This is the year that Voting Systems on the buyside are really going to accelerate in usage.

A lot of the original voting systems - Thomson Extel in particular - use a top down survey approach.  Meaning, as a PM, you vote on Bank X’s research out of 10, their Corporate Access out of 10.  You do not vote on specific meetings or ideas.  But buyside firms are finding it hard to trust this kind of vote - when their PMs are filling out the survey from memory.  They need data - and they know it.   They need to be able to run a simple league table that shows the number of meetings they have taken by bank.  Ideally weighted for meeting value.

Lots of firms will be there to provide such tools this year.  We are now live with FactSet as the first and are about to go live with themarkets.com.

What to do if your Institutional Clients don’t pay you commensurate with the Corporate Access work you do for them?  This could be the biggest single question facing Sales Heads who we speak to all the time.

First - do you know which those Clients are?  Which means knowing precisely, for each of your Clients, what you have done for them.

Second - were the Clients aware of all that you had done for them?   The best assumption for this question is “no”.

Third - under-payers can then be classified as either a) we don’t value your services the way you think we do,  b) we do value your services and can pay more but you’ve never been the squeaky wheel, or c) we cannot or will not pay any more.

The last may mean dropping the Client - but a) and b) provide a clear path to the sales rep to talk to the Client about modifying the service mix and getting paid more.

We realize that Corporate Access is a soft-dollar activity for the most part.  (Leaving out the considerable success of Gerson Lehrman, of course).   So invoices will never be sent out looking like this.

That does not mean that banks should forget about Invoicing.  

Institutional  clients are becoming ever more rigorous in  the voting processes they follow - driven by many factors.   A compliance need to justify how they direct commissions.   More sophisticated tools for managing their voting.  A desire perhaps, in these challenging times, to more accurately and generously reward their smaller sellside providers as the bulge bracket banks see their dominance eroded.

So while Institutional Clients develop what amount to sophisticated Purchasing and Accounts Payable departments, not all sellside firms have yet responded by developing equally sophisticated Accounts Receivable procedures.  And yet for any business, improving Accounts Receivable is often the easiest and quickest path to improving the cash flow.

Specifically, banks should be generating and delivering detailed reports for each and every Client that receives any kind of Corporate Access benefit - including Conference meetings, non-deal Roadshows, Company Visits, Conference Calls, Analyst lunches, Analyst Roadshows, Field Trips.   These reports need to be complete, accurate, detailed and timely.   They should be considered as if they were an invoice.  Sample.

Complete - every type of “billable” activity needs to be included.   Imagine if a wireless company didn’t invoice for calls made in Texas, or for those made on Tuesdays.  Activity not counted and reported is revenue left on the table.

Accurate - obvious errors are simply an invitation to a Client to discard the entire report.  The more that is done by hand, by busy salespeople, for example, or by copying and pasting data between systems - the greater the room for error.

Detailed - many Clients need full details on each meeting.  Who was there, was it a 1×1 or a group, where it was, what type of meeting it was, when did it start.   They need this to let the PM attribute the correct number of votes.  Without it, they will give the minimum number, or none at all.   Reports also need to be formatted in a way as to make Client processing as easy as possible.  

Timely - if the reports are not delivered on time, they may not be counted, or votes may be applied with minimal consideration.

These times demand that valuable services that are provided to Clients are fully compensated.  One component of that it to invoice for Corporate Access services - to show how serious you are about getting paid for it.

One brighter spot for smaller sellside firms this year, is that there is a lot of institutional market share up for grabs.   Bear and Lehman and Merrill/BofA have opened up a sizeable chunk of share, and many hedge funds are reassessing their allocations to those  remaining bulge firms.

But smaller sellside firms will need to get organized qujickly if they want to take advantage of this opportunity.

A helpful starting point is to  think like an attorney.   Not litigiously (please) but in tracking billable hours.  That attorney phone call to discuss the project.  Is it free?  That lunch to review progress?    That piece of research?  No, no and no.   Attorneys are ruthless at keeping track of every possible billable minute.  If an associate doesn’t bill 50 hours a week, they are in trouble, and if they don’t track it, it isn’t billable.

Brokerage firms don’t bill for hours but they assuredly bill for activities.  Billable Activities – any and  all activities that a Client might give you a vote for.   These include Corporate access meetings, 1×1s, field trips, client visits, analyst visits, substantive analyst calls, lunches with industry experts, conference calls or video conferences.  What is not billable?  Sales calls, voicemails, emails.   

Which is why CRMs (customer relationship management) systems make such incredibly poor billing systems.   They mix billable and non-billable activities together, and they are also very poor at reporting.  Law firms don’t use their CRMs for billing, and attorneys generally don’t prepare the bills.  They discuss them with clients.  CRMs are one thing, billing systems another.

Likewise, brokerage firms need to track Billable Activities.  Ruthlessly.   And these billable activities need to find their way into a central “billing” system that tracks everything.  And report  it accurately Client by Client.   So that the salespeople can start negotiating their way to a bigger share of commissions - based on hard substantiated facts, and leaving nothing out.   

Many brokerage firms keep different activities in different systems.    Analysts use one tool to monitor phone calls with Clients. Roadshows are kept in another system.  Conferences another.   This is  not an obstacle - it can even be a good thing - and is not an excuse for inaction.   Because these different systems can be ported to a single billing and reporting system - without causing any change at all in how people work.