The way institutions make investment decisions has become progressively more complicated. Gone are the days when a stock or bond was sold over the lunch table on the basis of an enthusiastic analyst’s report. Trustees, investment consultants and even institutions’ senior management have become involved in certain steps in the decision process. At the same time, portfolio managers—the traditional decision-makers—have often found their roles redirected toward marketing, translating goals of beneficiaries into quantitative measures of investment risk and reward.
These developments have impaired the effectiveness of the security salesman, who often finds he is no longer communicating with the key decision-maker in the client organization—if indeed he can determine who that person is. But the salesman can become the catalyst in an effective decision-making process. Tailoring the insights and skills of the various specialists in his firm to the various decision-makers’ needs, he can often serve as the intermediary between them. To succeed in his task, however, he needs to be a renaissance man who can both communicate investment knowledge to a range of decision-making levels in the asset manager’s organization and also understand its profit implications for the beneficiary, the asset manager and his own employer.