Using ABM to Optimize the Customer Journey in Financial Services

Finance and Fintech need trust. But what passes of as marketing is actually noise. ABM will help but not if you stay ignorant.

The way your buyer operates and makes decisions is hidden. The customer journey of your prospect, lead, potential buyer, or whatever you call them, is so unknown that you can only make guesses as to what is happening.

Is ABM the answer to uncovering hidden paths and optimizing for the journey? It very well could be, depending on the information you have. But the thing is, dark social and buyer psychology will always elude any scoring or formal system you have in place.

Especially in finance, where the stakes are always perceived to be higher than they are. Of course, there’s money involved – vast amounts of it. But does that mean fintech marketers stand idly by while the product does all the heavy lifting?

Absolutely not. Ciente believes that finance and fintech actually need their marketers more than ever. The industry has begun its upward ascent, and neo-banks are actually being considered legitimate alternatives to traditional banking.

The opportunity is right there, and the piece of the pie is huge. Look at Stripe; there’s a possibility here that it’s just the beginning. The trillion-dollar market cap could be pushed only if the industry understands and uncovers what its buyers want.

How does that start? It’s by asking whether ABM can be a tool to uncover the hidden aspects of the buyer’s journey. Let’s walk through it.

Why do fintech orgs need to invest in ABM?

For one, the tech world is saturated. AI tools like Lovable and other no-code solutions have made it easier for organizations to take their product to market. Speed to production has to be at least doubled by now. Imagine: a multitude of tools, and every organization vying for their buyers’ attention. So, who grabs it?

It’s the vendor who gains buyer trust. But this is a difficult step, as a startup, what makes you so different from Stripe or Revolut? Maybe that’s not your niche, and you have a product that is entirely new and has never been heard of.

Let’s take the extreme: your product saves buyers thousands and millions of dollars in cost. But let’s be honest, that app has a competitor too. And if it can’t prove the promise it’s making immediately, it will fail to the app that does. That’s why ABM helps marketing professionals change the game on two fronts:

1. ABM means knowing the account as well as the industry you’re in. This empowers you to understand the account’s core problems.
2. It helps you leverage this understanding by giving the accounts solutions exclusive to them.

For example, you are a neo-bank that safeguards people by securing their savings and giving them better interest rates. And you want to sell this to, say, an XYZ company for their employees. This is an excellent value prop; with your own capabilities as a neo-bank, you’re also providing security.

But can you identify the internal politics that avoid the change? No. Not unless you send a spy inside the organization. What drives the CEO or the CFO – who will be the drivers of this change? Why would they choose you and not the CFO’s roommate from college, who also has an excellent product? ABM will help you solidify your answer.

The Buying Committee

Marketers are in luck because of the buying committee. With ABM, you will understand:

• Who the decision makers are.
• What makes them tick?

Then, you position your messaging and sales initiatives such that they speak to every possible problem they might have and your solutions for it. Then, when the committee does realize you are the best solution, it will be challenging for any one party to negate you. They would need a solid reason not to onboard you unless they didn’t have a prior interest before, which, in many cases, is illegal.

ABM is a direct line into this. It treats your accounts’ differing viewpoints as leverage for getting them to say yes.

You get to cover each perspective at length. Yes, it is budget-intensive. But it is a strategy that compounds. All you have to do is make good on your promise. But there are challenges, and they are insane. Before you even think of optimizing for the customer journey, you need this information.

The challenges affecting ABM in fintech

Fintech markets face a complex challenge that will plague all their marketing efforts, including ABM: the fear of loss. Yes, as a marketer, you have heard that convenience in fintech helps buyers choose you over your competition, and that’s what you relayed to your product teams. But what if the buyers trust your competition more than you? They will overlook convenience. For example, a simple Google search revealed this:

This is a worst-case scenario for any buyer out there, and research like this dominates their mind. They will, in some form, ask you: “Why should we trust you when you can fail?”

Challenge 1: Budget Intensive

ABM is effective for startups and organizations that have their funds lined up. Being a fintech usually guarantees marketing funds, but a crucial aspect many marketing teams overlook is the CAC (customer acquisition cost), which can balloon very quickly.

The anecdotal wisdom here is that the CAC: CLV ratio should be 1:3; for every dollar you spend, three must be gained back.

But this changes from team to team – and since fintech, by logic, needs more touchpoints to generate trust, this could look very different for you. And ABM requires heavy market research, intelligence, committee-specific data points, strategies, and executional tools to create an actual account-based approach. That is why so many ABM approaches you try with certain agencies fail. They don’t tell you the nuances and costs behind it, nor do they take the actual approach.

Challenge 2: Lack of Conceptual Understanding

ABM is not very well understood. It is essentially multi-threading and unifying different perspectives to create a message. For example, imagine you are a fintech that processes cross-border payments at little to no forex charge – something like Wise. You may entice the CFO and CEO, but they make up only two-elevenths of the buying committee. What about the CTO? He has identified that integrating you into the stack could be problematic. He is questioning your:

1. Security features
2. Transfer protocols and customer safety
3. Increasing the surface area of cyberattacks and the breach of his customer’s data
4. Etc.

How will you answer these questions if you’re not on the committee? You may think that with ABM, you will influence him by targeting him with messaging. No, you are too late. You should have answered the questions before the first touch point. ABM starts before you touch the market by understanding the needs of each committee member. The product must answer their questions.

