Grow

Enterprise Account Executive

Selling Enterprise Software to Financial Services

Given that customers are getting more anxious over data privacy, security, etc ... Selling in financial services can be a pain upmarket.

What's the average time spent dealing with InfoSec or in PoCs with your engineers to make special request for customers?

💵 Finance

📳 SaaS

☁️ Software Tech

13 comments

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Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I start infosec as soon as possible. Recently we’ve been getting more stuck in vendor onboarding in general, so the sooner I can get these processes started, the better.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Feels like an infinite loop at times. I feel ya.

GDO

Politicker

BDM

trippy

Grow

Valued Contributor

Enterprise Account Executive

Yea - this is great advice. Vendor onboarding is a pain for sure. I once heard of an AE who sold a product into Blackrock, they never even got it implemented smh. Imagine having that account the next year

JustGonnaSendIt

Politicker

Burn Towns, Get Money

AGree with this. I sell to big FinServ companies.

There are really two parallel tracks to the deal:

- Stakeholder use-case (your traditional sales cycle - Value, POC, commercial negotiations, implementation planning, etc...)
- Compliance (vendor onboarding, infosec, etc...)

Make sure you don't get caught letting one get ahead of the other. And make sure your stakeholders are appraised on the progress of the compliance side of things.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Do you find that your business stakeholders are not well versed in their procurement processes? I find that mine always underestimate the amount of time it will take and are (unpleasantly) surprised. In my experience, most of them are unaware of the complexity of their own onboarding processes. I add two months to my close date pretty reflexively.

JustGonnaSendIt

Politicker

Burn Towns, Get Money

Yes, I see this all the time. Often, they are so frustrated with it they want nothing to do with it. Or, there are changes happening all the time and they don't keep up with the latest policy, etc...

One of the ways I make myself sticky in accounts is understanding how to actually get deals done and make it easy for the business side.

The business stakeholders always appreciate getting that 'here is the latest procurement deliverable and what we're doing about it' update, so they can then report up their own chain about the status of the program.

Diablo

Politicker

Sr. AE

It depends for us. Both are different.

FinanceEngineer

Politicker

Sr Director, sales and partnerships

It depends on how regulated the entity. I have had an 11 section questionnaire with dozens of questions and request on each section. Very much a pain in the ass and makes the process last longer.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

ERP Sales

Depends how good your white papers are

Beans

Big Shot

Enterprise Account Executive

Get ahead of it, we have a 2 page IT Primer we share very quickly to cover our specs and get ahead of any objections.

saaskicker

Tycoon

Enterprise AE

Like others, get it in their hands early. We tie any big asks or changes to our terms to a commitment in spend, the more you spend, the more we bend.