Early in my career, I sat in on a dinner in New York with a client who managed money at a large firm and a journalist from the New York Times. The food was good, the conversation was lively, and my client talked the whole night about his fund. At the end of the evening, the journalist leaned back and said, “Honestly, I didn’t understand a word you said.”

My client laughed it off. But I never forgot it.

That moment has played out hundreds of times since. I hear it often from portfolio managers who walked into conference rooms, video calls, and pitch meetings prepared, confident, and knowledgeable, and walked out having lost the business without ever knowing why.

The prospect didn’t say they were confused. They said, “Interesting.” They asked a polite question or two. They shook hands and promised to follow up. And then they didn’t, because they couldn’t explain to their partner, their board, or their own clients what you do.

That’s the moment most firms never see. And it’s costing them more than they realize.

The Prospect Who Nods Is Not the Prospect Who Buys

Almost every meeting where a portfolio manager talks past their audience follows the same pattern. The prospect doesn’t stop you. They don’t say “I’m lost.” They nod, because nodding is what smart people do when they don’t want to appear confused.

The PM reads that nod as engagement. It’s the prospect mentally checking out while keeping their face polite.

By the time the meeting ends, the prospect has retained fragments, a number here, a phrase there, but no coherent picture of what you do, why it works, or whether it’s right for them. They leave with an impression of competence but no ability to act on it. You can’t hire someone you can’t understand, and you can’t recommend someone you can’t explain.

This isn’t a knock on portfolio managers. It’s a natural consequence of expertise. When you’ve spent years building and running a strategy, the vocabulary becomes automatic. Words like “factor exposure,” “duration positioning,” and “idiosyncratic risk” are just how you think. You stopped noticing them a long time ago.

Your prospect hasn’t.

What Staying in Your Lane Actually Means

One of the most common ways portfolio managers lose a room is by wandering off their own story. A bottom-up stock picker starts fielding questions about interest rates. A long/short manager spends fifteen minutes on macro conditions. A quantitative PM spends twenty minutes on model architecture when the prospect just wanted to understand what drives the returns.

Every detour costs you time and muddies the picture the prospect is trying to form. Each topic you add is another thing the prospect has to hold in their head while trying to figure out whether your core strategy makes sense for them.

The discipline here is knowing the three things you want the prospect to walk away understanding. Just three. What you do, why it works, and what kind of investor it’s built for. If you can’t name those three things before you walk into the room, you’re not ready for the meeting.

Everything else, the macro backdrop, the model details, the risk attribution, can come later, if they ask. And if they’re interested, they will ask.

The Thirty-Second Test

Here’s a question I put to portfolio managers regularly. Can you explain what you do in thirty seconds to someone who doesn’t work in finance?

The core of it, in plain language, in half a minute. No qualifiers, no setup.

Some can’t. They’ll start, add a qualifier, add another, back up, try again. What comes out is a paragraph of related thoughts that goes nowhere.

That thirty-second explanation isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s the most important sentence in the meeting. It’s what the prospect will repeat to their colleagues. It’s what travels when you’re not in the room. If you haven’t built it, tested it, and practiced saying it out loud, you don’t have a pitch yet.

The test I recommend is simple. Explain your strategy to someone you trust who has nothing to do with finance, a spouse, a neighbor, or a friend outside the industry. Ask them to play it back to you. If they can’t, or if what they say doesn’t match what you meant, the explanation needs more work. A polite colleague who nods along is not a reliable test. You need someone with no reason to pretend they understood.

Good portfolio manager communication skills get built outside the office, not just inside it.

Jargon Moves Faster Than You Think

Most portfolio managers don’t know when they’ve said something their audience doesn’t understand. The words come out naturally, the prospect keeps their expression neutral, and the conversation moves on.

But jargon does something specific to a listener. It creates a small moment of confusion, a half-second where they fall behind. And in that half-second, they’re no longer listening to you. They’re trying to catch up. By the time they do, you’ve said three more things they may or may not have followed.

Technical terms are especially damaging because most PMs don’t notice they’ve used them. Words like “EBITDA,” “drawdown,” “alpha,” and “duration” come out in the flow of a sentence and keep moving. The prospect’s eyes glaze, they fall half a step behind, and the next two minutes are spent catching up instead of listening. Slow down at the technical moments or cut them entirely.

