Author: Kelly Waltrich

Recently, I hosted a webinar with Sheryl O’Connor, CEO of IncomeConductor, focused on the importance of building trust with prospective clients, and how to do so in a world where generic AI content is stripping firms of what makes them unique and relatable.

One idea kept resurfacing:

Are you earning the right to ask?

• For demos.
• For meetings or phone calls.
• For event attendance.
• For attention and engagement.

Too much marketing today skips straight to the ask, assuming prospects know who we are, understand what we do, and owe us their time simply because we showed up in their inbox or LinkedIn feed.

They don’t.

And I can say this with confidence because I see it every day.

What Firms Ask Us For

At Intention.ly, 99% of companies that come to us are chasing those accelerated wins.

They want:

• Leads now
• Quick wins
• Lower cost per meeting this quarter
• Campaigns that “start working immediately”

To be clear, we’re very good at delivering that. We can generate demand fast. We know how to activate channels, sharpen CTAs, and create near-term momentum.

But we’re also upfront about the fact that if that’s all your firm is doing, you’re not setting yourself up for long-term success.

I’ll show you why using stories from two firms I recently talked to. 

Company A: Chasing the Quick, Cheap Lead

The mindset: “Get us leads now. We can worry about brand later.”

What their marketing looks like:

• Cold outbound emails pushing demos
• Paid campaigns optimized for clicks rather than audience fit or relevance
• Feature-heavy content
• Positioning that sounds like every competitor: “Streamline your workflow and save time”

The experience for prospects:

• They see the company’s name for the first time in a cold pitch
• They have no context for what makes this solution different from the five other tools they saw this month
• They’re being pushed to book a demo before understanding if this even solves their problem

Short-term reality:

• They generate 60 demo requests a month
• The marketing dashboard shows green arrows for short-term success metrics
• Leadership feels momentum

Long-term reality:

• Only a few of those demos are qualified prospects
• Cost per qualified lead continues to climb
• Sales cycles drag on for months because trust and education happen entirely in the sales process
• Brand awareness never improves

Because they continue to prioritize short-term attention over long-term success, they’re trapped in a cycle of paying more for the same attention, forever renting demand instead of owning it.

Company B: Laying the Foundation First

The mindset: “Let’s add value and earn attention before we ask for it.”

What their marketing looks like:

• Consistent thought leadership addressing real problems their audience faces
• Educational content that demonstrates deep understanding of the market
• Stories showing honest results, including challenges and timelines
• Positioning rooted in a clear point of view that differentiates them

The experience for prospects:

• They encounter the company’s content multiple times before any outreach
• When a sales email arrives, they already understand what the company believes
• They reach out to book a demo because they know how the company can solve their problems

Short-term reality:

• They book far fewer demos initially
• Leadership trusts their process rather than changing gears to drive short-term wins

Long-term reality:

• Within months, most demos come from inbound requests
• Sales cycles compress dramatically because prospects are bought in by the time they talk to sales
• Cost per qualified lead drops as brand awareness grows

They’re generating more pipeline while spending less on acquisition. Their content qualifies prospects before sales gets involved.

The Difference Compounds Long Term

Fast forward five or 10 years, and the difference becomes impossible to ignore.

Five or ten years out:

• Company A is paying more than ever for the same leads
• Their CAC keeps climbing
• Growth depends entirely on budget, not brand

Meanwhile:

• Company B is generating demand at a fraction of the cost
• Their content, credibility, and reputation do the heavy lifting
• Their marketing works even when spend slows

One company is still asking for attention. The other has earned it.

Are You Building for the Next Quarter or the Next Decade?

The firms winning long-term aren’t doing it with louder messaging or cheaper leads.

They’re doing it by earning attention before they ask for it. They publish ideas that challenge how their market thinks and take clear, unequivocal positions. They demonstrate credibility before demanding time so that when they finally make an ask, it doesn’t feel like an intrusion.

Ask yourself: Are you willing to invest in building trust, or do you want to keep buying short-term engagement?

The brands that will dominate 10 years from now are laying the foundation right now. If you want to be one of them, let’s talk.

Today’s advisors are being asked to do more than ever.

They’re expected to be planners, investment experts, business operators, compliance specialists, and growth engines all at the same time, with marketing as another box to check on an already overloaded list.

Advisors don’t ignore marketing because they don’t care. But it’s difficult to master, time consuming to manage, and easy to get wrong when they’re already juggling a full plate of responsibilities.

Shortcuts become more appealing. Templated websites, do-it-for-me content, and cookie-cutter messaging that may capture the “what” but never gets to the “why” feel good enough.

But none of those things accomplishes what marketing does: answering the question of why someone should choose you over everyone else.

Worse, we’re now in a moment where AI can generate endless amounts of that “good enough” marketing. 

Websites look polished.

Content sounds professional.

And almost everything feels exactly the same.

If a firm hasn’t clearly defined who they are, what they stand for, and how they’re different, AI will happily flatten their message into something interchangeable. Advisors are increasingly relying on brand identities that do more to help them blend in than stand out.

A Different Approach to Advisor Marketing

Building a brand that cuts through the noise requires thinking, clarity, and consistency, not another template or hero image with a sailboat.

Advisor Brand Builder marries an upfront investment in time and authenticity with backend execution speed to first capture what makes a firm truly unique, then carry their voice and value prop through every necessary marketing asset and piece of branded collateral.

The process pushes first to articulate what makes them different, who they serve, and why their approach matters. 

That work is non-negotiable. It creates the clarity firms need to communicate effectively in the market. It shapes their visual identity, their messaging, the brand assets they use every day, and the content they publish.

Clarity of voice, vision, and value powers a cohesive and authentic brand experience.

The Pieces of the Branding Puzzle: What ABB Delivers 

Advisor Brand Builder bridges the gap between personalization and speed. The platform generates a brand, website, and content ecosystem uniquely aligned to each advisor’s positioning, services, and audience. ABB’s output is then refined by our team of agency experts, ensuring advisors receive high-quality work at a fraction of the traditional time and cost.

• A unique visual identity, not a template. The platform delivers a customized logo, color palette, typography, brand patterns, and imagery that reflect your firm’s philosophy and audience. You’ll receive multiple logo concepts to choose from, all generated by AI and refined by human designers.
• Strategic messaging that captures your value. You’ll get a complete messaging platform including your tagline, boilerplate, value proposition, differentiators, service descriptions, and individual bios. This becomes the foundation for everything else.
• A website built in seconds, not months. With the press of a button, ABB uses your brand messaging and assets to generate a fully responsive, brand-aligned website. What traditionally takes months of discovery, design, copywriting, and revisions is compressed into an instant, launch-ready digital presence. Our creative specialists then refine it further.
• Launch-ready brand assets. You’ll receive professional business cards, custom email signatures, social media profile graphics, presentation templates, and business stationery. All generated based on your strategic inputs and ready for real-world application.
• A 12-month content engine mapped to your brand. Rather than producing generic content, ABB builds a strategic content calendar mapped directly to your brand pillars and services. You’ll also receive channel-optimized monthly content packs delivered straight to your inbox and ready to deploy.
• Content optimized for AI search. Your brand is structured to be cited in AI-generated search answers. This includes SEO-optimized Q&A pages designed to capture traffic from people seeking authoritative answers in your niche.

Built and Backed by Financial Services Marketing Leaders

What sets ABB apart is the combination of AI capabilities and human oversight.

The platform is engineered by the industry’s top marketing leaders, who understand the language, competitive landscape, and nuances of financial services. It’s trained on FINRA and SEC rules, which cuts down on revisions and potential regulatory hurdles, and every output is reviewed by our agency team to ensure it’s polished, compliant-aware, and strategically sound.

Rather than replace human strategy with automation, ABB eliminates friction through AI and technology before the Intention.ly team adds a layer of expert refinement. 

Advisor Brand Builder gives advisors what the industry has failed to provide: a way to build a truly differentiated brand and then actually use it, without turning marketing into an ongoing burden.

Ready to learn more? Take a closer look here.

Picture this: there’s a sales leader who thrived in a different era of selling—when relationships, a full Rolodex, and a great golf game could carry the quarter. He built a strong career on that model.  

But today’s environment looks different. The tools and processes that power modern revenue teams feel foreign to him. 

Meanwhile, his marketing team is fully dialed in, generating qualified leads, creating content that educates and converts, and feeding a data-driven funnel. They’re operating in a motion built for how buyers make decisions now.

But he’s still relying on the playbook that worked years ago. He’s not comfortable in HubSpot, isn’t sure how to collaborate with a modern marketing engine, and doesn’t have a clear sense of where leads are coming from or how to follow up with them strategically.

In leadership meetings, that disconnect can morph into a narrative that sales are down because “marketing isn’t delivering enough good leads.” 

It’s not that he’s unwilling or isn’t working hard. But the sales motion he mastered no longer translates to the way growth happens today. And when the person presenting the data is doing so through an old lens, the whole story can get distorted.

The Accountability Problem

When sales owns a firm’s marketing function, accountability breaks down entirely. The organization loses clarity about what’s happening in the funnel, and marketing becomes the scapegoat for sales teams that aren’t delivering. 

