Financial Services Podcast

2023 Predictions & GTM Model For Banking

Dave Eddleman, principal at Alexander Group, shares three sales predictions and a go-to-customer model for the banking industry in 2023. These predictions stem from challenges Alexander Group is seeing from our research and client work.

More investment in sales enablement or revenue operations.
More client acquisition investment, a new job role definition
How much selling in financial services is going to be virtual

Host

Dave Eddleman Principal

Read the Transcript

Dave Eddleman: 2023 predictions in the go-to-market model for financial services. We’re going to have a little bit of a bias toward banks. But I think the things that we’ll talk about today sort of span across a number of sectors within financial services.

Announcer: It’s time for another episode of the Alexander Group Revenue Growth Model Podcast. Welcome and enjoy.

Dave Eddleman: Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining the podcast. I’m Dave Edelman with the Alexander Group. We’re going to talk today about the 2023 predictions and the go-to-market model for financial services. And we’re going to have a little bit of a bias toward banks. But I think the things we’ll talk about today sort of span across a number of sectors within financial services.

So, let me just start with the first one, and that is there’s going to be more investment in revenue operations. That’s a fancy word for what used to be called sales operations or sales ops. The general trend of competition and the general trend of digitization is really putting a lot of pressure on the go-to-market model. So, banks, for example, have good market share, they may be growing with significant percentages. However, they may be losing market share. So, I think again, there’s just a lot of drive, a lot of investment into being more commercially centric. Part of that is that we saw in our survey earlier this year, and we surveyed about 50 banks, 62% of them said the number one issue was sales force enablement.

And that goes to CRM adoption, better role definition, a lot of things that we see in sales ops. Again, the first prediction is more investment in sales enablement or revenue operations.

The second prediction goes along the same lines, and that is more client acquisition investment, a new job role definition. For example, the customer-facing role that’s very prevalent is relationship managers or RMs. So that role has been a legacy role that’s kind of been not exactly to commercially centric, kind of clunky in some ways. Now, I think they’re trying to reinvent themselves and not just do farming, upsell, cross-sell with specialists, but also going out in the marketplace and hunting and doing new client acquisition. So, the second prediction is whatever the customer-facing rules are in this space, there’s going to be more hunting involved, more training. And again, sort of as a result of this new investment in sales force enablement.

The third prediction, and we’ve only got three, is how much selling in financial services is going to be virtual. We had the pandemic, we had post-pandemic, and now I think the stickiness of how much time I can spend behind the camera and go through the selling motions with prospects and with clients is going to be set.

And we think it’s about 20-40% of time of their selling. Time can be virtual and it will be accepted by the banks and financial institutions as well as clients. So, the second or third follow up meeting and the selling motion may in fact be virtual, and that’s going to be okay. We’re back into full swing with in-person engagement, but I think there’s an acceptance there and I think some of the rules of engagement that we’re going to see in the go-to-market models will be around that fact. And many clients really like the virtual environment, because of the reduced cost and the perceived normality of having some of the interactions in a virtual environment.

So just to recap, more investment in sales ops and revenue ops, a greater emphasis on new client acquisition, on all customer-facing roles. And thirdly, how I go about that will be accepted to have 20-40% of that go-to-market interaction or customer interactions, be virtual. Appreciate your time for joining us today for the podcast. And again, Dave Edelman with the Alexander Group. If you’d like to learn more about what we do, please feel free to go to www.AlexanderGroup.com. Thank you.