There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of when your financial organization reels in a gigantic business client. Part of the satisfaction is pure numbers — after all, net-new accounts have a big impact on the bottom line. Another thrilling part of the catch is the challenge.
That’s especially true for financial services teams working to win more business from multinational corporations.
Enterprise companies have:
- Multiple gatekeepers
- Larger buying teams (and more veto votes your team must overcome), and
- More complex procurement processes
They also sometimes have competing interests and internal politics that have to be understood and navigated.
To overcome these challenges, financial services professionals should use an account-based marketing approach to:
- Identify major decision-makers
- Multi-thread across multiple teams and departments to build relationships with the whole buying team
- Uncover topics that will lead to messaging that resonates on an individual and team level
Let’s take a closer look at how account-based marketing (ABM) can help you prioritize outreach.
The Common Challenges of Selling to Enterprise-Level Financial Services Buyers
Identifying the Right Accounts
Our recent research revealed that between 30% and 50% of sales time is spent prospecting into cold accounts. This is a major source of go-to-market waste.
Without the ability to identify which accounts are in-market and interested in your services, your sellers will be wasting time on uninterested buyers. Revenue intelligence tools collect intent data. This is information surrounding a prospect’s online activity like:
- Topics they’re researching related to your company and/or products and services
- Visits to your website and competitors’ websites
- Reading submissions on business review websites
This visibility helps to gauge the prospect’s level of interest and readiness to buy … and enables you to prioritize your efforts.
Uncovering and Engaging the Entire Buying Team
B2B enterprise buying groups are usually 10 or more members — each with their own unique interests, goals, and potential use cases for your solution. Identifying these buyers, then addressing their individual concerns while reinforcing your core value, is a daunting undertaking.
Multi-threading is the practice of identifying and reaching multiple stakeholders within an account, usually at the same time. LinkedIn found that the most successful reps are 13% more likely to multi-thread than their peers, and that this strategy leads to larger deals.
Rather than focusing on a single buyer, multi-threading considers:
- Multiple members of the buying team
- Topics each person is interested in
- Levels of engagement across the team
- Gaps that need to be addressed
Sales intelligence technology automates this process, deanonymizing activity to determine an account’s key stakeholders and the business problems they’re looking to solve. If multiple members of the same buying team are showing an interest, there’s a very good chance they are moving toward a purchase decision.
Navigating the Procurement and Compliance Processes
Procuring a new enterprise client is difficult. You need to know about compliance and risk regulations, data security, and how your organization is aligned with both internal and external standards.
Intent data can help you anticipate potential hurdles. As your prospect conducts online research as part of their due diligence, intent data can reveal specific concerns. By addressing those concerns early, you can establish trust across the buying team.
Conclusion
Enterprise-sized organizations are complex, but selling to them doesn’t have to be. An ABM approach helps narrow down your pool of potential customers to a smaller, but more high-value set of accounts.
6sense’s ABM platform has proven a 31% increase in opportunity volume for our financial services customers, as well as a 40% reduction in effort to close. See how our revenue intelligence platform streamlines processes and reduces go-to-market costs.
