How to Sell to Top Executives in the Financial Services Industry

by Sami Taylor December 18, 2024

2 Min. Read

We all like to take shortcuts sometimes.

The finaWhether it’s taking the quick route home, copy-pasting a message, or chucking a ready meal in the microwave, humans are wired to take the easy way. And sometimes, that’s ok!

That said, taking shortcuts isn’t always the route to success. And that’s certainly true when you’re selling to a specific industry. We’d love to say that using cookie-cutter strategies and processes works no matter who you’re selling to – but unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

That’s exactly why we’re writing this blog. If you’re a sales rep trying to target the financial services industry, you’re going to need a pretty specific approach to booking meetings and carrying an opportunity through to closing. And that’s exactly what we’re going to walk you through:

Deploying Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Sales Strategies
Leveraging Buyer Intent Data
Essential Tools for Selling to Financial Services Executives
Crafting the Right Message for Financial Services Executives

By the end of this blog post, you’ll know exactly how to speak the language of top executives in the financial services industry. Plus, you’ll be confident with all the technology, techniques and strategies to use to get them through the door.

Without further ado:

Deploying a Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Sales Strategies

Let’s talk about strategy first. These days, the gold standard is a multi-touch, multi-channel sales strategy.

If you’re wondering what on earth that is, don’t worry – it’s not that complicated. A multi-touch, multi-channel sales strategy basically means reaching out to prospects a number of times using a number of channels.

This might sound a bit vague, but there’s nothing random about a strategy like this. Each reachout and channel is carefully defined and planned to maximize results.

How long a reach-out process lasts will depend on your business, but it’s usually somewhere around the two-week mark before the prospect gets moved into a nurture funnel.

For example, you might send a LinkedIn connection request on day 1 along with a connection note. The 2nd day you might cold call and then follow up with an email. Day 3 might be another email and then a LinkedIn InMail, and so on and so forth.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the channels you might employ as a financial services sales rep selling to top industry executives.

Social Selling on LinkedIn

Social selling on LinkedIn is when you use LinkedIn to sell to your prospects. Simple! It’s not about just sending them a message and hoping for the best. Instead, it’s about building a genuine connection before you even give selling a try. A social selling process might look like:

Following your prospect
Interacting with their content
Connecting with them
Having a conversation in a comments section
Then, and only then, dropping them a message

This allows the sale to happen more naturally through the trust you’ve already built.

When you’re selling to top executives, you need to keep a few things in mind. They’re busy people, so any messages you send should be straight to the point. Top executives are also paid to be ‘big picture’ thinkers rather than ‘executors’ – so you want to show that you understand long-term strategic goals, and your product is going to help them achieve them.

The Financial Services industry has been around for a long time. If you’re going after a company that’s more on the corporate side, you’ll want to adjust your language. That doesn’t mean speaking like a Fifteenth-century monarch, but it does mean starting with ‘Dear’ rather than ‘Hey’ or signing off with ‘Best wishes’ rather than ‘Seeya!’. They’re small details, but they can make a huge difference to how you come across.

If your company is more on the modern side (a startup, for example) you can probably get away with something a little more casual – but don’t overdo it.

As always, the best approach to social selling is to keep things personal. The more special you can make your financial services executive feel, the better results you’re going to have.

Cold Emailing

You’re probably going to send more than a few cold emails as part of your multi-touch, multi-channel sales approach. Let’s take a look at a few best practices:

Subject lines: keep them short and to the point (remember, you’re selling to busy people) and have a description of what’s in the email. Try not to include too much punctuation or any numbers – they’re shown to lower open rates.

Personalization: think back to our copy-pasting analogy at the start of this blog post. If you copy-paste every cold email, you’re not going to get results. Instead, personalize several aspects (like first and company names, pain points and content you send over) to keep a nice balance between personalization and reaching out at scale.

Value-driven content: make sure every email delivers something of value to your prospect – this could be a whitepaper, a webinar invite or a case study, for example. This helps them understand from the start that your relationship is going to be one of value.

A quick note on follow-ups and timing: 44% of salespeople give up after a single follow-up attempt. Don’t be one of them: persistence is key. As for timing, we’d recommend not overthinking it toooo much – the important thing is that the email goes out – but use historical data to get a sense of when the best times for you are.

