It’s the Monday pipeline meeting. Marketing says it sent fifty leads last month, sales says none of them were worth a call and the case study marketing spent six weeks on still hasn’t been sent to a single prospect.
A lot of fintechs end up here. Fintech sales cycles are long, buying groups are big and both teams are under pressure to hit their own numbers, so it’s easy for each side to build its own plan and measure its own wins. What you’re left with is leads nobody follows up and content nobody sends.
Here’s how to get fintech sales and marketing working from one plan.
What is fintech sales?
Fintech sales is how a financial technology company turns interest into signed customers. In B2B fintech that usually means a long, consultative process with discovery calls, demos, security and compliance reviews, procurement and a business case the buyer can take to their board.
Marketing’s job is to bring the right people into that process and give sales what it needs to move them through it. When the two teams plan separately, both jobs get harder.
Why sales and marketing drift apart in fintech
The reasons are usually structural, which is why they show up across the industry:
- Marketing is measured on leads and sales is measured on revenue
- Sales cycles are long, so marketing rarely sees which leads went on to close
- Each team has its own idea of what a good lead looks like
- Content gets planned without input from the people who’d use it
- Tools and data sit in different places and don’t join up
Each of these is fixable and most of the fixes come down to agreeing things together and writing them down.
Agree who you’re selling to
Start with your ideal customer and agree it as one team. That means the type and size of firm, the markets you sell into, the problem you solve for them and the people involved in buying. A head of payments, a CTO, a compliance lead and a CFO all need something different from you. Both teams should know who they are.
For enterprise fintech, turn this into a named list of target accounts that sales and marketing share. Marketing can then focus its campaigns on the firms sales most wants to win.
Agree what a good lead looks like
Write down what makes a lead worth passing to sales, in plain words both teams understand. That might be the right type of firm, the right role and a clear sign of interest, such as a demo request or a second visit to your pricing or integration pages.
Then agree what happens next:
- How quickly sales follows up
- What sales does with leads that aren’t ready yet
- How rejected leads come back to marketing, with a reason
That last point matters most. Every rejected lead tells marketing something useful about targeting, messaging or timing.
Share one set of numbers
If marketing reports on leads and sales reports on revenue, each team can hit its target while the business misses its own. Pick a few measures you both own, such as pipeline created, win rate, deal size and how long deals take to close.
Review them together every month. It’s the simplest way to see which campaigns and content help deals move. It also gives both teams the same picture of what’s working. Our fintech marketing guide covers how this fits into a wider strategy.
Build content sales will use
Ask your sales team for the questions prospects ask most, the objections that stall deals and the moments when they wish they had something to send. That list is your content plan.
The pieces that tend to get used most in fintech sales:
- Case studies with real customers, real problems and real results
- Comparison guides for buyers weighing you against an alternative
- One pagers for each buyer in the group, such as IT, compliance and finance
- Answers to common security, data and compliance questions
- Follow up emails and LinkedIn messages your sales team can adapt
Case studies are often the piece that gets a deal over the line, so it’s worth getting them right. Here’s what a fintech case study must include. Make everything easy to find, with one shared folder and a short note on when to use each piece.
Plan campaigns together
Bring sales into campaign planning from the start. They know which accounts are close, which messages land on calls and which events their prospects go to. Marketing can warm up target accounts with content and ads before sales gets in touch, then time follow ups so prospects hear one consistent story.
LinkedIn is a good place to bring the two together. When salespeople share company content and post about the problems they solve, prospects see the same message from the brand and the person they’re speaking to.
Keep talking
Alignment fades when teams stop talking. A short catch up every week or two, where sales shares what they’re hearing and marketing shares what’s coming up, keeps both sides close. It also helps when marketers sit in on a few sales calls each month, because there’s no better source of content ideas than listening to buyers explain their problems in their own words.
Ready to get sales and marketing working from one plan?
Fintech Content writes the case studies, guides, sales enablement and thought leadership that fintech sales teams send to prospects, built around the questions and objections your sales team hears every day. If you want help planning it, our content strategy service is a good place to start.