I’ve built my entire career on the unshakeable belief that marketing needs a real seat at the table. A healthy business depends on productive tension between sales and marketing; it’s the tension that creates balance.

Both sides need Service Level Agreements that answer these questions: 

• What counts as a qualified lead? 
• How many leads will marketing deliver? 
• How many opportunities will sales convert? 
• What does the handoff process look like?

Data needs to be shared transparently at the leadership level so everyone is operating from the same reality.  

Navigating an Agency Partnership

Sales shouldn’t own the marketing function period, whether it’s an in-house team, an outsourced agency partnership, or some combination of the two. With sales at the helm of an agency relationship, the same accountability issues arise. 

I’ve seen our team pressured to chase short-term lead volume instead of building sustainable growth. Blamed for a lack of demos booked when half the sales team was on vacation. Scapegoated when results are lackluster because fresh campaigns haven’t been reviewed and approved.

Ideally, an in-house marketing lead owns the agency relationship. They understand the strategy, the timelines, and the metrics that matter. In the absence of an internal team, the firm’s CEO should be involved in and very aware of the relationship, holding both sales and the agency equally accountable for results. 

CEOs: This One’s on You

I’ve talked a lot about sales and marketing, but leadership needs to be deeply involved in understanding what both functions are doing. 

When your salesperson claims marketing isn’t delivering, stop. Dig into the data. Ask hard questions:

• Where’s the actual breakdown? 
• Is engagement low? 
• Is interest weak? 
• Are the leads poor quality? 
• Are the opportunities not converting?
• Or is everything working fine and the problem is effort, the actual push to close?

Don’t let one side control the narrative. Look at the full funnel.

Build a More Inclusive Table

Full disclosure: I’m biased. I spent my career as a CMO. Now I sit in a seat where I do more sales than marketing, but I’ve watched this pattern play out too many times. It’s outdated, it’s destructive, and it needs to end.

CEOs, arm yourself with better information. Ask better questions. Make sure marketing and sales have equal seats at the table. That’s how you build a growth engine that actually works.

In financial services, “lead generation” is a term that gets thrown around so often it’s lost its meaning. Everyone wants more leads, faster and for less money. But we often see firms falling for the illusion that buying a list of names is the same thing as building a pipeline of opportunities.

Buying leads is not lead generation. It’s an expensive distraction dressed up as a cheap shortcut.

The Problem with Purchased Leads

Buying leads is appealing because it feels efficient. Pay a vendor, get a list, and start dialing or emailing. But no one on that list asked to be contacted by you. They haven’t read your content, attended your event, or engaged with your brand in any meaningful way. They’re not your audience; in fact, they may have no idea who you are.

At best, they’re lukewarm contacts with no context for what makes you different or how you can help them. At worst, they’re recycled, unqualified, and shared with dozens of other firms just like yours.

You can’t build trust, the foundation of financial services relationships, when your first interaction is asking a complete stranger to open up to you about their finances. You’re interrupting, not providing the kind of value-driven marketing that inspires confidence and encourages engagement.

What Real Lead Generation Looks Like

True lead generation is a long-term game, which is the only kind that actually works in a sustainable way. It’s the disciplined, strategic process of creating awareness, building trust, and turning interest into action.

Generating real demand for your services from qualified leads takes time, effort, and resources:

1. Start with Strategy, Not Tactics

Real lead generation begins with establishing clarity about who you serve, the problems you solve, and why that matters. Until you know exactly who your ideal audience is, your marketing will always miss the mark. Every content decision, ad placement, and social post should tie back to your positioning, strategy, and audience understanding.

2. Build a Brand People Want to Engage With

Brand isn’t a logo or a color palette. It’s a promise. It’s the experience people expect when they interact with your firm.

Your brand should make prospects feel something. Confidence. Curiosity. Alignment. If your brand story is clear and authentic, people will want to know more before you ever reach out. That’s what turns attention into intention.

3. Create Content That Pulls, Not Pushes

Effective lead generation is built on value, not volume. That means creating content that educates, inspires, and motivates people to learn more.

Host a webinar that solves a real problem, publish thoughtful articles that challenge industry norms, and share insights that make your audience smarter. When you consistently provide value, leads start coming to you.

4. Nurture Relationships Instead of Forcing Transactions

The journey from awareness to conversion doesn’t happen overnight. Real lead generation is about consistent nurturing, not nagging.

Build email sequences that educate rather than sell, use retargeting to stay visible without being invasive, and continue to deliver useful, relevant content long after someone has joined your list.

People do business with brands they trust, and building trust takes time.

5. Leverage Data to Guide, Not Replace, Human Connection

Technology and data are critical tools, but they’re not a substitute for empathy or understanding.

