Financial Institutions: Stop Selling Digital Payments Software The “Old Way”

Financial institutions are releasing their own payment software solutions, but teams tasked with selling these new products aren’t equipped with the right tools to sell software successfully.
Clari’s platform gathers and organizes all sales and revenue-critical data to let enterprise payments teams close more deals and outperform their revenue targets.
With Clari, payments sellers can save 6 hours a week on manual data entry, frontline managers get clear insight into deals, and executives can accurately forecast expected revenue from their new payments software.

Many banks are in the middle of a digital shift in how they process enterprise payments. Some are even entering into the payments space altogether for the first time.

Historically, financial institutions relied on archaic methods for collecting payments (e.g., cashing a check). But now, they are hyper-focused on enhancing their customer experience by developing their own software solutions.

And for a good reason. The digital payments market is big and growing.

Gartner estimates that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between buyers and suppliers will occur in digital channels. Additionally, the global B2B payments market is projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2028, up from 900 billion in 2021 (Vintage Market Research).

Innovative financial services companies want to take advantage of this opportunity. By offering their own B2B payments solutions, they can own a bigger piece of the pie. So they have expanded their efforts around building and selling digital payments software.

But while banks are becoming digitally savvy in enterprise payments, their sales and operational resources supporting those efforts are being left in the dark ages:

Sales reps are stuck logging data into clunky CRM systems and “reporting the news” to their managers.
Sales managers are interrogating their reps and trying to understand the true state of their team’s pipeline.
Ops teams are attempting to use outdated CRM, spreadsheets, and BI tools to run their sales and forecasting processes.
Executives have no way to quickly and accurately know if they’ll meet, beat, or miss revenue targets.

Financial services firms are missing out due to lost revenue

It’s a mess that has serious material ramifications for financial services firms. They are wasting time on manual data entry, experiencing poor data quality, deals are slipping, sales cycles are becoming unpredictable, and they are witnessing customer/client churn. All of this leads to revenue leak.

Revenue leak refers to revenue that an organization has earned or counted on earning but has not collected. This can be due to various factors, such as deal slippage, inaccurate billing, bad data, manual processes prone to human error, or unbilled services or products.

The impact?

Clari Labs estimates that 14.9% of a company’s revenue is lost due to revenue leak.
BCG estimates $2.1T in economic value is destroyed each year by revenue leak.
For every $1 of revenue leak a company loses $9 in equity value.

As more financial institutions look to sell software, how can they stop their enterprise payments initiative from becoming their number one source of revenue leak?

Three immediate actions to stop revenue leak

Financial institutions can take several actions to stop from losing revenue now and prevent future leak:

Automate data capture. Using a tool to capture deal data automatically is a key step toward ensuring accuracy. A Revenue Platform like Clari, for example, can pull data from a variety of sources, including email, calendars, CRM, and more, creating that shared source of truth that is up to date at all times.
Ensure data transparency and leverage AI insights. Sales and revenue teams should regularly review deals in their pipeline to prevent deal slippage, looking for key health signals. Clari, for example, ensures accuracy, transparency, and accessibility by automatically capturing data from a variety of sources (like CRM, email, Outlook, and more) and presenting it in a single source of truth that everyone within the organization can view. Using sophisticated AI and machine learning, it also can analyze current and historical data to produce actionable insights for teams. Clari’s CRM Score, for instance, can help reps quickly spot deals at risk of slipping by ranking deals and highlighting risky ones in red, thereby providing opportunities to course-correct to protect revenue.
Streamline communication and improve handoffs. The entire revenue team needs to work together to move a prospect along the sales funnel. This requires excellent communication and seamless collaboration. Everyone from marketing to sales to customer success needs to be on the same page, looking at the same information. Automation helps ensure that deal information is accurately updated in real time. Tools that gather this information and present it in a single, unified format across teams are critical for promoting effective communication and collaboration.

Clari aligns your revenue organization to stop revenue leak

As financial institutions look to accelerate growth from their new enterprise payment software, teams should be equipped with the right tools to meet or exceed revenue targets.

Clari’s market-leading Revenue Platform was purpose-built to stop revenue leak and help companies achieve revenue precision.

“Clari helps align the revenue organization with forecasting. It’s become our single source of truth for pipeline and commits, upside, used by account executives and sales leaders. We use analytics to gain greater insight into possible outcomes and have also rolled out Clari Align to our biggest sales teams to standardize how we communicate about deal progression internally and with the customer.” – Global Sales Operations leader for a publicly traded financial services technology company.

Clari liberates teams from having to manually enter data into CRM by automatically capturing all sales and activity data for them. With cleaner data and one view to see all deals, managers can up-level their conversations with reps to spot pipeline risk and strategize how to get deals across the finish line.

For executives, they’ll have more confidence in their forecast—knowing if they will meet, beat or miss their revenue targets for their new enterprise payment software.

The result is more alignment across the revenue organization and predictable revenue growth for innovative financial services companies. Sign up for a demo to see Clari in action.

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Does your digital payments team have the tools they need to succeed? Why or why not? Shoot me a note and let me know your thoughts! wgriffin@clari.com | LinkedIn