Why HNWIs and Investment Managers Often Overlook B2B Technology — And How to Change That

If You're Investing in a B2B, You're Betting on Something You Can't See Clearly

The assumption in most investment circles is that B2B organisations have their house in order. The products exist, the team is in place, there's a business plan with a CMO's fingerprints on it — so what's to worry about? Win or lose comes down to market conditions, right? No one is psychic. Due diligence ticks the boxes. The deal gets done.

That assumption is costing HNWIs and Family Offices a great deal of money.

I want to say this plainly before going any further: B2B marketing is, almost universally, appalling. Not mediocre. Appalling. And since new business generation depends entirely on marketing, that single fact puts most B2B investments on shaky ground before the first cheque is written. If that surprises you, read on.

Where Does the Responsibility Sit?

Before getting into what HNWIs and Family Offices should be looking for before committing capital, I want to set out how the problem is structured — because nobody in the chain is obviously at fault, and yet the whole system is failing.

A business can only survive if enough people know it exists. That is not a controversial statement. The more people who hear the story, the greater the chance of making sales and building revenue. Fail to reach enough people and the business fails. It really is that simple. B2B is not a social experiment. The objective is to sell a product and make a profit. Everything else is secondary.

For more on what a properly structured approach to this looks like, read our Investment Marketing Plan 2, which sets out what a credible go-to-market plan should actually contain.

High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs)

HNWIs typically make investment decisions based on advice from their portfolio managers and investment management companies. They are not expected to evaluate marketing plans — and in most cases, nobody else in the process does either. That is the first problem.

Investment Management

Investment management firms and their people are not business advisors in the operational sense. They do not evaluate marketing plans. Their job is to match B2B companies with capital, oversee the investment on behalf of the HNWI, and in many cases take a board seat as the investor's representative. Scrutinising whether the CMO's demand generation strategy actually works is not their remit — and that gap is where money disappears.

B2B CEOs

Most B2B CEOs have been led to believe they understand marketing well enough to make informed decisions about it. The reality is that most CEOs have never formally studied or researched marketing. Over years, a succession of CMOs and marketing directors has told them the same things, and through repetition it has become received wisdom. The marketing data in the business plan was almost certainly provided by the CMO. The CEO approved it on that basis. Nobody questioned it.

B2B CMOs

B2B CMOs have, for the best part of a decade, accepted the messaging coming out of Big Tech MarTech vendors and recommended the purchase of every fashionable SaaS tool going. What they have consistently failed to do is conduct any meaningful market research into whether any of it actually works. That research is supposed to be part of their remit — understanding the effectiveness of their strategies on the people they are marketing to. Most have never done it.

The CMO's job is to make sure prospects understand the product and to generate a steady pipeline of interested parties for sales to speak to. Instead, that job has been outsourced to marketing automation, demand generation platforms and ABM frameworks — none of which produce the results being promised.

We track CMO tenure closely at salesXchange. Our research puts average B2B CMO tenure at around 18 months — and the structural data backs this up. In B2B technology specifically, independent research now puts average CMO tenure at 18 to 24 months. The pattern is consistent: three months to get settled, understand the business and get a plan approved; twelve months to execute it; three months quietly looking for the next role. Some CEOs work it out faster, hence the occasional nine-month exit. The point is that no CMO stays long enough to be held accountable for the strategy they installed — and the business, and by extension the investor, pays for that.

B2B Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition is no help here either. Whether it is an in-house team, a contractor or an agency, they are given a job description — usually a barely modified version of the previous one — and they find someone who can get past the applicant tracking system and tick the required boxes. The result is another version of the last person, doing the same things that did not work before, on another 18-month cycle.

Talent acquisition people are not paid to make marketing strategy decisions for the hiring manager. They are paid to match a CV to a job description. Asking them to filter for whether a candidate's approach to B2B demand generation is fundamentally sound is not what they do.

