Symbiotic Selling: The Future of Fintech B2B Sales

Good, Ian, thank you. Welcome to my head office here, down on the south coast, in Emsworth. A bit of a homecoming for you.

So welcome, and it's a pleasure to be here talking to you today.

Yeah, that's a really good question. And, by the way, it's milk and one sugar for his tea, if he does come to your house. Cheers. Well, the reason I put "AI-powered" is because, look, in my work, in my advisory capacity, I have to keep abreast of the industry trends. I have to keep abreast of what's impacting my clients now and in the future. And, of course, part of my advisory role to my clients is to give them some foresight, from a value proposition, go-to-market strategy point of view: what's changing, what's shifting. Of course, "AI-powered" means I use the necessary tools around me to do that. And I can give you one example of a tool that I use for that. It's a very powerful sales enablement engine, and it highlights buying-intent signals on clients, which will be a little bit of a segue into what we're going to come on to talking about. So why is that important? Well, it gives my client, who's selling a product or a service to a buyer, the clue that says, "There's somebody in the market showing intent to buy something that could be helpful." And in my world, that's building that bridge to say, "Someone's got a problem in the market, looking to buy something, the signals are there, I want to match my client with them, because they've got the solution, possibly, for that client's problem." So "AI-powered" in that sense.

So, book one. *Revenue Realism and Resilience* is a bit of a mouthful, but by now I should be able to tell you. *Revenue Realism and Resilience: The Sales Leader's Playbook for Fintechs and Scale-ups*, launched last year, written a year ago. And what I wanted to do there is really help people understand this shift that's going on, from a practical perspective. The shift being, there's a lot of denial across the founder network, I'm finding. There's a lot of lack of control, and there's almost like a panic. It's a controlled panic, but it's a panic. When I look back over my 30-year career in software, and in sales of software, and managing sales teams globally, and working with some of the largest enterprises in the world, tapping on the door of a big bank like JP Morgan, when I worked for a local company here in Emsworth, and it was a small startup back in the day, I was employee number four. We had no financial services clients. We had a bit of technology that was okay, but I had to go and basically build a financial services practice out of that. And eight years later, we'd built a very successful practice. I had some great people working for me, we had a raft of clients to die for, and we got acquired by TIBCO, a very large American organisation. And I reflect on some of the journey, some of the tips, some of the lessons that I learned along the way.

Yeah, of course they're not useless, those firms made lots of money being useful firms. I spent lots of time in wealth management, where technology firms have found CRM to be useless for wealth managers, because they're not reflecting how a wealth manager works, how the client of a wealth manager works. They're not recognising that there needs to be a different way of using a CRM. And quite often I go into a client and they roll their eyes when you talk about CRM, and we actually move that conversation into more of a client-life-cycle-management conversation. I had a client that was very strong in that. And, you know, they'd have what they call CRM Fridays, where the relationship managers, advisers would go to the pub, come back on a Friday afternoon after a couple of drinks, and do their CRM Friday, which is basically populating the CRM full of rubbish. No analytics, no real understanding of where the client is on their buying journey. So when I say the pipeline is often false, it's because it's not being qualified properly.

Yeah, I mean, leaders are in a tricky situation. I've dealt with companies, and I've heard of colleagues who've been given the remit of, "Build the sales team, expand the sales team, shake the sales team up," and then they go to HR, who say, "Well, this is a salary band within which you can recruit." Well, that's not enough to attract the best talent in the market, we're lowballing our talent exposure. So there are multiple issues and challenges there. But I think leaders, founders of firms, and I did a lot with fintechs, where there's great technology, great innovation, great people, I call it the founder's paradox. There's a lot of denial out there. There's a lot of, dare I say, arrogance. There's a lot of unknowns that they think they know.

Yeah, it's a really pertinent question, and a personal one of mine, because I run my own business. I've just had to politely decline to work with a client that I spent some time with, and we agreed a statement of work. The agreement I sent over, for my engagement model, came back with lots of markups, as if it was an employee role, not an advisory role. I had to politely decline, because they were restricting my ability to do business, they were putting the risk on me and wanting to get the majority of the reward. So I had to make a business decision to say, "I'm sorry, guys, it's not quite right. The right time, maybe, for you, you're fundraising; when you've raised the funds and you're ready, then we can get back to the table and talk again. But at the moment, it's too risky for me, and this is not a symbiotic relationship."