Cold Calling

Cold calling may strike fear into the heart of a new sales executive, but the seasoned sales exec sees it as an opportunity. After all, it’s an easy way to get immediate feedback and the most direct way to learn about your clients. Two ways to make it easier:

Research: whether you use LinkedIn or the good old-fashioned World Wide Web, do some research on the business you’re pitching so you’re not going in totally blind

Personalization: much like social selling and emailing, the more personalized you can make your call the better. Wondering how to personalize it? Funny you should ask – we’ve got some key topics for the financial services industry below:

Regulatory compliance and risk management
Data security and fraud prevention
Operational efficiency and cost reduction
Customer experience and personalization
AI and predictive analysis

Cross-reference ideas like these with your prospect’s LinkedIn activity, and you should find a topic that you know they’ll like to hear about.

Generally speaking, we’d recommend that your call follows a structure a bit like this:

Opening: introduce yourself and talk about the problem you want to solve
Value proposition: show how your product helps
Clarifying question: find out if they’re interested
Close: ask for a demo meeting

Worried about objections? Don’t be! They’re just an opportunity to find out more about your prospect. Practice active listening and approach from a place of empathy, and you’ll find answering them much, much easier.

Integrating Channels for Maximum Impact

Here’s how to put it all together.

The best combination of the above channels for you is going to depend on your product and who exactly you’re selling to. Use historical data to figure out exactly what works best for your business – and use testing and learning to narrow your options down.

Want an example of what a sequence might look like? Salesloft has a great example here. Its top tips:

Double touch on the first day to cement yourself firmly in your prospect’s mind
Give them a bit of space – you don’t want them to feel like you’re breathing down their neck (gross)

Leveraging Buyer Intent Data

Onto the next: using buyer intent data.

When you have good buyer intent data, you’ll have a good idea about when potential customers are considering a purchase. No, it doesn’t mean you’re a mind reader: it means that you’re keeping a close eye on their online behavior.

There are two types of buyer intent data:

First-party data: this is what you gain from direct prospect interactions. They might visit a pricing page on your site, or interact with you over email.

Third-party data: you get this from external sources. Think data providers or industry-specific platforms.

Incorporating Buyer Intent Data into Your Sales Strategy

Top executives in the financial services industry might indicate that they’re considering a purchase by:

Engaging with industry-specific content: if you see a prospect engaging with content on, say, regulatory compliance or risk management, and your tool helps with that particular area, you could be onto a winner.

Discussing recent changes in regulatory environment or company structure: keep an eye on the news. If something pops up about a new regulation, or maybe a new senior executive has joined your target company, take it as an opportunity to reach out and see how you can help.

Participation in industry events and forums: if your prospects attend industry conferences or webinars, or engage with LinkedIn groups or financial services forums, they might be looking for a solution to a pain point. Engaging with topics like regulatory technology, compliance or digital transformation are positive signs to look out for.

You can use these insights to tailor your outreach and messaging. For example, say there’s a big regulatory change that is going to change the way a lot of your prospects have to operate. Your product or service can help – so make this the crux of your reach-outs across social media, email and phone call.

You also want to be working closely with the marketing team to make sure you’re acting on the same signals. For example, if you’re reaching out to prospects about the above regulatory changes it makes sense for your marketing team to create some content around the matter too. This will help you truly position yourself as a financial services industry expert.

This might seem like a lot of extra work – and we get that you’re busy!- but it doesn’t have to be. Integrate your buyer intent data providers with your CRM systems, and set up alerts and notifications where possible to streamline your processes.

The more closely you can align your multi-channel strategy with up-to-the-minute buyer intent data, the better your results will be.

Essential Tools for Selling to Financial Services Executives

Next up, let’s look at several tools that are going to help you in your mission.

CRMs

When you’re selling at scale, you’re not going to get very far without a CRM. They help you manage relationships, track interactions and streamline communication.