Use analytics to learn what resonates. Implement automation to scale personalization. Never forget, though, that behind every “lead” is a human being making decisions about their money, their future, and their family.

The Payoff of Doing It Right

In terms of upfront cost, time, and effort, real lead generation is more expensive than buying a list of names. But the payoff is worth it.

Prospects come into conversations informed, curious, and open. They already trust your expertise because they’ve experienced it through your marketing. Instead of annoying people who never asked to talk to you in the first place (and doing potential reputational damage), you’re continuing an organic conversation they started.

Buying attention may be faster and easier in the beginning, but earning it will get you the results you’re looking for.

Building an Engine vs. Renting Attention

If your marketing strategy depends on a lead vendor, you’re not really generating leads, you’re renting them. When you stop paying, your pipeline dries up.

But when you build a brand that attracts, educates, and converts, your audience grows because they want to hear from you. Your pipeline becomes a flywheel that pays compound returns in the form of trust, interest, conversions, and referrals.

That’s real lead generation. It’s intentional. It’s sustainable. And it’s the only kind that lasts.

If you’ve been in a marketing strategy meeting lately, you’ve probably heard some version of these three sentences:

• “We can’t prove what’s working.”
• “Everyone’s using AI but nobody knows how.”
• “The old playbooks don’t work anymore.”

We hear them from financial services and fintech clients every week. And frankly, they’re all true.

Marketing is going through a full-blown identity crisis. But we think that makes right now one of the most exciting times to be in this business. When everything stops working the way it used to, you’re forced to build the future intentionally.

Attribution Is Breaking People

Marketers are drowning in data and starving for clarity.

Sales and marketing teams are often targeting entirely different audiences, but they’re both measured by a single metric: new revenue.

The problem is that attribution was never built for the way modern buyers behave.

The “source” of a customer might technically be a LinkedIn ad, but the real journey probably started months earlier during a conversation with their accountant, via a Reddit thread about alternative investments, or a colleague’s recommendation.

When leadership teams demand perfect attribution, they paralyze their marketing teams:

• They stop taking smart risks.
• They stop experimenting.
• They start optimizing for easy-to-game metrics that look good on paper but don’t grow the business

Alignment is the only solution. Marketing and sales need to agree on who they’re trying to reach, why that audience matters, and how to define success beyond first-touch conversions. The data might not ever tell the full story, but your strategy can.

Everyone’s Using AI (But Hardly Anyone Knows How)

AI has moved from curiosity to chaos.

Every team is using it to draft email campaigns, generate social content, and summarize client feedback. But very few have been trained to use it well.

The result is an ever-widening gap between adoption and competency.

This isn’t just about prompts or tools. It’s about understanding what AI should (and shouldn’t) replace in an industry built on trust and regulatory compliance. Good marketers know AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s an amplifier. It can help you work faster, but it can’t tell you what resonates with a COO evaluating portfolio management software or a millennial comparing robo-advisors.

Without proper training, teams risk automating mediocrity.

Right now, winning firms are investing in upskilling. Rather than just using AI, they’re mastering the ability to build repeatable, on-brand workflows, teaching teams how to blend human insight with machine speed, and redefining modern creative strategy in an AI-driven world.

The Old Playbooks Are Dead

Remember when you could sponsor a conference, run some LinkedIn ads, maybe send a piece of direct mail, and call it a day?

That playbook is over.

Today’s buyers have evolved. They’re skeptical of anything that feels like a sales pitch, researching on platforms you’ve never advertised on, and asking peers for recommendations in Slack channels and private communities.

Paid social is getting more expensive and less effective. Content syndication is dying. Firms are experimenting with everything from founder-led content on Instagram to intimate roundtables for decision-makers.

Credibility and usefulness now form the foundation of marketing effectiveness. 

Prospects are looking for knowledge that matters to them from brands they trust. They don’t want paper-thin thought leadership or barely-veiled sales pitches; they want to understand immediately if you actually solve their problem.

In an era defined by AI, the future of marketing is getting infinitely more human.

It’s Time to Rebuild (Intentionally)

Attribution will never be perfect. AI won’t replace strategy. And the old playbooks are gone.

But that’s freedom, not bad news. 

You now have permission to stop doing what’s expected and start doing what works for your business, your audience, your growth goals.

This moment belongs to the marketers who are curious enough to test new channels, courageous enough to challenge the status quo, and collaborative enough to align their entire organization around deeply understanding their clients’ needs.

At Intention.ly, we’re helping fintech and financial services clients do exactly that by aligning teams, upskilling talent, experimenting with new approaches, and proving that the future of marketing isn’t about following formulas.

It’s about building a growth engine designed (intentionally) for what’s next.