Bridging the Gap Between HNWIs and B2B Investment Portfolios

Summary

High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and investment managers often avoid B2B portfolios because they see them as high-risk or poorly aligned with scalable returns. For businesses, this disconnect can mean missed opportunities to secure vital funding. To understand how digital selling impacts investor decisions, explore "Attracting Investment with Digital Selling Strategies". If you’re pitching to venture capitalists, check out "How to Secure Venture Capital for Your B2B Startup". Additionally, learn how to create compelling investment proposals in "Impress Investors with a Winning Digital Selling Plan".

You'll Discover:

• Why HNWIs are cautious about B2B portfolios.
• How to align your business with the expectations of high-net-worth investors.
• Strategies to attract interest using data-driven approaches.
• Tactics to improve communication with investment managers.

There is an assumption that B2B organisations have everything worked out and it’s just the luck of the draw who wins and who fails even after due diligence - because no one is psychic right!  HNWI and Family Offices may want to invest in B2Bs as part of their portfolio, however, why would they enquire about the marketing, they’re only after the ROI - right?

Reading the press, social media, email newsletters and insider information there are some significant things to consider before investing in any B2B organisation.  I know this will surprise many people, but B2B marketing is appalling, so is pretty much anything to do with them generating new business.  Surely not I hear you say!

Where does the responsibility lay?

Before I explain what HNWI and Family Offices need to look out for, I first want to prepare the landscape.  You know businesses can only succeed if other businesses know about them, hence marketing. 

The more people ‘the story’ is told to, the more likely you are going to make sales and succeed.  Failure to connect with enough people will result in the business failing.  It’s always been as simple as that.  Additionally, no B2B is a social experiment.  The objective is to sell a product and make a profit.

High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI)

The High-Net-Worth Individuals often make decisions based upon the advice and recommendations from their investment portfolio company/managers.

Investment Management

Investment management companies and their employees are not business advisors in the sense that they do not and cannot evaluate marketing plans.  Their job is to matchmake the B2B companies with an investor and oversee the investment on behalf of the HNWI or main investors.  And in many cases act as the representative of the HNWI on the board.

B2B CEOs

B2B CEOs have been led to believe they know enough about marketing to make informed decisions; however, most CEOs have never trained or researched marketing.  Over time, multiple marketers and CMOs have said the same thing which has deceived or misled CEOs into believing they are doing the right thing. The marketing data within the business plan would typically have been provided by a CMO or similar qualified person.

B2B CMOs

B2B CMOs have accepted the messaging form Big-Tech MarTech and have recommended the purchase of every common item of SaaS and their respective strategies for the past ten years.  However, they have collectively refused to engage in market research, yet it is supposed to be part of their remit – to understand the effectiveness of these strategies towards those whom they are marketing to.

The CMOs job is to ensure prospects ‘get’ the product and to create a continuous stream of new interested parties for sales to talk to - hence the blind acceptance to marketing automation driven demand generation and ABM – which doesn’t work.

Unsurprisingly, the average tenure of a CMO is between nine to eighteen months according to Seth Godin back in 2022 and Forbes Magazine in 2023, and in the press virtually every year since 2016.  It takes three months to get their feet under the desk, devise the plan and get it approved.  Twelve months to execute the plan and a further three months to find a new job.  Clearly some CEOs catch on much quicker, hence the nine-month tenure!

B2B Talent Acquisition

Talent acquisition is of no help either.  Whether employed, contracted or an agency, they are given a job description, often a re-hash of the previous one and they make it known a role is up for grabs, as long as the individual can bypass the applicant tracking system and if they tick the required (previous) boxes, they’ll have a chance at another eighteen-month stint before they change – yet again. 

No matter what an applicant might say about their unique abilities, it is not the role of Talent Acquisition to make business marketing decisions to the hiring manager.  They’re paid to match the job description to the CV!

B2B Sales Teams

CEOs, CMOs and the rest of the C Suite (with the exception VPs of Sales) believe marketing teams are doing all they can and the reason for poor sales is a result of poor salespeople and their abilities, hence the demand for sales enablement trainers, meticulous ABM related sales-stage structures and prospect review meetings, even for those who have been selling for decades.

Blame or Responsibility Rolls Downhill

It would appear there is nothing anyone can do to rectify this situation and no one in the pecking order has enough expertise to convince the next person up the chain that a solution either exists or anything more can be done.  

Where B2B Marketing is Going Wrong

B2B Marketing departments are given KPIs for activity and salespeople are given revenue targets for actual income.  There has been an ongoing debate relating to friction between these two departments due to Marketing continuously lambasting sales for poor performance and Sales saying the leads are no good.

Unfortunately Marketing holds sway in the boardroom, simply because of their budget allocation and possible desperation of the board for Marketing to pull a rabbit-out-of-the-hat.  No exposure means no leads, hence the constant demand for more budget.

We have heard about great leaders who focus on employing great talent.  Steve Jobs once said, we hire great talent on high salaries, for them to tell us what to do, not the other way round.  This has now become a big problem when it comes to marketing. 

Conclusion

Sadly it seems, the HNWI and Family offices must accept they’re the only ones who really want to see a business succeed.  Let’s face it, everyone else in the feeding chain is getting paid regardless and sometimes very handsomely.  Win or lose they’re ok – and you’re funding it.

Perhaps there’s no appetite to tell businesses to stop being so bloody-minded and lazy.  Perhaps it’s all about ‘silo-working’ and no one really cares because the only losers are going to be the HNWI and Family Offices as no one else has skin-in-the-game, they will all get another job if everything went south, and the business ends up getting sold for pennies.

If Marketing had done their jobs properly and applied common sense, market research and financial analysis, they would not have kept doing the same thing over and over for the past ten years.  They also would have established that reliance on digital was not working, as reflected in the low Annual Recurring Revenue. 

To make matters worse, if you haven’t heard about the leaked API data by Google on GitHub, you need to learn about it fast!

The data proves marketers have been making it up as they went along.  They can’t blame Google necessarily as it’s a free platform, however, the strategies and tactics of marketers calls into question why they continued to do the same thing year after year and kept failing.

The leaked data illustrates they may have misled businesses and SEOs, which in turn means everything marketers have been telling their B2B companies to do has been wrong too. 

The consensus is businesses need to develop their brand outside the Google eco-system if they want to succeed.  It makes sense, because no one in their right mind would depend on an infrastructure no one knows how it works, no one is accountable, and nothing can be guaranteed to work.  If investors would not back a business whose sole route to market was cold calling, the Google proposition is even worse!

To find out more about the API leaked Google data and to read a summary – click here.