This compounds. A meeting with five or six of those moments isn’t a meeting where the prospect learned five or six things they didn’t know. It’s a meeting where they spent twenty minutes slightly behind, trying to piece together a picture that never quite came together. Research from Harvard Business Review confirms what most experienced salespeople already know. Complex language causes people to tune out, and investors at every level are drawn to clarity over sophistication.

The fix is a habit of pausing at the moments where jargon would usually come out, and asking yourself if there’s a simpler way to say the same thing. Often there is. “We focus on finding undervalued companies before the rest of the market notices them” is more useful than “we identify mispriced securities with asymmetric return profiles.” Both are true. Only one of them works.

Creating a compelling investment story starts with removing the words that put distance between you and the person you’re trying to reach.

Learn to Bridge

During a communications training session, I worked with an emerging markets manager who ran a concentrated portfolio across several countries. She had a small position in South Africa, not a core allocation, not a story she wanted to tell. I asked her about it. She answered. I asked again. She answered again. We went back and forth several times, stuck on a position that represented a fraction of her portfolio and none of her conviction. She needed to redirect, and she didn’t know how.

Bridging is the skill of acknowledging a question and moving the conversation to where you want it to go. Discipline about where the conversation goes, not evasion. A prospect who asks about your South Africa position isn’t necessarily interested in South Africa. They’re probing to understand how you think. You can answer that question by talking about your broader emerging markets framework, a country where you have a higher-conviction position, or a company in a similar sector that mirrors the kind of opportunity you look for.

Something like this. “South Africa is a small position for us. We own [company] because new energy legislation is opening up the private power market in a way the market hasn’t priced in yet.” From there, you have two ways to bridge. You can redirect to a higher-conviction position: “That said, India is where we’re seeing the biggest opportunity right now. Let me tell you about that.” Or you can bridge to your process: “At the XYZ Fund, that’s the kind of catalyst we look for across all our positions. A regulatory or structural shift that creates a window before the rest of the market catches on.”

Either path works. The point is that you answered the question, gave a real reason, and moved the conversation somewhere you can make your case.

One sentence and the conversation is yours again. PMs who don’t bridge get pulled wherever the prospect takes them. The ones who do stay in control of their own story.

Make Room for the Other Person

Prospect meetings work best as conversations, and most portfolio managers treat them as presentations. When you talk for thirty minutes and then open it up for questions, you’ve already lost the thread of what the prospect needs to know. You’ve covered what you prepared, not what they came to understand. And there’s a good chance that what matters most to them, the thing that would move them toward a decision, never came up.

The managers I’ve watched build strong books of business stop, ask questions, and let the prospect tell them what they’re trying to solve. Then they respond to that, specifically, rather than delivering the full pitch regardless of who’s in the room.

Silence is part of that. Many PMs interpret a quiet room as an invitation to fill it. It usually means the other person is processing, or forming a question they’re not sure how to ask. Let it sit. The prospect who pauses before responding is often the one who’s most engaged.

When a PM stops presenting and starts listening, the whole meeting changes. The prospect feels heard. They start to trust the manager not just with a strategy, but with their clients’ money, because a manager who listens is a manager who will manage the relationship well over time.

Practicing sales prevention often comes down to one thing. The manager who does all the talking leaves no room for the prospect to become a buyer.

What the Firms That Win Do Differently

The managers who grow their businesses aren’t always the ones with the best performance or the most sophisticated strategies. They’re the ones whose story travels.

Their prospects leave the meeting and can explain the strategy to a colleague. Their advisors feel confident recommending them to clients. Their existing investors can articulate the thesis without pulling out the pitch deck. That kind of clarity is what separates the managers who grow from the ones who stay stuck, and it starts with the portfolio manager deciding that being understood matters as much as being right. As McKinsey has noted, what investors need most isn’t more information. It’s a clearer picture of the decisions being made on their behalf.

The same applies in volatile markets. How you communicate when things get difficult says as much about your firm as your performance does.

The journalist at that dinner wasn’t being difficult. He was telling my client something every prospect thinks but rarely says. The managers who hear that feedback and act on it are the ones who grow.

If your meetings consistently feel productive but rarely turn into clients, a strategy session is a good place to start. We’ll talk through your situation, where you’re getting stuck, and what might be worth changing. No agenda beyond that.

Schedule Your Strategy Session Now

Dan Sondhelm is the CEO of Sondhelm Partners, a firm dedicated to helping boutique asset managers attract investors, strengthen credibility, and build influential brands. He helps portfolio managers and investment teams turn complex strategies into clear, compelling stories that prospects can understand, remember, and act on.