Turning distribution strategy
into won mandates.
We help institutional and retail asset managers align sales, marketing, and the systems behind them — so growth stops depending on one great wholesaler or one heroic RFP response.
Led by people who've run this on the inside.
Jeanene Bettner
Principal
Jeanene has spent her career in technical sales and sales operations, including the last 11 years at Thornburg Investment Management, most recently as Managing Director, Distribution Enablement. There she drove technical sales and marketing enablement strategy — not general business strategy — across the firm's Institutional, Private Wealth, and Retail divisions.
Brian Runyan
Principal
Brian brings two decades in financial services technology, including as Vice President of Information Technology at LPL Financial. Since then he has worked as a Salesforce-certified architect and managing consultant, building CRM and data systems for financial and professional services firms. Through a strategic partnership with NASDAQ, he also architects and produces data management solutions for institutional asset managers.
We work across both sides of the distribution business.
Institutional
Consultant relationships, RFPs and DDQs, eVestment and Mercer positioning, asset owner and OCIO coverage. We help teams respond faster and tell a sharper story to gatekeepers who see hundreds of strategies a year.
Retail
Wholesaler enablement, advisor-facing content, broker-dealer and RIA platforms, digital and hybrid coverage models. We help distribution teams give advisors what they need at the moment they need it.
A straightforward path from diagnosis to a system your team actually uses.
Diagnose
We map your current sales and marketing motion — messaging, content, CRM, reporting — and find where deals or renewals actually stall.
Design
We build the enablement strategy and the technical roadmap side by side, so positioning decisions and system decisions inform each other.
Deploy
Our technical team builds out the roadmap in phases — configuring the CRM, integrations, and platforms ourselves, sized to what your team can absorb.
Enable
We train wholesalers, relationship managers, and marketing on the new tools and narrative — and stay on to operate and support the system for as long as you need us to.
Pragmatic recommendations — and real access to make them stick.
We build recommendations your team can actually execute, not a deck that sits in a drawer. That requires direct access to the stakeholders and management who will own the change: the people who can approve budget, alter a workflow, or greenlight a system move.
Ready to talk about your sales and marketing enablement strategy?
A first conversation starts with understanding where growth is stalling and what's actually getting in the way — before we talk about how we might help.
Strategy, systems, and execution — built to work together.
Most firms treat sales strategy, systems, and implementation as separate projects, run by separate teams, on separate timelines. We run them as one engagement, because a positioning decision usually has a technical consequence, a system decision usually has a message inside it, and neither means much until someone actually builds and runs it.
Sales & Marketing Enablement Strategy
Positioning · content · coverageWe give distribution and marketing teams a shared story, a clear-eyed view of the tools and platforms that will tell it consistently, and a process for keeping both current as products and markets change.
- Positioning & narrative — a clear house view of your strategies, differentiated against the peers gatekeepers actually compare you to.
- RFP & DDQ systems — we evaluate your current process and recommend the response libraries and workflow platforms that cut turnaround time without cutting quality.
- Wholesaler & RM enablement — we recommend the field tools and content platforms best suited to how your coverage teams actually sell.
- Competitive intelligence — we recommend the sources and frameworks for a living view of how peer managers position, price, and win.
- Content & case study architecture — we recommend a content system and supporting tools mapped to the buying journey, not just a folder of decks.
- Consultant & platform relationships — we advise on where to prioritize eVestment, Mercer GIMD, and other platforms that shape institutional shortlists.
Technical Roadmap Development
CRM · data · martechWe assess the systems behind your sales and marketing motion and sequence a roadmap your team can actually deliver — not a wish list, not a platform migration for its own sake.
- CRM & sales-tech assessment — an honest read on Salesforce, Dynamics, or whatever you run today, and what it should do next.
- Marketing automation & content ops — tooling that gets the right material to the right audience without manual handoffs.
- Data integration — connecting portfolio, performance, and reporting data to the tools your sales teams use daily.
- Consultant database integration — keeping eVestment, Mercer, and similar platforms in sync with your CRM instead of updated by hand.
- Advisor-facing digital tools — portals, proposal tools, and content hubs built for retail distribution.
- Phased implementation plans — a sequence with owners and milestones, sized to your team's real capacity.
Implementation & Managed Support
Execution · operationsA strategy and a roadmap only create value once they're running. Our technical team carries the roadmap through implementation and stays on to operate what we've built — so the work doesn't stall at the handoff, and nothing breaks between one roadmap review and the next.
- Hands-on implementation — we build the CRM workflows, integrations, and platform configurations the roadmap calls for, rather than handing it off and stepping away.
- Managed operations — ongoing administration of your CRM, marketing automation, and data pipelines, so routine upkeep doesn't fall to your internal team.
- Break-fix support — a technical team on call when an integration fails, a report breaks, or a rep needs help outside business hours.
- Flexible scope — scale up for a migration or launch, then scale back to light-touch maintenance once things are stable.
Built around how each channel actually buys.
Institutional
Asset owners, OCIOs, DC platforms, and the investment consultants who screen them. Long sales cycles, formal DDQs, and a small number of very well-informed buyers.
Retail
Broker-dealers, RIAs, wirehouses, and the wholesalers who cover them. Shorter cycles, relationship-driven, and increasingly digital-first.
A pragmatic engagement, built on real access.
Our recommendations are sized to what your team can actually execute — not a theoretical best practice. In exchange, we ask for direct access to the stakeholders and management who will own the change: the people who can approve budget, alter a workflow, or greenlight a system move. Without that access, even the right recommendation stalls.
Not sure which side of this you need first?
Most engagements start with a diagnostic that covers both. We'll tell you honestly where to focus.
Tell us where growth is stalling.
Share a little about your firm and what's prompting the conversation. We reply within one business day.
- support@distributionedgeconsulting.com
- Phone
- 720.272.2059
- Office
- Phoenix and San Diego
- Focus
- Institutional & retail asset management