Chet Holmes makes a counterintuitive argument in this chapter: the best way to sell is to stop selling. Instead, become the most credible, most useful source of education in your market and let that reputation do the heavy lifting.

His term for it is the “Stadium Pitch.” The idea is this: imagine your entire market sitting in a stadium. Only about 3% of them are actively looking to buy right now. Another 7% are open to it. The remaining 90% are somewhere between not thinking about it and not interested at all. Most sales teams aim their entire effort at the 3%. Education-Based Marketing is how you reach the other 97%  and stay top of mind until they’re ready.

The mechanism is simple: instead of leading with your product, lead with insight. Teach your buyers something genuinely useful about their market, their risks, their opportunity. Make them smarter. Then, when they’re ready to act, you’re the obvious first call.

Why this hits differently in institutional finance and digital assets

I spent my early years in institutional asset management then before moving into FinTech (including digital assets), and the dynamic Holmes describes maps almost exactly onto how institutional buyers actually behave.

Large asset managers like pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and sophisticated hedgies are not buyers who respond to cold outreach and a features deck. They move slowly, they rely heavily on trusted relationships, and they are deeply skeptical of anyone who leads with “here’s what we sell.” But they are genuinely hungry for insight because they compete on very small margins; whether fund performance or backoffice speed & reliability. They respond to specific, experience-grounded, non-generic insight about the markets they’re navigating.

At Wellington and SSgA, I came up through the Ops & Admin team to then sit with the FX derivatives & Asset Allocation teams. I never pitched on behalf of those firms, but I was part of the teams implementing new technologies and processes for the back office. Later in my career I was responsible for P&L on FX trading desks. The most effective business development wasn’t pitch-driven. It was thought leadership, CIO roundtables, white papers that actually said something, and conversations where the salesperson knew more about the client’s problem than the client expected. That’s Education-Based Marketing, even if nobody called it that.

In digital assets, this is even more pronounced and more of an opportunity. The institutional buyers entering this space are smart people who are genuinely uncertain about a lot of things: custody risk, regulatory treatment, tokenization infrastructure, stablecoin mechanics, staking yields. They are not looking for a vendor to sell them something. They are looking for someone who can explain the landscape clearly and honestly. The firms that do that well that show up consistently with credible, specific content, and can speak to the different parts of a buyside firm (Risk, Trading, Operations, Compliance) build a trust advantage that is very hard for competitors to overcome with pricing or features alone.

What this looks like in practice

When I landed at Circle in Jan 2021 USDC market cap was at $3.8 Billion (Currently $76 Billion). Tether was, and is, far larger but my initial mandate was to win minting/redemption flow from Circle’s partner, Coinbase. Coinbase had far more services available to trading firms and capital markets institutions than Circle did; Circle was a simple tech stack for minting/redeeming USDC. So Coinbase had a strong edge on distribution of USDC and was therefore generating a high percentage of minting/redemption flow. Competing against the allure of Coinbase and all their integrated services was daunting.

I did not have an exchange, an OTC desk, or prime brokerage services to sell. So I was not selling via a features comparison. But minting/redeeming directly via Circle, rather than via Coinbase, had one advantage that I knew was valuable and easily understood by every department at a trading firm or institution; speed. So I set out to educate, not sell to, my target audience. 

I sold through education — helping institutional counterparties see that minting/redeeming with Circle would save them an average of 13 minutes whenever they wanted to convert from/to US Dollars. And 13 minutes is a lifetime in the world of trading. And I spoke to the Compliance teams to educate them that Circle’s MTL and BitLicense were more clearly delineated as compliant for what we were offering. And finally educating the Ops and Dev teams how to simply grab our API’s and write to them.  The people who bought in early weren’t sold to. They were taught, and then they concluded on their own that it made sense to switch from Coinbase to Circle for minting/redemption functions. And I did often close with a casual remark if I was not confident they would make the switch. I would tell them, “I’m reaching out to all your competitors. If you do not open an account and start to mint/redeem with Circle, you can expect to be 13 minutes behind your competitors that do so.” 

That’s the Holmes model in action. And it works because the conclusion the buyer reaches on their own is always more durable than the one a salesperson reaches for them.

For anyone building a digital assets go-to-market today, the implication is direct: your content strategy is your sales strategy. The white papers, the LinkedIn posts, the panel appearances, the client briefings, these aren’t marketing overhead. They are the top of the funnel for every serious institutional relationship you will ever build.

A few principles I’d apply specifically:

• Say something specific. Generic content about “the future of finance” is everywhere. Content that names the actual risks, cites the actual data, and takes an actual position is what gets read and shared.
• Teach what you know firsthand. Your lived experience is your moat. I can write about USDC adoption dynamics or institutional staking risk in a way that a generalist content team cannot, because I was in those rooms. Use your strengths. And even as a Business Development person or part of a Sales Team, be a power user of your own technologies..
• Be consistent, not sporadic. Holmes emphasizes cadence. One great piece every six months doesn’t build a reputation. A steady drumbeat of credible, specific insight does.
• Don’t bury the insight in the pitch. The moment educational content feels like a sales document, it loses its credibility. Teach first. The relationship that earns you the right to pitch comes later.

Holmes wrote this chapter for a world where the main educational vehicle was a seminar or a brochure. The vehicles have changed; it’s now LinkedIn, podcasts, Substack, conference panels. The logic hasn’t changed at all. In a market where everyone is pitching, the person who teaches wins.