Case Study 01
When Morningstar acquired DealX, it inherited a credit analytics platform serving institutional markets: CMBS investors, CLO managers, CRE lenders, structured finance desks. The products were sophisticated and the data was genuinely differentiated, but the sales team lacked materials that could communicate that value to buyers outside the quant community. Concepts like expected loss vectors, probability of default, over-collateralization tests, and BYOL preliminary workflows are second nature to credit analysts but opaque to the portfolio managers, compliance officers, and institutional decision-makers those analysts report to. The one-pagers needed to work at both levels simultaneously.
The audience wasn't one person. Each product served a different desk, a different job title, and a different definition of risk.
My role was to take six products, understand each well enough to write about them accurately, and produce a suite of sales enablement materials that sales and business development could use in meetings, at conferences, and in digital outreach, all under a unified Morningstar Credit brand voice.
Each piece required learning a distinct product, its buyer, and the competitive framing that would resonate. The six one-pagers covered:
Structured finance copy has a particular difficulty: the audience is expert enough to spot imprecision immediately, but sales materials can't read like technical documentation. Every piece needed to be accurate enough to hold up in a meeting with a quant and clear enough to be understood by the executive who approved the budget.
The CLO Data API piece, for example, had to simultaneously speak to loan traders (who care about interest resets and margin payments), CLO managers (who need to benchmark deal-level performance), and data infrastructure teams (who need to understand API delivery and normalization). One page, three audiences, one through line: regulatory-grade data, delivered fast, into your existing workflow.
The BYOL piece presented a different challenge: introducing a genuinely new workflow concept (uploading your own loan tape into an external platform) without making it sound complicated or risky. The framing that worked was positioning it as removing a friction point that already existed in their process.
Started with platform documentation, existing materials, and prior DealX positioning, then interviewed product managers to understand capabilities, differentiators, and the questions prospects most frequently asked.
Defined the primary buyer for each piece: CLO manager, CMBS investor, CRE lender, data infrastructure lead, institutional research team. Each persona has different vocabulary, different objections, and a different definition of value.
Drafted each one-pager for review by product, sales, and compliance stakeholders — navigating feedback from multiple teams with competing priorities while keeping the copy sharp and the format tight.
Delivered final copy in a format ready for layout, with clear hierarchy signals for the design team. The finished pieces follow Morningstar Credit's brand system: structured, authoritative, red and white.
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Sales enablement for technical financial products requires enough subject-matter fluency to be credible, enough editorial discipline to stay within a page, and enough empathy for the buyer to lead with what matters to them rather than what's interesting to the product team.
This suite also reflects a challenge that comes up frequently in fintech after an acquisition: inheriting products with strong underlying value but underdeveloped go-to-market materials, and building the messaging layer while a sales team is already in the field using whatever they have.