B2B Sales Teams

CEOs, CMOs and the rest of the C-Suite — with the notable exception of VPs of Sales — believe the marketing team is doing everything that can be done and that poor sales results are caused by poor salespeople. This leads to an industry built on sales enablement training, elaborate ABM-stage structures, and weekly pipeline review meetings that produce theatre rather than revenue, even for people who have been selling for twenty years.

Blame Rolls Downhill

Nobody at any level in this chain has enough independent expertise to convince the person above them that the model is broken. The CEO defers to the CMO on marketing. The CMO defers to MarTech vendors. The board defers to the CEO. The investor trusts the board. And the whole structure sits on a strategy that has been failing for a decade, with nobody accountable for it.

If you want to understand how to position a B2B investment opportunity properly, our Attract Investors article sets out what the market actually needs to see.

Where B2B Marketing Is Going Wrong

Marketing departments are given KPIs for activity. Sales teams are given targets for revenue. These two things are not the same, and the friction between them has been a feature of B2B organisations for years. Marketing points at the number of leads generated. Sales says the leads are no good. Both are partly right.

Marketing tends to hold sway in the boardroom for one simple reason: budget. Where there is significant spend, there is political weight. The board wants marketing to pull results out of thin air, marketing demands more budget to do it, and the cycle continues. Sales, which actually generates the revenue, is treated as a support function that should be grateful for whatever leads marketing provides.

There is a version of leadership wisdom that says you hire brilliant people at proper salaries and let them tell you what needs to be done — not the other way around. Steve Jobs articulated this. The theory is sound. The problem, in B2B marketing specifically, is that the brilliant people being hired have been shaped entirely by a MarTech industry with a vested interest in selling them more tools. Their expertise is real, but it has been pointed in the wrong direction from the start.

What Investors Are Really Funding

Let's be blunt about this. HNWIs and Family Offices end up as the only people in the chain who genuinely need the business to succeed. Everyone else — the CMO, the talent acquisition firm, the MarTech vendors, the management consultants, the investment management company — gets paid regardless of outcome. Win or lose, they move on to the next engagement. You, as the investor, are the one with skin in the game. You are funding the whole structure.

Nobody in that chain is motivated to tell the business to stop doing the same things that are not working. There is no financial incentive to do so. If the business eventually fails or gets sold for pennies, the people involved will already have another job. The HNWI and Family Office are the ones left holding the loss.

If marketing had applied basic common sense, proper market research and financial analysis rather than repeating the same playbook for ten years, the evidence of failure would have been impossible to ignore. The consistently low Annual Recurring Revenue should have been enough. It was not, because nobody with the authority to change the strategy was sufficiently incentivised to do so.

And then there is the Google problem, which every investor in any B2B that relies on digital visibility needs to understand. In March 2024, Google's internal search API documentation was accidentally made public on GitHub. Read the full summary of the Google API leak and its implications for B2Bs here. The documents — over 14,000 ranking attributes from Google's internal Content API Warehouse — revealed that Google's public statements about how search works have been, at best, incomplete and, in several cases, directly contradicted by its own internal data. Signals Google publicly denied using, including click behaviour and site authority scores, appear to have been factored in all along.

What this means for investors is significant. B2B marketers have been building strategies around a set of rules that were either wrong or fabricated. They were not lying deliberately, for the most part — they were following vendor guidance and Google's own public statements. But the strategies they built, the content they created, the tools they bought, and the SEO approaches they adopted were based on incomplete or misleading information. That is a material risk to any B2B investment that depends on digital channels for revenue.

The conclusion the SEO community has drawn from the leak and from the DOJ antitrust case — in which a US federal court ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search — is consistent: businesses need to develop their brand and audience reach outside the Google infrastructure if they want sustainable growth. No rational investor would back a business whose entire route to market was cold calling. Dependence on a search algorithm nobody can verify, nobody controls and nobody is accountable for is a worse proposition. The investor takes the downside. Google does not.

For a full overview of the investment context and related reading, browse our Investment articles section.