7 Marketing Myths That Are Stalling Your Growth

Most tech founders treat marketing like an expensive checkbox – something they were told they “needed to have” but in reality, have no idea what it is or what marketing is suppose to do.  They think marketing means updating the website, sponsoring conferences, and cranking out LinkedIn posts until something sticks.  Meanwhile, your sales team says the leads are useless, your pipeline's full of tire-kickers who ghost after the first call, and deals you should win are going to competitors with an inferior product.

The realty is, your prospects are already 70% of the way through the buying process without you even knowing about it.  They researched you anonymously, asked their peers, and compared you to three other vendors who all sound identical. If your marketing hasn't given them a reason to believe you're different during that invisible research phase, your sales team is starting every conversation from behind.

The firms winning in the institutional markets aren't outspending you on ads—they're outmaneuvering you on positioning. They understand that in long-cycle B2B sales to investment managers, marketing isn't necessarily about generating more leads. It's about making sure when your prospects finally are ready to move, you’re top of mind of who to talk to.  That’s not sales’, job, its marketing’s.  Here's what many early-stage tech companies get wrong about marketing:

1. "Marketing is fluff—sales does the real work"

Your audience often sees marketing as the department that makes brochures, updates the website, and plans events while salespeople close actual deals. They don't realize that in complex B2B sales, especially in the capital markets, strategic positioning and a coherent messaging framework are what enable sales conversations in the first place. Without marketing defining why you're different and what problems you solve, sales is just doing demos that go nowhere.

2. "Marketing results can't be measured like sales can"

Because marketing doesn't directly close deals, it’s often viewed it as a necessary evil with fuzzy ROI. Founders will demand accountability from sales (quota attainment, pipeline value) but give marketing a pass with vanity metrics like website traffic or social media followers. The reality is that marketing in long-cycle B2B sales should be measured on influence: deal velocity, competitive win rates, sales cycle length, and whether your name comes up when buyers start their evaluation process.

3. "We can DIY our marketing or hire a generalist"

Industry-specific tech firms believe that all marketing is the same- that someone who did demand gen for a SaaS company or brand marketing for a consumer product can easily transition to PE-tech. They don't recognize that selling to GP/managers requires deep domain expertise. A generalist doesn't understand LP governance structures, fund administration workflows, or why your product helps solve X. Without that context, even competent marketers produce generic content that signals you don't actually understand the business.

4. "If we build it, they will come"

PE-tech firms often believe a superior product naturally attracts customers. They think institutional buyers are constantly scanning the market for better solutions and will find you if you're genuinely good. The reality: most firms stick with incumbent providers despite mediocre service because switching costs are high and "nobody got fired for buying IBM." You need marketing to create urgency around the cost of inaction and make switching feel less risky than staying put.

5. "Effective marketing requires a big budget"

PE-tech firms assume marketing success requires six-figure ad budgets, expensive agency retainers, and premium conference sponsorships to compete with larger competitors. The reality: in institutional markets, a precisely targeted point of view reaches more qualified buyers than broad awareness campaigns. A single well-researched piece demonstrating you understand operational pain points will outperform a generic thought leadership campaign with ten times the budget. Most invest-tech marketing dollars are wasted on surface-level visibility when a focused effort on competitive positioning, client success stories, and sales enablement delivers better returns. Your differentiation comes from domain expertise and strategic focus, not budget size.

6. "AI can handle all our marketing needs"

Tech and service providers in the capital markets increasingly believe ChatGPT can generate content, write campaigns, and create messaging without human marketing expertise. But AI doesn't understand the nuanced differences between fund administrators and auditors, can't distinguish what matters to a PE CFO versus a family office executive, and has no insight into why buyers chose your competitor in the last three deals. AI is excellent at execution once you know what to say, but it can't replace domain expertise from years in private capital. It doesn't know which pain points resonate, which positioning works, or how fiduciary responsibility shapes decisions. Firms using AI without strategy produce high volumes of generic content that  lacks the credibility points that institutional buyers recognize. AI is a powerful tool for marketers with expertise - not a replacement for understanding your market.

7. "Marketing is only about driving leads"

PE-tech firms reduce marketing to lead generation—measured by form fills, demo requests, and MQLs passed to sales each month. But according to 6sense research, 70% of the B2B buyer journey happens anonymously before prospects ever engage with sales. In the private capital markets with 12-18 month cycles and committee decisions, most of your actual buyers are doing quiet research, talking to peers, and evaluating you in the background. Marketing's real value isn't capturing leads - it's influencing those hidden buyers through what we call compound marketing: positioning and activity that accumulates credibility over time, content that demonstrates domain expertise when prospects are researching anonymously, and competitive narratives that give them reasons to leave incumbents.

The bottom line: Marketing in PE-tech isn't about outspending competitors or chasing lead volume. It's about strategic positioning that makes you the obvious choice when prospects are ready to move.

The question isn't whether you need marketing. It's whether you're willing to do marketing that actually moves the needle—or keep treating it like an expensive checkbox while competitors take deals you should be winning.