To answer the objections, the marketing team must:

1. Pick out major accounts.
2. Understand the problems of each member and find the common thread.
3. Integrate the thread into the product, or at least answer the question with what they have.

Yes, ABM informs product strategy. And that is not an easy pill to swallow.

Challenge 3: Trust as Currency

No matter how sophisticated your ABM program is, it cannot work without the product – this is a maxim. But it is a fallacy to think that your product can cover all the ground, right? That’s why it exists to solve a specific gap in the market. That is product 101. Understand your market and create a solution. Understand the customer and design the product.

Yes, the product creates trust by bridging this gap. Unfortunately, the buyer’s experience of constant remorse has made them wary of their own buying processes. Bummer, you weren’t even involved in this. And because of their own failure to choose the right solution, they see all solutions with a critical eye.

Their trust is a finite resource. And it cannot be gained by just ABM. It needs something personal. They want to feel acknowledged and secure. Why? Because when the world became VUCA, leaders were the first to realize just how delicate everything is. People lost businesses because banks didn’t bail them out. But fintech did – this is your play. ABM has to position your organization as a fail-safe when traditional methods don’t work. This is the framework with which most fintech organizations should operate.

Using ABM to Optimize the Customer Journey in Financial Services

Now, after this long-winded introduction and backstory, let’s dive into what you came here for. Though the hope is that you found some notion to challenge yourself. The customer journey is complicated, to say the least. They use physical and mental tools to verify your credibility – the so-called markers of trust: there’s mindshare, market share, market perception, brand name, etc. The question here is: why would you buy something and why? Your buyers are buying for the same reason as you; the only difference is the context, product, time, and price.

ABM as an Antidote to Hidden Journeys

ABM is not targeted advertising. No. If you think this, remove it from your strategy. And if any agency is selling you this, they are lying to you. ABM, if done right, is a data-driven strategy that should uncover insights about your high-value accounts. How is this done? So let’s assume two things:

1. Your buyer is well researched.
2. They are actively discussing similar solutions to yours and talking about you in the context of buying with their peers. Oof, that was a mouthful.

So what do you do? First, you understand their peers. This means that you cannot just target high-value accounts but also discover which peers the buying committees talk to. This is dark social – usually communities on Slack or Discord channels.

You probably won’t be able to enter these.

But you can identify connections of connections and assign probabilities. These probabilities will help you create a list of people who might know each other.

You should, if the budget permits, show similar advertising and messaging to these people. This helps your high-value accounts and their peers see your organization in an equal light. The main advantage that ABM provides is that the data identifies the buying committee’s professional circle and helps you penetrate it. This has two advantages, maybe more:

1. Creates positive mindshare.
2. Builds a pipeline that can be leveraged in the future.

ABM as Iterative Product Building

Once you run your ABM campaign, you will realize the true gap in your product. Your salespeople will receive feedback that will be a goldmine for the product team. And with ABM, you actually understand the specific problems of your high-value accounts. This can help you run diagnostics on your tool and give your product managers tangible data to work with.

This data will empower your teams to understand the micro-problems plaguing their product – is it security that is bothering the buyers, or is it the transfer rates or complexity in integration? Is the buyer afraid the product will break under certain thresholds? Can your product teams verify this and iterate around it? If not, what is the leverage that your product teams believe they have over the problem?

This will help you tailor your marketing messages, improve sales performance by anticipating future objections, and help product teams iterate at a very high speed. But the shift here is not as groundbreaking – this is just a return to marketing being a function that provides strategic insights based on buyer behavior; the only difference is the scale. It’s a granular approach to a timeless problem.

ABM for Navigating Internal Politics

Let’s borrow something from sales: the ability to contextualize. Ask any amazing sales rep you know, and you’ll understand that they use context as leverage. Okay, this is a bit tricky to understand, but basically, what we’re saying here is: let the person talk. Discover the leverage within their words.

ABM, by its nature, is hyper-focused.

Through the granular data collection from your campaigns and the conversations your sales reps have with different members of the committee, you will understand the internal relationships. This involves a few things:

1. Observing behavior based on some model.
2. Seeing if the model plays out in sales calls and how, eliminating what doesn’t work.
3. Mapping the relationships.
4. Listening to which competitors come up in the conversations and why.

This is based on one assumption: given enough time to talk long enough, people will start giving unwanted information.

This might hold true for all human beings except those trained not to do this.

This information contains leverage. And you can use it to understand what is happening internally. For example, why does the CFO push for a specific solution? It’s because you found out he was roommates with the guy. But what does the roommates’ solution have that you don’t?

The gap to explain is right there. And if the CFO can’t explain why he is choosing not to address that gap, he will look suspicious – something no C-level executive wants to be seen as: a shaky and compromised leader.

This is a simplified example, and there will be layers, but that is on you to find out.

ABM is the answer to “Why do we need marketing in fintech?”

Marketing as a function is going back to its roots as a strategic management system. It is people management and organizational growth.

But the noise has made everyone forget that. Now, marketing is eroding trust rather than building it. Why? Because it treats itself as a thing to be consumed and not a thing to drive decisions, which it historically was.

And finance needs it now more than ever.

The world is changing, labor is changing, and operations are changing – traditional banks might not be able to keep pace.

But don’t fall for cheap advice either. If you think everything here doesn’t align with what works for you, discard it.

No one knows your context, and the same goes for the buyer. What ABM does is it brings context to light and gives you leverage.

The usage of this strategy proves why marketing exists. It’s not to increase ROI, no. It is to dominate the market share.