You Can’t Harvest a Sales Pipeline You Haven’t Planted

Anyone who’s spent anytime with me knows (and has heard many times) my number one marketing philosophy: buyers always start with a problem they need solved. They don’t start with your product, your features, or your latest announcement. They start with something that isn’t working the way they want it to.

I wrote about this in Nobody Cares About Your Product, where I made the case that good marketing starts with the buyer’s pain and the business impact of that pain. Addressing that first and foremost in your messaging and positioning is the most effective way to get the market to pay attention to you.

But there’s another side to that idea: what happens when the buyer doesn’t realize they have a problem in the first place?

Take a family office that has a team of analysts spending hours pulling data from LP portals or other manager sources and re-keying it into a portfolio management system. The work gets done, the reports get produced, and the process may have been in place for years. From the family office’s perspective, there may not be a problem at all. It’s simply how the work gets done.

This is where good marketing can change the way they see the process. A piece of content might show the cost of using highly skilled analysts for manual data entry. A campaign might highlight how other family offices are scaling without adding headcount. A sales message might frame manual re-keying not as an administrative nuisance, but as a drag on operating leverage and heightened investment risk.

Nothing about the underlying process has changed. What has changed is the buyer’s understanding of it. They’ve been presented with a better way of thinking about the problem, what it’s costing them and, potentially, a better way of solving it.

That’s the seed marketing plants.

The same thing can happen in less obvious ways. Imagine a PE firm where an LP asks a question and the IR team needs to track down the information, check it with finance, pull data from multiple systems, and then respond to the investor three days later. The LP eventually gets an answer, so internally the firm may believe the process is working.

But good messaging can reframe that situation too. It can show what faster investor responsiveness looks like, how investor expectations around access to information are changing, and how slow answers can gradually erode confidence and goodwill. The problem already exists. Good marketing simply helps the buyer see why it matters.

And that’s where I think top-of-funnel marketing really starts.

When firms tell me they need more pipeline, the conversation usually moves quickly to lead generation. Who should we target? What campaign should we run? How do we get more meetings?

Those are fair questions, but they assume a large group of buyers already recognizes the problem and is ready to start looking for a solution. In investment technology, that’s often not the case. The biggest competitor is frequently not another platform. It’s the status quo.

The spreadsheet works. The analysts get the job done. The investor or client eventually gets an answer. The process may be inefficient or frustrating, but it isn’t painful enough yet to trigger a buying process.

You don’t build pipeline by waiting for buyers to have a problem. You build it by helping them recognize the problem before they’re ready to buy.

That’s why I think about marketing a little like farming. You plant an idea, then reinforce it over time. A prospect sees a LinkedIn post about the cost of manual data management. A month later they read an article about how other family offices are approaching the same challenge. They hear the issue discussed at a conference. Then someone on their own team complains about spending half a day re-keying data.

Individually, none of those things creates a sales opportunity. Together, they start changing the way the buyer thinks. “That’s just how we do it” becomes “Why are we still doing it this way?”

Planting the seed is only the first step. Most of your market isn’t evaluating vendors today, so the idea has to be reinforced over time. Every article, LinkedIn post, conference conversation, case study, or email adds another layer of familiarity with both the problem and your point of view and, eventually, your solution.

Over time, that repeated exposure compounds. The buyer starts to see the issue differently, and your brand becomes more closely associated with a better way of doing things. Then, when something changes and the issue becomes urgent, you’re not introducing yourself for the first time. You’re already familiar.

Of course, you still need to capture the demand that exists today. But if all of your marketing is focused on people who are already in-market, you’re spending all of your time harvesting and none of it planting.

The firms that build durable pipeline are the ones that keep planting seeds long before the market is ready to buy. They introduce a better way to think about the problem, reinforce why it matters, and keep showing up until that idea takes root. If you’re not planting anything today, you shouldn’t be surprised when there’s nothing to harvest tomorrow.

That’s a big part of the work I do with technology and service firms serving the investment management industry. I help companies identify the problems they should own in the market, develop the content and messaging that plants those ideas with the right audience, and build the consistent presence that turns awareness into recall and recall into pipeline.

If your firm has a strong solution but isn’t coming to mind when buyers recognize the problem you solve, drop me a note. Let’s talk.