Sterling Capital’s B2B Content Shift for 2026

2024 was brutal for Sterling Capital Partners. They were managing over $12 billion, but their pipeline for new institutional money had dried up. Mark Jensen, Sterling’s Head of Investor Relations, felt the heat. “We’re cranking out quarterly reports and our performance is solid,” he told his team during one awful Monday meeting, “but nobody knows we exist. Competitors with half our AUM are winning mandates that should be ours. What are they doing that we’re not?” The problem wasn’t their investment returns. It was their outreach. Sterling’s old-school approach of just showing up at networking events and sending direct mail felt ancient in the crowded, complex world of capital markets marketing. They had to completely rethink their B2B content strategy to get back in the game.

Mark knew a simple refresh wasn’t going to cut it. Institutional investors, from pension funds to sovereign wealth funds, don’t care about flashy brochures. They want substance and real expertise. This was hammered home by a 2025 Greenwich Associates report on investor preferences, which found a whopping 78% of them put educational content and proprietary research first when vetting new asset managers. Sterling was just publishing performance data, not the deep-dive analysis that actually gets a sophisticated audience to pay attention.

From Data Sheets to Actual Insight

A quick audit of Sterling’s content showed a massive gap. The website was full of data sheets and fact cards, all updated on schedule, and their emails just summarized market performance. They were reporting the numbers, but not explaining what they meant or what to do next. They had no whitepapers on emerging market debt strategies, no nuanced takes on the long-term effects of quantitative easing. This was a huge missed opportunity, because institutional investors do their homework and research partners for a long time. In fact, a HubSpot B2B Marketing Trends report from late 2025 noted that over 60% of B2B decision-makers read at least three pieces of content before they’ll even talk to a sales rep.

Mark’s first move was to tear down and rebuild their entire thought leadership program. “We have brilliant people here,” he argued. “Our portfolio managers and strategists are sitting on gold. We just need to get that expertise out of their heads and into formats people will actually read.” This meant moving budget away from just reporting performance numbers and into developing solid, research-backed articles and whitepapers. The first big project was a paper titled “Working through Geopolitical Volatility: A Framework for Portfolio Resilience.” It wasn’t a sales pitch. It was real value, offering a proprietary risk model and actionable ideas. The content team worked hand-in-glove with Sterling’s Chief Investment Strategist, Dr. Evelyn Reed, to get the depth and accuracy right. You can’t fake thought leadership. That kind of internal teamwork is the only way it works.

Building Trust with Real Expertise

When the whitepaper launched in Q4 2024, they didn’t just do a generic email blast. The strategy was precision, not a shotgun blast. They used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find the right people at their target institutions and sent personalized messages pointing out sections of the paper relevant to that person’s known investment focus. “We’re delivering tailored insights directly to the people who need them,” Mark explained to his team.

The early numbers looked good. Whitepaper download rates smoked anything Sterling had ever put out before. But more importantly, the engagement metrics they tracked in their Pardot and Salesforce stack showed people were spending an average of 8 minutes on the landing page. That’s a huge jump. It proved the content was hitting the mark. People were actually reading it.

Lots of firms miss this, but you can’t just publish one great whitepaper and call it a day. You need a steady stream of high-quality content. Sterling committed to a big thought leadership piece every quarter, alternating between macro-level analysis and deep dives on specific asset classes. They also spun up a bi-weekly “Strategist’s Take” blog with quick opinions from their investment team on what was happening in the markets. It gave them a regular touchpoint and kept Sterling’s name in the conversation.

Getting Personal: ABM in Practice

General thought leadership was building their brand, but Sterling had to turn that awareness into actual business. That’s when they brought in an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. “We know exactly who we want as clients,” Mark said. “We have to treat them like a market of one.”

Their ABM plan meant creating custom content for specific target accounts. For example, if they identified a big public pension fund that had been talking about sustainable infrastructure, the ABM team would pull together Sterling’s existing research on ESG and infrastructure, and maybe even commission a quick, bespoke analysis of returns in the Midwestern renewable energy market. That package would then be delivered by the business development team with an invitation to a private webinar or a one-on-one with the right portfolio manager.

Getting that personal requires tight coordination between marketing, sales, and the investment teams. Sterling set up weekly sync meetings to keep everyone on the same page. Marketing used tools like Demandbase to get intelligence on their target accounts, who the key players were, what they were interested in, where their pain points might be. That intel fed directly into the content they created, making sure every piece hit a specific need. It’s a lot of work, no question, but the ROI on qualified leads and conversions can blow traditional broad-reach campaigns out of the water.

Measuring Impact: From Clicks to Commitments

One of Mark’s biggest fights was proving that content was actually driving revenue. In capital markets, sales cycles can easily stretch 12 to 18 months. Nobody’s going to attribute a new mandate to a single whitepaper download, it’s just not realistic. But by tracking engagement across the whole journey, Sterling started to build a story that was hard to ignore.

They looked past simple website traffic. Their key metrics became:

• Content Downloads & Shares: Which topics were actually popular?
• Email Open & Click-Through Rates: A clear signal of interest.
• Webinar Registrations & Attendance: How many people were willing to spend an hour with them?
• Meeting Requests & Follow-Up Activities: The first real hand-off to sales.
• CRM Data: Every single content touchpoint for every prospect was logged, giving them a full picture of the engagement history.

By Q2 2025, Mark’s team could show a clear correlation: prospects who engaged with three or more of Sterling’s thought leadership pieces were 40% more likely to take an initial meeting with a sales rep. On top of that, the accounts that got the personalized ABM content moved through the sales funnel 25% faster. These numbers showed the content was directly influencing the sales process. That quarterly data presentation to the execs is what kept the budget flowing for his content strategy.

Looking back, Mark saw the shift. “We stopped thinking of content as marketing collateral,” he said. “It became an extension of our investment expertise, a way to build a relationship before we even shake hands.” By the end of 2025, Sterling Capital Partners saw a 15% jump in qualified institutional leads and landed two major mandates they could trace directly back to the new content and ABM programs. Their pipeline was full again, driven by insightful content that actually spoke to what sophisticated capital markets players needed. The takeaway for capital markets is simple: your content has to provide real value long before anyone’s talking about a deal.