the Events launch? What was the impetus?
Our vision is to empower users to unlock value with every client interaction. We are excited and committed to driving innovation in Capital Markets. Traditionally, the corporate access industry lacks a systematic way to streamline the event management, invitation, and registration process. With this new Client Portal feature, the sell-side can share their forward-looking calendar with clients in a manner that is easy to consume, reducing time for discovery and with controls to manage visibility with each client.
How will this new Events offering help clients & the industry?
The new Client Portal is a productivity tool for sales and event coordinators to send mass, personalized invitations to investors and track the invitation status. We want to give our clients a way to streamline the event management and invitation process, while giving their investors flexibility and control over their own schedule by allowing them to pick and choose from a list of meeting timeslots.
- Event coordinators can control the visibility of an event and its meetings based on generic settings or predefined booking rules such as account tiers so that our clients can target the most important investors first.
- Salespeople can connect with investors to promote the event without needing to spend too much time on the phone regarding the event details and registration.
- Investors can self-serve, requesting and booking into specific events. All the event information, pertinent supporting documents, virtual meetings replay links, are automatically visible to clients via the portal. Investors can access the portal anytime, from anywhere, on desktop or on their mobile devices, allowing them to review the event and register at their convenience. This flexibility is especially valuable for global or remote clients.
In addition, with our new Calendar Sync feature, there are no more ICS files downloads! The event coordinators can rest assured that the most updated event details are communicated to all participants (both internal and external) and the attendance responses are sync right back to the CRM, providing visibility of participants’ attending status to the entire organization.
“I am excited to see our clients benefit from this new digital strategy so that they can be more efficient and increase the effectiveness of the event – by refocusing their efforts on planning and promoting the event, and ultimately resulting in a successful event and maximizing their revenue.” - Bonnie Cheung
What other insights can you share about your process?
Understanding the type of flexibility that our clients want to offer to their investors and how they want the user experience to be for the investors, event coordinators and sales team is the key to success in this roll out.
We worked with our top clients – we had design sessions with our UX designer to understand our clients’ needs and align with our product strategy and development efforts.
For example, one of the feedback items we heard in our initial discovery with our clients is that salespeople would like to control the type of access for investors. If the investor is local to a hybrid event, by not offering the virtual attendance option, this encourages in-person participation and in return, our clients get paid more for that type of attendance. This allows our clients to maximize the revenue for their events.
Another example, during a pilot release demo to our clients, it was pointed out that salespeople will want to add a personal touch with each of the investors they are inviting. This led us to quickly turn around with a solution that enables salespeople to optionally enter personalized notes to individual investors (or the same notes to all the investors they spoke to) during the invitation process.
We know that people usually respond to invitations much better when they get that personal invite directly from their covered salesperson rather than a mass marketing email from the corporate access team. This allows our clients to increase response rates to their invitations, and in turn, increase client participation and revenue for their events.