When you’re selling to top executives in the financial services industry, you need to look out for the following features:

Advanced analytics and reporting: understanding data trends, client behavior and sales performance is critical in the financial services industry
Lead scoring and buyer intent tracking: this helps you to efficiently prioritize leads and focus on the prospects most likely to close
Workflow automation: simply put, there’s just no point spending time on tasks that a computer can do for you. Follow-up emails, task assignments and lead nurturing emails can – and should – be automated
Integration with industry-specific tools: based on your industry, we’re guessing you use tools for compliance, financial analysis and communication. Make sure your CRM integrates with these to avoid any pesky manual data transfers or complicated workflows.
Security and compliance: if you’re handling sensitive financial information, your security needs to be water-tight, and adhere to industry regulations too.

Outreach Tools

There are plenty of tools to help you on your outreach journey. You want to be looking for something that automates everything it can, without losing the all-important personalization. To help you reach out at scale, we like:

Outreach.io: helps you streamline your sales activities into one workflow

Lemlist: send personalized outreach content at scale

Salesloft: orchestrate your conversations – whether they’re through email, phone calls or something else – to nail each and every relationship.

Buyer Intent Tools

Before you can start using buyer intent data, you need buyer intent sources to help you gather it.

Third-party buyer intent data tools include: Bombora, TechTarget and G2. You can also look through social media platforms, and industry publications to find what you need.

Tip: make sure these can integrate with your CRM to make data transfer automatic – far easier for you, and less room for human error too.

Contact Data Enrichment Tools

You need to have contact data that’s super-accurate and up-to-date: remember, they’re busy people, and likely won’t have time for any mistakes you make as a result of inaccurate data.

In this day and age, when it comes to enrichment, you’re way behind if you’re using a single enrichment tool. Why? Because there is so much data available, you’re only accessing a small percentage of it if you use a single tool. Instead, use a waterfall enrichment tool that combines the top databases globally and searches all of them until you find the accurate contact details you were looking for. It’s simple… why would you use one tool when you can have access to many for the same price? (hint: test Surfe’s Waterfall Enrichment Technology to have your mind blown)

We’d also recommend having a good LinkedIn Chrome extension downloaded and synced between LinkedIn and your CRM – it scans your CRM for any out-of-date things like job change alerts or email addresses and updates them when necessary.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a Godsend when it comes to identifying and connecting with financial services executives. Why? Well, its powerful filtering capabilities allow you to quickly and easily filter a big list down to people who exactly match your ICP.

The more of a close a match it is, the higher your success rates will be. Perfect.

Surfe’s Lead List Builder

Having a B2B lead list builder will literally save you hours every week. Use advanced search capabilities to identify accounts and people that match your ICP. With Surfe, you can then discover b2b data and insights you wouldn’t find elsewhere and then segment your leads into lists that are enriched with this data, including their b2b contact information!

Crafting the Right Message for Financial Services Executives

So, how do we tie it all together and create the right message for financial services executives?

Understanding Their Pain Points and Priorities

Regulatory compliance and risk management: non-compliance can lead to significant financial penalties and reputational damage. Executives need to make sure the business can adapt to current regulations as well as respond to future ones.

Digital transformation: financial services is a competitive industry, and technologies like these need to improve efficiency to stay ahead. Innovation needs to be balanced with integrating new technologies into legacy systems.

Enhancing customer experience and retention: offering superior customer experience is often a key differentiator in such a competitive market. Top executives will be looking out for ways to do this and stay up-to-date.

Navigating economic uncertainty and market volatility: we all know how volatile the financial world can be. Top executives need to manage their organizations through change – and make sure they’re growing at the same time.

Speak about pain points like these, and industry trends, and you’ll stand out as a sales executive that really, really knows their stuff.

Value-Driven Communication

Next up, you need to show that you’re the answer to their prayers (or problems, at the very least). Make sure your value proposition is super clear: you want to focus on ROI, risk management and other critical factors in your pitch. Make sure you mention them early enough, to catch and hold your prospects’ attention.

Building Trust and Credibility

You can talk the talk – but you need to make sure your business can walk the walk, too. Show that you’re credible and that your business actually does what it says it will by sharing content, testimonials and industry knowledge.

Social proof and case studies are key – after all, people trust people – make sure these are in your outreach emails, offer to share them after calls, and place them all over your website. They’re your strongest advert – so use them!

Let’s Wrap It Up!

So there you have it – all the tools and techniques you need to reach out to top executives in the financial services industry.

Go forth and conquer. Oh, and don’t forget to pass this on to all your friends. After all, you don’t want to get lonely up on your podium.