With your highest-touch clients, individual investment performance is an expected benefit. All the relevant information pertaining to their assets distilled into the most comprehensive and efficient package. Differentiating your firm from their other investments when you have your client’s undivided attention can come in many forms, but ultimately depends on the audience.
It should be clear to your investor that you are putting your best foot forward in this interaction. Personalized charts and graphs with their assets alongside the performance of your portfolio shows how they’re doing with their decisions, who knows, even potentially how they could be doing if they’d done everything you advised? If they missed a round or decided to decrease their follow-on investments in a fund, or if they went in heavy on one fund but skipped another … everyone you speak with is making the best decisions for their portfolio and is part of their broader strategy. These are some of the factors to consider when creating this report.
In planning your personalized investment reports for clients as virtual events, you’ll want to make sure the top minds on your team are available for any questions they have on their investments, and being ready with data and visualizations to back up your positions will doubly impress. Bringing in an external thought leader to join the call may also be a welcome surprise. When you’re all hands on deck, you’ll be most likely to strengthen investor loyalty, increase retention, and potentially attract new investors through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
What’s Included in a Personalized Investment Performance Report?
Much like an investor relations report, a personalized investment performance report is made up of all the other reports that you’ll send out to your broader investment pool. We called this post the bonus post for that reason, so we would direct you to the bottom of this article where you can find the links to those other posts. We encourage you to read through the series.
What are the goals of these updates?
- Help investors evaluate the performance of their individual investments and the overall portfolio by providing an analysis of returns, including metrics such as IRR, MOIC, and TVPI, and allow for benchmarking against industry standards
- Assist investors in making informed decisions regarding their existing investments and future investment opportunities (and win their follow-on investment)
- Communicate challenges that may impact the investor’s investments, enabling them to make informed decisions and manage their risk exposure
- Comply with legal and regulatory requirements by providing investors with the necessary information and disclosures related to their investments
- Share the firm’s outlook on the market, emerging trends, and potential investment opportunities that may impact the investor’s portfolio
- Provide investors with tax and legal information about their investments, helping them navigate any regulatory requirements or implications that may impact their investment decisions
Who’s Involved?
Depending on what topics you’ll cover during the event, you’ll need different teams or personnel attacking this task. Again, this should be an all-hands-on-deck event, where your team is ready to step in with an answer, and if not, the answer should be delivered in an email a short time after the event. You’ll want to put your best foot forward and have the person with whom the investor has the most contact hosting the event (if that’s within their skillset). Often, the relationship manager is that person, but just as often it’s a managing or general partner (you’ll want to have one of them in the event as well). The rest of your staff is supporting a thorough and efficiently designed report. In our other articles on the subject, a bulleted list of people most closely associated with making this report would go here, but since this report is an amalgamation of the others, it makes more sense to point you to the other reports rather than list titles in a VC firm.
What can you include when planning this update as a virtual event to achieve these goals?
Our initial thought here is that you want to butt right up to whatever verb is just short of “cajoling” when you’re planning this report. They should feel like the red carpet has been rolled out for them and also be ever-so-subtly reminded that their assets are a component part of your fund ecosystem.
We mentioned surprise guests earlier in the article – those surprise guests don’t all have to be related to the subject matter. If your investor is a huge tennis fan, and your general partner can get Andy Murray to join the call, that might play. You might want to save that appearance for the end of the presentation to give your staff time to relax and celebrate for a job well done. The great thing about virtual events is that your access to these figures rises exponentially when they simply need to be in front of a camera with internet access to attend.
Polls and quizzes might be fun for your client, but they also might hate them, so as part of the “personalized” part of the presentation goes, you’ll want to rely on the people closest to the investor in helping suss out what should and shouldn’t appear here.
Networking doesn’t make too much sense for this particular event, and sponsorship is an absolute no unless it’s approved ahead of time. For the sponsorship example, you know your client was dissatisfied with his accountancy or legal firm because of something they did and he’s looking – you might plug a partner from one of your trusted advisors into the regulatory and compliance update section or this report to introduce them. Otherwise, no sponsorship.
Post-event video might be important if the investor wants. Always password protect the link to the video, never set sharing settings to “anyone with link can view.” Maybe that’s obvious, but we’ve seen it happen to our own files (PSA – Dropbox links can be brute force attacked).
Rewards or recognition … remember, just short of cajoling. If it makes sense here, do it, but there are many other opportunities to do this for an investor and you don’t have to pile on. Unless you know this is the only facetime you’ll get with them all year, we feel like saving this kind of thing for another time would be more suitable.
Benefits over your traditional communication strategy
Honestly, a virtual event might be a huge negative for an investor if they are used to the team flying out to them and presenting in their home or office. It might be a huge negative for someone who hates Zoom calls, and older investors might avoid them altogether. Analytics don’t really matter if you’re speaking with a single person. Cost savings over flying out to meet them again could end up a negative.
This series isn’t about sugar coating virtual events as the end-all-be-all strategy for your firm. You may have skipped your in-person for 2020 with the investor and tried a virtual presentation with them. When that didn’t land like you thought it might, you flew back out in 2021. Keep doing that if it works and is what’s expected. Aside from not meeting the expectations of your clients’ customary, yearly, in-person meetings, we feel that the availability of your team globally for this event is a huge advantage.
As you onboard new investors, you can try to set the expectation that they’re going to be presented with an amazing virtual experience that puts all the top minds at your firm at their disposal for Q&A. If you feel the market demands an in-person meeting for the investor, or they have a scheduled time for you to present and a place at which they need you, you make the call.
If you haven’t read the other parts in our series on Virtual Events and Venture Capital Communications Strategy, check out the links below:
