This is the sixth in a seven-part blog series about selling technology and software into the financial markets sector.
Colin Slight of The Realization Group, Carl Rogers of Finceler8 and Debbie Brown of Broadridge Financial Solutions discuss how and where to use sales & marketing automation when Selling Fintech Solutions.
Introduction
One of the challenges that sales and marketing teams face today, if they’re doing their jobs right by persistently communicating with the market, building communities of interest, and seeing expressions of interest coming in at increasingly granular levels, is keeping track of all of that. Who is looking at you? How often? What part of your organisation are they looking at? There are a number of different marketing automation platforms that can help with this, and they all fulfil a need. But at what stage in a vendor’s growth should they start using them?
Introduce Best Practice at an Early Stage
“Effectively, if you’re a small, early stage firm, and the volumes of data that you need to process can easily be managed by simple human resources, then that’s the way you should go,” says Colin Slight, Co-Founder and Managing Director of The Realization Group, the specialist financial services and fintech marketing agency. “But if you do have ambitions to grow your firm, then you have to anticipate that the volumes of data that you’re going to be dealing with are going to grow over time. These challenges might not be presenting themselves to you now, but they will at some future point. So what you should be doing is introducing best practice at an early stage. That might mean setting up a simple CRM to help you manage the community of interest that you’re intending to build over time, to hold it in a structured and coherent form, where the members of that community are categorized appropriately, so you know who they are, they’re easy to find. That is a relatively straightforward thing to do, even in a small firm.”
That can give you a platform that enables you to progressively move to a fully automated marketing automation solution in due course, says Slight. “But if you’re a small firm, don’t over-spec things, because you’ll just be wasting money. It’s not about the technology at that stage, it’s about putting the correct processes in place. Get the processes right in the first place and then the technology will look after itself. It will become obvious when you need to automate, because doing it manually becomes disproportionately expensive and difficult. And at that point, you can introduce the tools.”
Track Engagement
Being able to track engagement is key, says Carl Rogers, Director at Finceler8, a London-based fintech accelerator. “If you’re able to track the impact of your marketing outreach around a particular target individual, they can then be scored more accurately as a potential prospect throughout that sales process than if you don’t have that kind of data around engagement. They then become better leads. You may have identified somebody on LinkedIn who you think is a prospect, but if they’ve attended a webinar and they’ve asked for a white paper, then they’re a more qualified prospect to some degree.”
Educate Your Staff
It can take time to get people up to speed on this kind of technology however, warns Debbie Brown, Global VP Marketing Asset Management at Broadridge Financial Solutions, a financial services technology company. “There’s always work to do to integrate technology into your current workflow. However, once it’s in and working, then you can really start to see some operational efficiencies and it gives you governance and an audit trail. You’ll be getting a lot of data coming back that you wouldn’t get otherwise. For example, we have a real-time dashboard of what’s happening across our assets and our owned media, who’s looking at the website, who’s interacting with content, how that content’s performing, and all the stats and analytics that go along with that. And we can break that down in various ways, by product, by business division, by account type and so on.”
Part seven, the final blog in this series, will cover the need to demonstrate value early and throughout the sales process.
Check out our Financial Markets Insights report on “Addressing the challenges of selling software and technology into the Financial Markets sector”