Sector
Account-Based Marketing For Fintech And Financial Services
You know the firms that matter in your market. The banks, insurers, payments businesses, asset managers and lenders worth winning form a defined account universe, and your sales director may know many of them already.
What is often missing is the intelligence beneath each account: the real buying group, commercial priorities, approval process and timing of incumbent contracts. myGTMplan puts that into one shared plan that sales and marketing can work from.
Why It Is Harder In Financial Services
Your market is a list, not a funnel. A finite, named market changes the maths entirely. Lead volume tells you very little when the whole opportunity fits in one spreadsheet, and covering every name matters more than conversion on any single one.
Compliance sits inside the buying committee. Under the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act, banks, insurers and investment firms have to keep a register of their technology provider contracts and run formal due diligence on each one. The UK has its own regime for critical third parties. The effect for anyone selling in is the same: your sponsor can want you and still not be able to buy you.
The evaluation happens before you know it exists. Gartner reports that 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free experience, and McKinsey found buyers using an average of ten channels across a single purchase. Your documentation, your certifications and your incident history are doing the selling long before anyone books a call.
One to one alone will not cover the market. McKinsey found genuine one to one personalisation running in 20% of market leaders and 5% of laggards, so even among the best it is rare. Most firms manage it for the handful of accounts a good salesperson carries personally, then have nothing for everyone else.
What Your Plan Contains
Illustrative example, not client data.
The ABM Strategy page.
Your targets by year and by month, the institutions you are selling to, the people who decide including risk and procurement, your conversion rates and the headcount behind the number. On a countable market the maths is unforgiving in a useful way. If sixty institutions qualify and you need eight wins, the plan shows you the conversion rate that implies and whether your team can carry it.
The ABM Playbook page.
How an account moves from a name on a list to a signed contract across eight stages, with an owner and one measure to watch at each. Built around the two places these deals die: the security and risk review that stalls after the sponsor has said yes, and the pilot that never converts into production.
The guidance to run it.
A full presentation behind the two pages, covering how to choose each tactic and put it to work.
Your Three Tiers, Set For Financial Services
One to one.
The institutions where a single mandate changes your year, or where you are protecting revenue that would take years to replace.
One to few.
You group accounts sharing a real situation: the same regulatory deadline, the same core platform, the same licence type, the same renewal window. One proposition serves the group, adjusted lightly for each.
One to many, run programmatically.
The mid-tier and the long tail, meaning smaller institutions, brokers and intermediaries where individual deals are modest but the total is not. You score them and follow them by account.
Your integrators get their own tier.
Consultancies, core providers and systems integrators sit between you and the institution, and they shape more shortlists than most fintechs plan for.
How the work splits is settled in the workshop, against cycle length and how concentrated your revenue already is.
How It Runs
The research comes first. Accounts are scored, the market sized, and the real buying committees mapped inside the institutions you named, before anyone meets. Then comes the Insight Workshop, where your sales and marketing leads build the strategy page with that research in front of them. The Solutions Workshop settles the playbook, the tier split and the stage measures.
The research is also where you find out that a named target signed a three year deal with your competitor last quarter, which is worth knowing before you build a campaign for them.
Where AI Does The Work
AI does the research and the first drafts. Mapping a committee that runs from the business sponsor through risk, compliance, information security and procurement, then tracking regulatory deadlines, leadership changes and contract renewals across a named market, is work nobody has time to do by hand. McKinsey found market leaders twice as likely as laggards to have adopted generative AI, 44% against 22%. The judgement stays with your team, and with someone who has trained more than 400 enterprise marketers to make these calls.
Questions And Answers
Q. Our sales take a year. The board wants results this quarter.
A. The plan will not make the sale happen any faster. What it does is show where each account has got to, so a twelve month sale becomes something you can predict rather than something you hope for.
The strategy page sets targets month by month, so the board can see progress long before the money arrives.
Q. We only have about sixty realistic targets. Is that too few?
A. It is close to ideal. This way of working was designed for exactly that shape of market: enough companies to sort into groups by how much attention each deserves, few enough that none of them get missed.
Q. We tried this before and it stalled in the security review.
A. That is not a marketing problem. It is a plan that stopped at the person who wanted to buy.
Risk, compliance and procurement each get their own step in the playbook, with someone responsible for it and the evidence prepared ahead of time. The paperwork is ready before the review starts, rather than being pulled together in a hurry afterwards.
Selling Into A Different Sector?
The method is the same. The buying committee, the triggers and the length of the cycle are not.
One plan covering your whole market, across all three tiers.
Let's Talk
Bring your numbers and your account list. One conversation will tell you whether myGTMplan fits.
Patrick Rea FCIM
CIM Course Director for Account-Based Marketing
Prefer to write directly? Email is just as welcome as the form.