You've got to use data. You've got to use data. And the data comes from: where is the client in their buying cycle? How are we validating and qualifying our pipeline, our deal, on those scores, the six PPVVCC? What's the sales team saying to me that I need to think about? And are they in sync with the client's buying cycle? And data never lies. As a sales leader, and I've been in many a situation where we've been promised something that's never happened, or it's delayed, or it's been killed, the one learning point that will kill a deal for anybody is the skeptic. The skeptic on the client's side of the process, who generally is a risk-averse person, that wants to have their objections heard, their objections understood, and their objections answered. And there are certain characteristics and traits that skeptics have, but the most important thing you can do, from a salesperson's or founder's perspective, is get your sponsor to recognise there is a skeptic in their industry, in their business, in their company. They know who that skeptic is. They can go and find that person, and, collectively, together, you can work with that person to form a symbiotic, mutual-value relationship with that individual, who might have a political agenda. It might be a power-play agenda. It might be a personal agenda. It might be a "you've misunderstood the requirement" agenda. And I've heard so many times, so often, and most recently, people who have failed to close business because the skeptic killed the deal in the final hour. And they come from nowhere, you don't even know they exist. So qualify your sponsor, and ask the sponsor: who is that skeptic? How do we engage with them? What are their challenges and issues that we need to resolve? And if we can't get that skeptic onside, how do we neutralise them, or negate them?

Well, look, you're right, it's getting harder now, because normally you'd sit in a meeting room and they'd walk in, announced or invited. Now you're on a Teams call, trying to talk to the people on the client side, and you're looking at the names going, "I don't recognise that name." You're looking on LinkedIn, "Oh, that's the head of digital, I didn't know they were being involved. What's their angle?" So I was on a recent client call, perfect scenario worth reflecting on, where the CTO for the client side, as in the person we're trying to sell to, was on the call. Now, the sponsor we've been working with, who's very pro our proposition, very pro what my client can deliver, has a big problem to solve, this is a chief compliance officer. He'd assembled his team, and all the people we've spoken with, we've built value, we've built mutual trust, we've built symbiotic value. The CTO came online, and he absolutely ripped the call apart. Absolutely ripped the call apart.

Promises are easy to make, but they're hard to deliver against. And I've seen many a skeptic close and kill a deal, where promises are being made, "My team can build this." I've had one situation where a CIO, in a board meeting, put his career on the line, saying, "I, and my team, can build this," after nine months of me building the value and getting all of the other board members to agree to go with my client. The CIO put his career on the line in the board meeting, guess what happens? They went with the CIO. He failed to deliver. That particular well-known UK wealth management company then couldn't provide access to their customers' digital portal, and they had to pay their high-net-worth-individual clients three months' worth of fees back in compensation, because they weren't able to interact with their bank's digital portal, because it failed, because that IT team he was going to put his career on the line on failed to deliver. It hurt the company. So, wrong decision made, skeptic won in that situation.

Be professional, be polite, outline your reasons to feel aggrieved, but also keep a bridge open, to say, "Look, maybe the timing's not right now." And I always come back to this timing. The example I just gave, with the client I've just politely said "not right now" to, maybe, because the timing's not right for you, the engagement model isn't symbiotic. You get some funding, which you're going for; maybe the timing's better then, because then I can feel that my value's being recognised. You're investing in me, we're investing in each other, it's not a one-way street. So that has to be the model that I think everyone's now thinking about: how do we actually create mutual trust and value? Because, without that, it's just a transactional relationship, and the world's moved on. Transactions don't cure problems. Mutual value solves problems, because everyone's got their hat in the ring, everyone's invested in the right level of risk and reward. So there is definitely a new wave of buying behaviour, and a new wave of selling. It's gone from functional, "My database is quicker than your database," from the '80s, it's gone from diagnostic, "What's keeping you awake at night, what's making you feel worried about your end-of-year bonus, what's going wrong with the business, how do I help you, how do I get my solution to fit yours", it's now symbiotic. How do we work together to build a mutual-trust and mutual-value framework that we can all win from? That has to be the next wave of selling and buying.

