What Managing Money Taught Me About Effective Marketing

Before I became a marketing professional, I spent a large portion of my career as an institutional investor and allocator. On the surface, managing portfolios for pension funds and endowments, and helping invest-tech firms with their go-to-market efforts, might seem worlds apart. But you'd be surprised how much overlap exists between these two disciplines. The principles that guided my investment decisions have become invaluable frameworks for managing my clients' marketing programs.

Here's what I've learned.

Risk Management: The Courage to Stand Out

In institutional investment management, how you manage risk is everything. It shapes every decision and every allocation. The same risk/return principle applies to marketing, particularly when it comes to messaging boldness in what has historically been a fairly conservative industry.

As competition heats up in the PE/invest/wealth tech space, we're drowning in a sea of sameness. Everyone's messaging sounds identical and predictable. This low-risk approach to messaging often gets overlooked by your targets.

Does crafting messaging that steps outside the institutional box mean you're taking on higher risk in your GTM plan? Not necessarily.

But here's what I learned from managing money: sometimes the riskiest thing you can do is play it too safe. How do you add alpha if all you do is hug the index?  Being a contrarian has often been a profitable investment strategy.  Same with marketing.  When every competitor is zigging, zagging becomes your competitive advantage. There's too much copying happening in the PE and invest-tech space. Standing out requires a level of boldness, and that's precisely where opportunity lies.

The principle of diversification applies here as well. Just as you wouldn't put all your assets in a single investment, you shouldn't put all your marketing into a single strategy. Marketing required testing and iteration. Your overall "portfolio" of messaging becomes stronger through strategic variety and insights gained over time.

Allocation and Position Sizing: Where to Place Your Bets

Every institutional investor knows the critical importance of allocation decisions. How much capital do you commit to a particular investment? What's the optimal position size given your conviction level and the opportunity set?

Marketing budgets work precisely the same way. Every dollar you allocate to a go-to-market activity or resource represents a choice as well as an opportunity cost. Should you invest heavily in content marketing or new sales assets? Do you allocate budget to a new marketing automation platform or double down on LinkedIn advertising? Position sizing taught me a simple rule: match your budget allocation to your conviction level based on data and experience. If you have high confidence in a channel or tactic based on data and experience, lean into it. If you're testing something new, keep the initial allocation modest until you prove the concept. This prevents you from over-committing to unproven strategies while ensuring you don't under-invest in what’s working.  The reality is marketing is both art + science.  Testing is paramount.

Measurement and KPIs: Know What's Working…and What’s Not

No institutional investor would dream of managing money without rigorous performance measurement. You track returns, benchmark against relevant indices, analyze attribution, and constantly assess whether your investments are performing as expected.

Yet I'm consistently surprised by how many marketing programs operate without clear KPIs or rigorous measurement frameworks. Marketing requires the same analytical discipline as portfolio management. You need to know what's working and what isn't.  Developers are constantly analyzed by the quality of their code, bugs, and output.  Sales is the same.  Shouldn’t marketing also be held accountable beyond vanity metrics? What's the quality of your leads? What's the conversion rate? What's the cost per acquisition? How long is the sales cycle? These are the numbers that matter.

Review, Rebalance, Iterate: Double Down on Winners

Perhaps the most critical parallel between investment management and marketing is the discipline of regular review and rebalancing. Institutional portfolios aren't "set it and forget it" affairs. Markets change. Opportunities shift. Marketing demands the same adaptive mindset.

Review your campaigns regularly. Which channels are delivering qualified leads? Which messaging resonates? Where are you seeing strong engagement versus dead air?

Then comes the hard part: acting on what the data tells you. In portfolio management, this means cutting losers and adding to winners. The same applies to marketing. If a campaign isn't performing despite adequate time and investment, cut it loose, regardless of what the salesperson at the trade mag says. When you identify a winning strategy, rebalance the budget into it.

This iterative approach prevents throwing good money after bad while ensuring you fully capitalize on what's working.

The Bottom Line

Managing institutional portfolios gave me a framework for thinking about marketing that invest-tech firms instinctively understand: risk management, strategic allocation, and rigorous measurement. These aren't just investment principles; they're the foundations of effective marketing.

The tech firms that win in this space aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest campaigns. They're the ones that apply the same discipline to their marketing that their prospects use to manage capital. That's not just good marketing, it's how you earn trust in a highly competitive market.