How to sell nice-to-have fintech software into a mature market?

title. currently trying to break into a very conservative & mature market. some successes, some customers as references, but overall been a huge struggle in this down market the last year and a half. need perspective on any successes, strategies or stories about how this might play out.

🧠 Advice

🖼 Branding

🌎 Economy

12 comments

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Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

So many things used to be nice to have, but now they are need to have. I would leverage your current customers and try to get endorsements by them talking about how they thought it was a nice to have product and now it is indispensable to them.

buyhighselllow

Good Citizen

sales

Very good strategy, i like this a lot

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Customer stories are extremely valuable. This is a great idea.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

I agree. They can be more compelling than anything else you have to say.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

You truly can't beat social proof.

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

Nice to have is always tough.
Is there an ICP where you're a "NEED"?

buyhighselllow

Good Citizen

sales

Selling to the office of the CFO, and the project the software automates is a business critical process, meaning it already gets done one way or another with or without software. Finding there is no clear ROI, mainly intangible value drivers.. saved time, scalable etc

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Recently sold a solution into a company where they were using spreadsheets to manage a very complex multistep process. Work was getting done, but it was highly manual, and involved $$$$ of corporate budget. Being able to manage a business-critical process in a non-manual way, particularly one that provides a reporting or audit trail, is going to be more than a nice-to-have for a busy office. Tangible ROI numbers may be hard to come by, but time is money, efficiency gains are huge.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

You mentioned two strong points - time and scalable product but you will have to start communicating it well and create value. As bunny mentioned time is money - if your solution can save them a couple of hours per week, imagine how much they would save per year and calculate the cost + opportunity cost i.e. that time got utilized for some other important tasks saving/adding X amount

GDO

Politicker

BDM

Nice to have in this market with financial profiles. Good luck!

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

You have to solve a problem, find the gap they have and make it seem mission critical for your product to fill.

wolfofmiami

Opinionated

🐺

Focus on building relationships and becoming a value, I do this in med device as I compete with huge companies such as Stryker and J&J, doctors dont know who I am or anything about my company and some of my products they see as a nice to have but dont need bc of insurance reasons. But by constantly showing up and becoming a resource to them and their practice, they started giving me the time of day to have meetings and eventually knew I was reliable because of all the work I did prior to even getting their business helped me closed deals with them for once a product they saw has a nice to have, but dont need.