Before the Demo: What Fund Managers Already Know About You (Part 2)
- Quadsight
- Feb 16
- 4 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
How Investment-Tech Buyers Actually Search, Learn, and Decide
In Part 1, we showed how AI has become the first stop for investment-technology buyers, and how being cited in AI-generated answers increasingly determines whether a vendor is even considered. By the time a buyer reaches out, much of the evaluation has already happened, often without the vendor ever knowing it occurred. That shift has an important implication.
Most investment-technology and service firms still focus their content on the moment a buyer is ready to choose a vendor: comparison pages, feature lists, integration documentation, and proof points. But by the time a buyer reaches that stage, the decision's shape is largely set.
Buyers don’t move through a funnel of pages – at least not anymore. They move through a progression of questions. First, they try to understand the problem clearly. Then they evaluate different ways of approaching it. Only after that do they compare platforms.
AI-driven search compresses this progression. Buyers now ask compound questions that span education, approach, and vendor validation in a single prompt. When that happens, vendors that publish only late-stage content often struggle to appear in the answers AI produces.
A useful way to think about this progression is what we call the Buyer Prompt Funnel.
The Buyer Prompt Funnel
At a high level, buyer questions – including from managers and GPs - tend to cluster into three types: 1) questions that help them understand the problem, 2) questions that help them evaluate approaches, and 3) questions that help them select a platform.
Understanding the Problem
Early in the process, buyers are not looking for vendors. They are looking for guidance for a problem they have.
Typical questions at this stage include:
How does X actually work?
Why does X matter in practice?
Where do teams commonly get this wrong?
How do more experienced or institutional organizations handle this today?
A fund CFO trying to improve LP reporting or an investment team evaluating portfolio analytics is not shopping yet. They are trying to make sure they understand the problem well enough to justify spending time, budget, and internal effort on it. Content that gets mentioned and cited here tends to be educational rather than promotional. Clear descriptions of how a process works, practical diagrams, and honest discussions of trade-offs perform well because they help buyers orient themselves to the topic.
The way a buyer first understands a problem often determines how subsequent options are evaluated and which vendors are taken seriously when platforms are ultimately compared.
Evaluating Approaches
Once buyers feel grounded, their questions change.
They move from " What is this?” to " How should this be handled?” At this point, they are comparing approaches rather than tools. Common questions include:
What’s the right way to approach this?
How do different approaches compare?
What are the risks in taking a certain path?
What does a “positive future state” look like for my firm?
In investment technology, these questions often surface as comparisons such as:
In-house workflows versus outsourced solutions
Point solutions versus integrated platforms
Standardized processes versus flexible, bespoke setups
These are questions about trade-offs. Buyers are evaluating different operating models and assessing the implications of each before committing to one.
Content that performs well here explains constraints clearly and avoids one-size-fits-all answers. Vendors that appear consistently at this stage are often favored before formal evaluation even begins, because their point of view already aligns with how the buyer thinks the problem should be handled – if it's written correctly.
Vendor Assessment
Only after buyers feel confident about the problem and the approach do questions become explicitly vendor-focused.
Now the questions are about fit and justification:
Which platforms support this use case well?
How do different vendors compare?
Will this integrate cleanly with our existing systems?
Is this proven at our level of scale and complexity?
This is where comparison pages, use-case examples, and proof points matter. But they matter precisely because the earlier questions have already been answered.
At this stage, buyers are asking a simple internal question: Can this decision be defended? Good content makes that answer easier.
The AI Search Reality
In practice, AI collapses all of these question types into a single interaction.
A buyer might ask:
What’s the best portfolio analytics platform for a mid-sized asset manager that needs factor attribution, strong governance, and Snowflake integration?
That single prompt reflects:
a need to understand what matters
an implicit choice of approach
a request for vendor recommendations
AI can only answer that question credibly if it has access to content that addresses all three types of buyer questions. Vendors that publish only vendor-comparison content often answer the final question without addressing the earlier ones, and as a result, fail to appear at all.
Why This Matters
Investment-technology buying is complex. Buyers need help understanding problems, choosing approaches, and justifying decisions well before any conversation with a vendor takes place. Content that appears only during vendor comparisons often arrives too late.
The organizations that increasingly earn mindshare and AI visibility are the ones that help buyers make sense of their pain points early in the process.
In an AI-mediated search environment, an effective content strategy is not about keywords or funnel stages. It’s about answering the right questions, in the right order, in a way that AI search engines can understand and present.
If you'd like to see how your firm (and your competitors) are showing up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity and Gemini, drop us a line.
