By Bruce Frumerman

How long is the selling cycle now? That's a question my financial communications and sales marketing consulting firm has been asked on a regular basis by hedge fund firm owners and sales people, ever since we opened the doors to our firm in 1987 pre-crash.

Watching and waiting?

Since that time, we have observed that there are quite a number of hedge fund boutique firm owners and staffers who are under the impression that the selling cycle for their products on offer to institutional investors (family offices, endowments, foundations and institutional plan sponsors) can somehow dramatically shift from one year to the next or one time period to the next. If they assume such a thing can be so, and could even identify such dramatic shifts, what would they even do with that information? Decide to go market their funds only in months when it appeared that the selling cycle was significantly shorter, and otherwise just sit on their hands waiting for the selling cycle to shorten again? If, as you read those words, you found yourself thinking “That doesn't make any sense," you're right. Every time a hedge fund asks me the question How long is the selling cycle now? it always makes me think of the jazz standard titled “How High the Moon", popularized by the guitarist Les Paul and singer Mary Ford. The average distance of the moon from earth is 238,855 miles. At its apogee the distance is 252,088 miles and at the perigee it is 225,623 miles. Nice to know, but not something that should influence how you run your business this month versus, say, next year. So, what about the selling cycle for hedge funds?

Time of the season?

The answer can be seen in decades of anecdotal evidence. Let me give you a sense of the breadth of market conditions through which my firm has observed this, and through which my firm helped clients market. Think back in ‘market' time. Consider the time just before th......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.