Every WealthTech company begins with a problem worth solving. A planning workflow that takes too long. A household picture spread across six systems. An investor who wants to understand what their advisor is actually doing for them. Somewhere along the way, many firms stop talking about that problem and start talking about themselves.
The shift is quiet, and it is common. Product roadmaps fill with features. Marketing describes the platform. Sales learns to demo every screen. The advisor on the other side of the table, the person who was supposed to see their own day in your product, is left to connect the dots alone.
The market is telling us something
Research on why companies fail keeps landing in the same place. When CB Insights studied 101 startup post-mortems, the most-cited reason for failure wasn’t running out of cash or being out-competed. It was building something the market didn’t need, cited by 42% of failed companies. The technology worked. The connection to a real, felt problem didn’t.
Buyers have also changed how they buy. Gartner research found that B2B buyers spend only about 17% of their total buying time meeting with potential suppliers. When they are comparing several, any one supplier may get just 5–6% of the buyer’s total time. The rest happens without you: reading, comparing, talking with peers, deciding what matters. If your message doesn’t already speak to the buyer’s problem, you may never get the meeting where you planned to explain it.
And the advisors WealthTech firms sell to are under pressure of their own. In Cerulli research, 55% of advisors named client acquisition as a top challenge. They aren’t looking for more software. They are looking for help winning and keeping clients.
Two levels of empathy
That is why we believe the work starts with the client, and then goes one step further, to the client’s client.
An advisor buys technology for one reason: it helps them serve the people across their desk. Advisor360°’s 2024 Connected Wealth Report found that 86% of investors want a full view of their wealth, yet only 40% believe their advisor has one. That gap is a problem the investor feels, which makes it a problem the advisor feels, which makes it a problem a WealthTech product can solve, if the message carries it all the way through.
When your story speaks to both levels, it gets bought twice: once by the advisor, and again every time they use it with a client.
Most teams can describe their product in detail. Far fewer can describe their client’s day.
Why Spencer Business Strategies exists
SBS was built to close that gap. Not with a louder message or a bigger campaign, but by starting where the buyer starts: with the problem they are trying to solve every day.
In practice, that means asking questions many teams skip:
- Who exactly is our client, and who is their client?
- What problem are they trying to solve on an ordinary Tuesday?
- How do they describe that problem, in their own words?
- Would Product, Marketing and Sales give the same answer?
When those answers line up, Product builds for the problem, Marketing describes the problem, and Sales solves the problem. When they don’t, each team drifts in its own direction and the client gets lost in between. We call that Strategic Drift, and it is the subject of our next post.
A different starting question
If you lead a WealthTech firm, whether you are launching, entering the market from another industry, or repositioning an established product, the most useful question you can ask this quarter isn’t “How do we sell more?” It is “Where is our client in our strategy?”
Start there, and the rest of the go-to-market has something to stand on.
Sources
- CB Insights post-mortem analysis, as reported in “Define the Need Before You Bleed,” CMO Council (July 2021)
- Gartner research, as reported in “Buyer Enablement Is the Key to B2B Sales,” destinationCRM (2018)
- “Cerulli: Independent RIAs to Outpace All Other Channels by 2028,” WealthManagement.com (February 2025)
- Advisor360°, Connected Wealth Report: Client Edition (2024)
