Case study · Fund distribution · UK asset manager
Growing assets without growing the sales team
A £7.5bn asset manager hired 10 more salespeople from Tier 1 firms, and assets grew over two years to £11.5bn. But the firm needed a smarter way to keep growing than the centuries-old model of adding more and more people. SignalFlo gave every salesperson something they had never had, namely the ability to see which client was getting ready to buy, before picking up the phone.
- Sales cycle
- −55%
- Pipeline, 3 months
- £1.1bn
- New assets raised
- £333m
- Distribution cost
- Reduced
The firm
A growth mandate with a cost ceiling
A mid-size asset manager with £7.5bn under management had been unable to grow at any consistent pace. It took private equity investment to fund a growth plan, and the plan was distribution-led: expand the sales team from 7 people to 17, hiring exclusively from Tier 1 firms so that every new hire arrived with an established book of relationships. Talent of that calibre is expensive: Tier 1 hires carry Tier 1 packages, and ten of them is a permanent addition to the cost base.
Two years in, the strategy had partly worked. Assets stood at £11.5bn, representing £4bn of growth. The private equity firm then asked the obvious question: does this keep working if the answer to every growth target is another salesperson? The brief changed to finding a smarter route to growth, one that raised more assets from the relationships the firm already had, rather than buying new ones.
Assets at the start
£7.5bn
No consistent growth
Assets, two years on
£11.5bn
After the hiring programme
Sales headcount
7 → 17
10 Tier 1 hires, Tier 1 cost
Discovery
Everyone was guessing who to call
Findings from interviews with the sales team and a review of web analytics.
4,000
Contacts held by each salesperson
In practice each person worked the same 20 names, the clients they knew bought often. Sensible for the individual, costly for the firm: the money the firm did not yet have was sitting in the other 3,980 contacts, and nobody was calling them.
31,000
Known contacts in the database
Marketing emails were opened and clicked by about 5% of them, some 1,550 named people landing on the website each month. But knowing the one page a client opened from an email told the team almost nothing. What they wanted was the visits nobody prompted, such as the client who comes back on a Tuesday evening and reads three fund pages. That is where the valuable information was, and it was invisible.
0
Reliable clues that a client was ready to buy
Nothing told a salesperson who was close to a decision. They picked a name, called it, and used the conversation itself to find out, which meant most calls were spent asking basic questions rather than advancing a sale.
Off-the-shelf tools were trialled, including the lead-scoring modules bundled with marketing platforms. None was fit for purpose. They counted email opens and website traffic; they could not tell a salesperson which named client, at which firm, was quietly working towards an allocation.
Three questions to answer
01
Which client should I call today, and how do I know they are close to buying?
02
What do they already care about, so I arrive informed instead of asking basic questions?
03
And how does that happen automatically, every day, across 31,000 relationships?
The solution
SignalFlo shows you who is getting ready to buy
Signals in from every source the firm already owned; one number out per client.
SignalFlo watches what every named client does across the sources the firm already had, including website visits, CRM activity, paid campaigns, event and webinar attendance, factsheet and document downloads. It turns all of that into a single score out of 100 for each person. A score of 98 is not a hunch. It is a client who has spent the week putting the case together.
For a salesperson, it is the closest thing to standing behind a client and watching them build the very presentation they are about to take to their investment committee, including which funds, which documents and which questions, in what order.
Marketing platforms have sold a rough version of this idea for years under the name lead scoring, and it counts clicks. SignalFlo works at the level of the individual relationship: it knows which person, at which firm, is moving towards which fund, and how far along they are. Asset managers know how valuable that is, and most have tried to build it internally, and stalled, because the data sits in six systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
| Contact | Account | Latest signal | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dan Whitfield | Rathbones | DDQ requested · Gold Fund | 98.2 |
| Priya Raman | Quilter Cheviot | Factsheet download · third visit this week | 94.7 |
| Marcus Hale | Evelyn Partners | Webinar attended · Global Equity | 88.1 |
| Helen Cortez | Brooks Macdonald | KID viewed · two unprompted visits | 76.4 |
Illustrative view; firm names shown as examples. Scores update as signals arrive and the list is worked top-down.
Monday morning now starts here rather than with an address book and a hunch. The team opens the dashboard, reads the scores, and works down the list, and because the activity behind each score is on screen, the first sentence of every call is about the fund the client has already been reading.
Results
What changed in the first three months
Time to win business
−55%
Sales cycles more than halved
Pipeline created
£1.1bn
In the first three months
New assets won
£333m
From the same conversations
Distribution cost
Lower
Headcount reduced, coverage held
Reach without more people
All 31,000 relationships are now watched, not just the few hundred anyone had time for, and the firm now covers more of its market with a smaller distribution team, and its cost base fell.
A forecast the board can rely on
Every opportunity traces back to observed client behaviour, so the pipeline can be measured and predicted instead of estimated from individual optimism.
The management conversation
Before
“How many calls and emails have you sent this week?”
After
“Last week you had 100 contacts scoring 90+. How did those conversations go, and how many were interested?”
Why it matters
Selling funds has worked the same way for centuries: relationships, effort, and hope, with almost nothing visible in between. Every asset manager wants to change that, and most have discovered they cannot build it themselves. This firm did it in months, and now runs a distribution business that can be measured, managed and improved rather than simply staffed.
Why the tools already on the market could not do this
Marketing automation platforms score leads. Intent vendors sell third-party signals. Neither was built for the way funds are actually sold, where a named individual at a named firm is working towards an allocation to a specific strategy. The full comparison, capability by capability, sits on the SignalFlo page.
Your clients are already telling you what they want to buy
Thirty minutes on your funds and your contacts, showing the scores your own data would produce.
Client identity withheld. Figures as reported by the firm, first three months post-implementation. Published August 2026.