Why Digital Asset Managers Need a Different CRM Approach
Digital asset management firms — the companies behind cryptocurrency ETFs, blockchain-based investment vehicles, and tokenized asset platforms — occupy a unique position in financial services. They're institutional asset managers subject to SEC registration requirements and compliance obligations, but they operate with the speed, growth trajectory, and technology expectations of a fintech startup. Their CRM needs reflect both realities.
At Vantage Point, we've worked with firms in this space that are deploying products through platforms like Revolut and major brokerages while simultaneously building institutional sales teams to distribute to pension funds, endowments, and family offices. The technology stack that serves this dual-market reality needs to be both institutionally credible and operationally fast. That's a combination that HubSpot delivers particularly well.
What Makes Digital Asset Management CRM Requirements Different?
Traditional asset managers have established distribution channels, long-standing institutional relationships, and sales cycles that can stretch over months or years. Digital asset managers are often building their distribution from scratch, selling a new asset class that many institutional investors are still evaluating, and operating in a regulatory environment that is evolving in real time.
This translates into specific CRM needs. First, marketing velocity matters more — these firms need to educate the market about their products, their security practices, and the asset class itself. Content marketing, webinar programs, and thought leadership campaigns are not optional; they're the primary driver of institutional awareness. Second, sales outreach must be scalable — institutional sales teams at digital asset managers are often small and growing, and they need tools that amplify individual productivity rather than requiring large teams to operate. Third, data from multiple channels needs to be unified — a single institutional prospect might first encounter the firm through a webinar, then download a white paper, then attend a conference presentation, then be contacted by a sales rep. All of that activity needs to flow into one record.
How Is HubSpot Being Used by Digital Asset Managers?
The architecture we've implemented for firms in this space follows a progression that matches how these businesses actually grow. Marketing Hub Enterprise serves as the foundation — powering content marketing programs, webinar registration and follow-up, email nurture sequences for institutional prospects, and marketing analytics that track which channels and content are driving the most qualified engagement.
As the institutional sales team scales, Sales Hub Enterprise layers on top — providing prospecting sequences for outbound outreach, pipeline management for the complex institutional sales cycle, meeting scheduling and call logging, and reporting that connects marketing activity to sales outcomes. The critical value here is that sales teams can see the complete engagement history for every prospect: what they've read, which webinars they've attended, what pages they've visited on the website. That context transforms cold outreach into informed conversations.
For firms handling investor inquiries and ongoing client service, Service Hub provides ticketing, knowledge base, and communication management capabilities. This is particularly important for digital asset managers that serve both institutional and retail investors, each with different service expectations and communication requirements.
Why Are These Firms Choosing HubSpot Over Salesforce?
We've seen two primary drivers. The first is operational efficiency. Digital asset management firms are typically lean organizations that cannot afford the overhead of a Salesforce administration layer. They need their sales and marketing teams to be self-sufficient in the CRM, creating workflows, modifying pipelines, and deploying campaigns without waiting for a technical resource. HubSpot's design philosophy supports this operational model.
The second driver is the AI capabilities gap. These firms are technology-forward by nature, and they want AI tools that their teams can use immediately — not AI platforms that require engineering resources to configure. HubSpot's Breeze AI tools (Copilot for CRM interaction, Prospecting Agent for outreach automation, Intelligence for data enrichment) align with what these teams need: embedded, practical AI that improves daily productivity. Salesforce's AgentForce platform, while more powerful in theory, requires a level of investment in AI configuration that most digital asset management firms aren't prepared to make at their current scale.
What About the Salesforce Footprint That Already Exists?
Many digital asset managers adopted Salesforce early because it was the default CRM for financial services. Some have significant Salesforce investments that they're not ready to fully replace. For these firms, the hybrid approach works well — maintaining Salesforce for specific functions where it's deeply embedded while extending HubSpot into marketing, sales enablement, and service functions where it delivers faster time to value.
The native Salesforce-HubSpot integration facilitates this transition by synchronizing data between platforms. Over time, as firms see the productivity gains from HubSpot, the scope of what runs on HubSpot tends to expand — often starting with marketing, then adding sales, then service, until HubSpot becomes the primary operational platform for all customer-facing activities.
What Should Digital Asset Managers Prioritize in Their CRM Strategy?
Start with the function that creates the most immediate operational value — for most firms, that's marketing. A well-implemented Marketing Hub deployment that connects your webinar program, content marketing, and email campaigns to your CRM data will deliver measurable ROI within the first quarter. From there, extend to sales operations as your team grows, and to service as your client base scales.
The most important architectural decision is ensuring that your CRM strategy supports both institutional and retail audiences, with appropriate segmentation, different communication cadences, and separate compliance workflows for each. The firms that get this right build a platform that scales with them through the rapid growth phase that defines this segment of financial services.
About Vantage Point: Vantage Point is a boutique consulting firm exclusively serving financial services organizations, including digital asset managers, crypto ETF firms, and fintech companies. We help firms build CRM architectures that support both institutional credibility and startup-speed growth. Learn more at vantagepoint.io.
