Spending money is easy, sounds fun, and gives people a bit of a rush. So why aren't your potential customers in the financial services industry throwing their money at you? They should be because your product is solving a major problem for them.
But before banks buy your product (or service), you first need to convince the buying committee. The people on this committee make sure that the banks money is well spent. Here is how you deal with them in order to close a deal.
So what and whom are we talking about?
Before we get lost in marketing and sales lingo, let's define what's what:
- Buyer persona: a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses.
- Buying committee: the group of buyer personas that are involved in the decision to buy something.
- DMU: the decision-making unit. This is a combination of the buying committee and the buyer personas.
In general, marketers use buyer personas, and sales use DMU, but it comes down to the same in the end. As long as you understand that sales and marketing must work together to convince the buying committee to pick their product. That means that everybody on the committee needs to be at least neutral, or better: give a thumbs up.
Hello gorgeous, who are you?
We first need to get to know the buying committee. Think of your individual buyer personas as if you want to date them: you want to know every (cute) little detail about them. In business, this means that you need to know their interests, responsibilities, KPI's, what they read, what their educational level is, some personality traits, etcetera.
This way, you define how to get their attention by offering them great content or support to do their job.
To get a head start, you can first define the type of buyer. Within the financial services industry, you can define four types:
- The power sponsor
The power sponsor ultimately decides if the bank will spend money (please be aware that doing nothing is also a popular decision). The power sponsor is the budget holder or grants the budgets. Most of the time a power sponsor will only grant a budget if the majority of the buying committee is positive about the project. Please be aware that technology is often only part of the puzzle the banker has to solve. The more complex your product or service, the more senior or higher up the ranks the power sponsor is within the bank.
A forthcoming mistake for scale-ups is that they don't check the buying process (and thus budget consequences) with the power sponsor. They start lengthy and costly sales cycles within a bank without checking if the person who needs to pay for this is OK with the process and actually has the money.
- The sponsor
The sponsor has a personal or business interest when the bank buys (or not buys) your product or service. First, you need to categorise the sponsor, aka influencer, as a positive or negative sponsor. You need at least one positive sponsor to navigate you through the organisation. Without a positive sponsor, you need to walk away from the case. Banks have complex (formal and informal) organisations, so you need a friend to help you.
- The user
If the bank buys something, things will change. Most likely, people will have to change their way of working or at least get a different user interface. Change is hard on people; humans are not wired for change. Remember that and take them by the hand. If you find they have (too much) adversity to change, most likely they will not buy your product or service.
- The (Technical) gatekeepers
These are the people who can't say 'yes, we do it', but can (and will often) say 'no'. Most banks have lots and lots of gatekeepers that you have to convince. So be sure to have an answer ready for all the gatekeepers in Purchasing, Risk, Compliance, IT, Security, vendor management, middle management and the likes.
You can't shoot them all, so you have to work with the gatekeepers. Understand what is essential for them and help them get it. The gatekeepers are just doing their job, and from a highly regulated and complex banks perspective, they need these people to do their job well.
And for those who think salespeople are lazy, the bummer comes now....
All people on the buying committee have their own reasons and views on whether they want to buy your product or service or not. These reasons are often even very personal. Because the people in the buying committee are from different disciplines within the bank, they can have wildly different motives and expert views on the decision.
Your sales team will have to make many different value propositions to these different people within the bank. Four (4) propositions are the minimum: one for the power sponsor, one for the sponsors, one for the users and at least one for all the NO-sayers.
So everybody who says that sales is a walk in the park should realise that it is Champions League level sales if you sell into a bank. It takes hard work and interaction with lots of different people. But oh, the reward of the sale can be so sweet.
In our next blog we will talk about the competition analysis and why you should never underestimate your competition.
