Alisha Lyndon, Founder & CEO, Momentum
The financial services industry stands at a crossroads. As 2021 looms, trying to determine what will happen feels like a futile exercise. In such uncertainty, it can feel best to fall back on tried and trusted approaches. But when everything has changed, including the needs and expectations of customers, how do the myriad of financial services organisations targeting businesses plan for what comes next?
One of the challenges they face, beyond the continued disruption everyone is wrestling with, is the threats Fintechs pose. While there is a case to be made that no single FinTech is going to rival a major finance corporation, the fact is that they don’t need to. Unencumbered by legacy systems and footprints, FinTechs are free to focus on delivering a high-quality customer experience in a number of specific areas. For establish providers, this means they could be faced with a variety of different competitors across multiple business units and lines of service.
On top of this is the changing nature of customer relationships. Traditionally, financial services organisations might have enjoyed relationships of 20 or 30 years with their customers. Now, as digital tools mean those buyers are no longer restricted to whichever provider has a physical presence nearby, providers need to come up with new ways of building and maintain relationships.
It isn’t just in the customer experience arena that established players are having to adapt. Increasingly, FinTechs are hiring sales forces more akin to tech start-ups than traditional financial services operations. To support these teams, they’re deploying automation technologies and adopting agile, reactive and highly targeted marketing activities.
Why? Because as we’ve seen from the latest Momentum Customer Buying Index notes, 42% of large enterprise buyers across all industries say they’re finding it harder than before to make buying decisions.
Aside from the obvious concerns regarding revenue and cash flow, and question marks over government support and how future lockdowns could affect businesses, part of the issue could be down to how vendors sell to their customers. The Index found that just 13 per cent of buyers believed their vendors fully understood their current business challenges and just 14 per cent said they were proactively kept up to date with the latest developments by vendors. From a financial services perspective, this could mean poorly tailored products, or trying to push services such as loan and overdraft facilities that do not meet the requirements of the business.
This paints a damning picture of the state of enterprise sales and marketing efforts – at a time when everyone needs to be securing revenue, a failure to meet customer expectations will severely hamper their overall performances. How, then, do financial services provider ensure that their campaigns aid sales teams in delivering what potential customers are looking for?
Relevance, relevance, relevance
It is not all bad news – the Index highlighted that nearly three quarters of customers are open to more communication from vendors, highlighting the opportunity on offer for those providers that get it right.
But what does that ‘right’ look like? According to Pete Markey, Chief Marketing Officer at TSB Bank, “the best vendors that I’ve worked with are the ones that don’t just arrive and give you an off-the-shelf presentation, but actually really take the time. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need to have some basic understanding of the business you’re presenting to, and come in with some knowledge to make recommendations based on facts.”
In other words, approaches need to be relevant and tailored to the business in question. This is complicated, however, by the fact that selling any service or product to services usually involves multiple stakeholders and decision-makers. Gartner states that “the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they’ve gathered independently and must deconflict with the group.”
So, not only do financial services companies need to ensure that the support they provide is relevant to the target business, but that it resonates with potential decision-makers too. This is why it is so critical to have a variety of channels in action across a campaign, bringing together multiple tactics. These include earned, owned and paid, as well as strategies that incorporate account-based marketing, whereby content, collateral and distribution are targeted at specific contacts and decision-maker roles across one business.
In fact, 60% of respondents to the Customer Buying Index said ABM content is valuable when it comes to selecting suppliers. This aligns with the Gartner comment above and highlights how critical ABM can be in making sure providers are influencing which pieces of information are being used in the decision-making process.
It is clear from the research that many providers are struggling to align with changing customer needs, irrespective of sector. In financial services, this presents an opportunity to try new approaches when developing campaigns and content. Business customers want relevant information, and they want partners willing to communicate.
As we approach the end of the year, businesses in all sectors have a decision to make. Do they accept that they are operating in a world of constant disruption, and therefore look at how they can deploy new approaches to secure sales, or do they try the tactics that might have sometimes worked pre-2020? The choice financial services organisations make now will go a long way to determining how well they perform in the coming twelve months.
