Go-To Market Strategies that Deliver ROI for RegTechs (Part 2)
Map your customer‘s RegTech purchase journey to your sales cycle
It sounds obvious, but it’s important to know your sales cycle and its length to build realistic goals and KPIs into your Go To Market strategy.
This is where having a tight product-market fit makes a real difference to your purchase journey. If you understand exactly the pain point you solve, for exactly what buyer persona in exactly what size company, in which jurisdiction(s), you won’t waste time, effort and money chasing the wrong people.
For example, let’s say your ideal customers are Heads of Compliance at mid-size businesses operating across the EMEA region. Perhaps you’ve found it takes 18 months from first contact with you to purchase, with an average of twelve or more touchpoints including building relationships with at least three other internal influencers.
If that’s the case there’s no point setting a goal of growing 150% in six months using just three touchpoints. That’s not reality – it’s a recipe for frustration. Worse, it will demotivate your sales team.
Discovering the key moments in your existing sales cycle depends on having current, accurate data. If you have an internal demand generation team and/or a data team, you can find out where specific conversion points happen and which tactics are the most effective. Pull that data into your customer journey to highlight key moments your sales team should act on.
If you’re working with an external lead generation company you can ask how they track prospects across touchpoints and what their lead nurturing strategy looks like. A demand generation agency may even be able to benchmark the length of your sales cycle against other RegTech providers and offer pointers on how to streamline it, helping you grow faster.
Use tactics that resonate with RegTech buyers
To get the most return on investment from your marketing budget, it pays to know what works with RegTech buyers as opposed to other B2B buyers. After 17 years in the RegTech industry, we think we can share a few insights.
We’ve found that the human-to-human connection is most effective for selling to RegTech buyers. If a product claims to protect your business from risks like money laundering, financial crime or modern slavery it won’t be bought off the shelf. The stakes are so high that Heads of Compliance want to feel a high level of personal trust with their suppliers – most sales are closed face to face or over the phone.
Having said that there are lots of different tactics to build the know, like and trust factor and it’s worth considering the potential ROI of all of them when crafting your Go-To-Market strategy.
Must-know facts and figures on marketing statistics
Tactics that have worked for our RegTech clients over the last 17 years
Product Marketing
Creating product collateral and education opportunities such as product demos helps your prospects understand who you are and how you can help them. Typical product marketing materials include:
Product demos are particularly effective. The complex nature of compliance means buyers prefer to be shown, not told, how a particular RegTech can support their business. That’s why setting up appointments for product demos is often a KPI for sales teams – although it makes sense to ensure the demo is for the right level of buyer before committing time to it.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is favoured by many B2B marketers to generate leads – 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal.
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Given the breadth of stakeholders for compliance products, it may be valuable to invest in a content marketing programme that educates prospects outside the traditional compliance buyer persona, for example a white paper targeted at Board members. Once you’ve created a piece of digital content, it’s straightforward to translate into other languages if your RegTech business operates globally.
Remember that white papers, lead magnets and other content marketing tactics are successful but also now ubiquitous across both B2B and B2C industries. Today 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge.
To gain maximum return on any content investments you make, you should also invest in a demand generation strategy for that content. Demand generation tactics for content include paid GoogleAds or LinkedIn Ads or using an industry list (as long as it's compliant with all the relevant privacy laws).
Events Marketing
Events are another way you can get in front of the right people. You can position your RegTech brand through:
As explained earlier, most RegTech buyers value having face-to-face conversations with suppliers because the stakes for their businesses are so high. If you’ve been nurturing specific prospects through your sales cycle and you know they’ll be attending a certain event, set up meetings in advance. No-one likes feeling ‘ambushed’ , but if you’ve already built up a strong relationship it’s a great opportunity to meet in person, and even give a product demo if time allows.
Branding
Heritage corporate or RegTech brands with long histories have a distinct competitive advantage when going to market. Some of the know, like, trust factor that B2B sellers need has already been acquired. Gungho Marketing’s client Dow Jones enjoyed great success with a demand generation campaign, partly due to the strong brand presence they already had in the corporate market. You can read their case study here.
However, challenger brands can even the odds by having a laser focused value proposition that speaks directly to their customers’ pain points.
This is why ensuring you have tightly aligned your RegTech product to the market pays dividends. Listening to the market, or using a current, clean database to do your research helps you create a brand proposition that puts your RegTech front of mind.
Since partnering with Gungho, we’ve had over 100 meetings and seen a 20% increase in our opportunity pipeline.
Vice President of Marketing, AuthenticID
Part 3 - coming soon...