You could be forgiven for thinking “selling in finance is easy, all you need to do is show a solid ROI.” The stereotype is that people that work in finance make decisions with their calculators. The truth is that software development in banking, and selling that software, is more challenging than that. Decision makers still think with their hearts and emotions, as much as anyone else.
The most successful B2B software companies in banking and financial services are those with a value proposition that focuses on the buyers as human beings, and their buyer’s individual pain points.
The first point to note is that selling software to banks and financial services isn’t really that much different from B2B software sales in general. The primary difference is that your tools must meet the relevant security standards, or you won’t even get past the first meeting.
Software Development in Banking: Make Their Life Easier
Ultimately, successful software should be so essential to customers that they can’t live without it. The underlying point here is one of convenience. You want your financial services customers to be unable to operate without your tool.
Therefore, your marketing messages shouldn’t focus on your solution, tech, and features. They need to identify where you can help them solve their problems. Can you save them time or resources? Great. Can you do all that without making their jobs more complicated? Even better.
Focus on how your solution can help them as humans, not just employees. Everyone wants to do their jobs better and quicker, so that they can enjoy their time. That is what really sells.
Software Development in Banking: Address their Fears
Just like you need to identify your buyer’s problems and solve them, you also need to know what their primary concerns are. What keeps them up at night? What can you do to be the hero in their work day?
This is why it’s so important to understand your buyers before you even get started building marketing and sales strategies. You need a detailed picture of who you’re trying to sell to, down to the nitty-gritty.
Can your software address some of these fears? For instance, can your tool ensure that all advice they generate is compliant or legal?
The best security tools on the market sell in financial services, not because of their technical specifications, but because they sell a vision to the CTO of a world where he or she isn’t lying awake at night worrying about seeing their name on the front page of the newspaper tied to a data breach.
Be Professional or Go Home
Financial services companies want to buy from companies and people who mirror them and to whom they can relate. Startup culture is great and a cool office environment can help drive recruitment and productivity. But it’s the people on your team that are customer-facing, and need to be able to relate to your target buyers, and build real relationships.
You need to sound and look professional, as if you might work in the bank that you’re selling to.
Selling software to banks and financial services companies isn’t very different from selling enterprise B2B tech.
While you can expect long sales cycles because of the speed at which these companies move, you want to do everything you can to make the sales go as fast as possible. Working with people who know the space and have sold in it before, is a good place to start.
At Nituno, we work with startups and growing tech companies to expand into new markets. If you’re having trouble resonating in your industry, whether tech, financial, health, or other, we can help you to build sales and marketing strategies that perform. Get in touch with us today to learn more about securing sales in the financial sector.
