5 Trends Reshaping How Asset Managers Buy – and What that Means for Your GTM
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
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Private markets have always operated by their own rules. What’s changed is that those rules are being rewritten faster than most sales teams are keeping up with.
After recording a recent webinar with Jonathan White (Portfolio BI) and Sven Eggers (State Street), I’ve been sitting with five themes that kept surfacing in different ways throughout our conversation. None of them are brand new, but all of them are more urgent than they were 12 months ago.
These are the trends that should be shaping your approach right now.
1. Fundraising pressure is changing who holds the power in the buying conversation
Private markets fundraising has become genuinely difficult. Cycles are longer. Capital – from institutional investors and increasingly from retail – is harder to secure. And the managers who are winning the capital are the ones who can demonstrate institutional credibility: robust risk management, operational transparency, strong compliance posture.
This matters for sales because it changes what Asset Managers are prioritising. They’re not just evaluating whether your product or service is good. They’re evaluating whether being associated with you helps them look more credible to their investors.
If your pitch is product-led rather than outcome-led, it misses the frame entirely. The question isn’t what you do. It’s what working with you helps them demonstrate to the people whose capital they’re trying to attract.
2. Investor scrutiny is pushing managers to demand more from their service partners
A point Jonathan raised: the manager’s client – the investor – is now far more visible in the conversation. Events like the financial crisis and more recent market stress have made investors more demanding around transparency, reporting, and operational governance.
Asset Managers are responding by raising their own bar. They want partners who can move quickly, respond effectively, and provide comfort — not just deliver a service. That pressure flows downstream to everyone selling into this space.
The implication: if your outreach is still framed around features and capabilities, you’re answering a question nobody is asking. The question is how you help them respond to what their investors are asking for. That requires a different kind of conversation – and a different kind of preparation.
3. The market is segmenting, and generic GTM is paying the price
Private markets is not one market. Private equity, private debt, real estate, infrastructure – each has its own dynamics, its own investors, its own operating pressures. And within each segment, individual managers construct their businesses differently.
Sven’s point was direct: you need to understand not just which segment your prospect operates in, but where they are in their evolution, what their investor base looks like, and what their specific challenges are right now. Fundraising might be a bottleneck for one segment and not another. Retailisation is reshaping some markets faster than others.
Generic messaging that doesn’t reflect this specificity gets screened out almost immediately. These are sophisticated buyers. They notice when you haven’t done the work.
4. Traditional outreach channels are hitting serious diminishing returns
Cold email. LinkedIn messages. Cold calls. None of these have stopped working entirely – but the signal-to-noise ratio has deteriorated significantly. Decision-makers in this space are being contacted constantly, and their filters – human and algorithmic – are increasingly effective.
What Jonathan flagged is worth sitting with: the typical volume-based approach doesn’t just fail to work. It actively signals the wrong thing. A generic outreach message tells a senior executive everything they need to know about whether you’ve thought about them specifically. The answer being no is enough to make them move on.
The firms getting traction are the ones treating each outreach as a researched, specific intervention – not a campaign. That’s harder to scale, but it’s the direction the market is moving.
5. Thought leadership is only working when it’s built on something real
There’s a lot of thought leadership in financial services. Most of it is doing nothing. The reason is that it’s self-referential – firms writing about their own capabilities and calling it content.
Jonathan made a distinction that cuts through this: thought leadership that works is built in collaboration with clients who have experienced real outcomes. It points to something the reader can use, not just something the seller can promote. The bar is whether it would be interesting if your name wasn’t on it.
In private markets specifically, where trust takes time and credibility is everything, content that demonstrates genuine understanding of what managers are navigating carries disproportionate weight. It’s one of the few ways to be interesting before you’ve earned the right to a conversation.
The thread running through all of this
Every one of these trends points in the same direction: the old model of identifying a buyer and selling to them has broken down in private markets. What replaces it is a model built on relevance – specific, researched, outcome-led relevance – delivered consistently over a longer cycle than most GTM strategies are designed to accommodate.
That’s the harder thing to build. It’s also the thing that actually works.
We went deep on all of this in a recent webinar – including specific examples of what’s worked and what hasn’t, from people on both sides of the table. Watch it on demand.