Well, I mean, I always feel a little bit like an influencer, which I'm certainly not, I'm far too old for that, and I'm not on social media either. But I'm passionately, genuinely trying to help an industry here. I'm seeing the problems across the industry, right? And I was doing a bit of research for the book, so let me just

Because this is where the rubber hits the road, right? So, this is research that came out of Finextra Research, which is a respected, leading, independent newswire and information source for the fintech community, that you and I work in closely. 70% of technology projects fail to meet their objectives, often costing firms 300% more than their initial budgets. That's a big number, two big numbers there. So what's causing that? And this is reflecting on last year, '25 to '26. Globally, failed transformation costs are estimated at $2.3 trillion a year. $2.3 trillion. AI failures: financial institutions have invested over $100 billion in AI since 2020; 80% of these projects fail to generate significant ROI. Project write-offs: financial institutions frequently write off at least one major IT project a year, with an average loss of $12.5 million per project. Software waste: approximately 67% of investment banks waste over a million pounds of their annual software budget on underutilised or failed, unused solutions. Legacy system burden: banks are spending billions maintaining legacy, UK banks alone are set to spend £3.3 billion in 2026 to maintain outdated core banking systems.

But I think there is a way of doing that, and it's in book number two. And the FCA are a great example of this. The FCA, as a regulator, deserve a lot of credit, because they've really embraced technology, infrastructure, AI. I'm working with one of my clients who provides digital sandbox infrastructure. And that digital sandbox infrastructure, it's a core enabler to address that challenge you mentioned, which is: if we can test stuff collaboratively, whether it's vendor, or internal development, or a combination of the two, using synthetic data, using an emulation of our production environment, but in a safe, air-gapped way, and we can test it, and benchmark it, and compare it, and stretch it and push it and squash it, and we can get to a point where we know, safely, that this will deliver the innovation that it promises in six weeks, not in six months, because the test can be run in six weeks, not six months. If you can enable that infrastructure, which is there and now used by lots of big banks and insurers to do this, you're able to engage with the client, you're able to create symbiotic value in a safe environment, so that when you say, "We're now ready to go from test to production," we're confident it is going to work. It's not going to blow up in an employee's face, because we're training them on it in the test environment before it goes to production.

Well, 100%. And, again, in the current climate, there's protecting your own job, protecting your own career, protecting your own team. The more problems you've got to solve, the more valuable you are to your company, to your employer; the more people that work for you, the more important you are to your employer. And I had a call from a very panicked founder about six months ago, who was engaging with a very large, global, UK-headquartered bank. He said, "We've got some really good news, we've won the POC, we're in. But we've got some really bad news: we've got a big problem to solve. It's taken 18 months for us to go through that process with the bank, to get to the point where they want to select our technology. We've run out of money. We have no runway. We've got a big loan that we need to pay back, we've got a debt on the books. The bank checked our finances 18 months ago, and they started looking at us 18 months later, all of that money's gone, and we've sucked up most of that money working on this project for the bank. So what do I do? How do I operate? How do I function? How do I sign an agreement that I know we can't fulfil? Because, if I don't get an injection of cash into my business, I can't pay next month's payroll, and all of my team have to be made redundant." A real problem. I tried my best to help the guy, but, ultimately, it was a big problem to solve, and I'm not quite convinced they ever solved it. But the fact that it took the bank 18 months has killed his business. The bank's seen the symbiotic value in the solution, but in that process, it's killed his business. He's now looking at, "I need to get a cash injection, where do I get that from? And anybody that looks at my books, and looks at the situation, they're probably going to want to take more control of my business, that I've spent 20 years building. So I'm now in a very difficult position."

I mean, 18 months is a long time in technology, and in all walks of life. Well, I do know what happened at the end of that. In the end, the bank actually ended up becoming an investor. They had to take an investment, had to take equity. The skeptic in me says maybe that was their game plan anyway, they've got a bit of control. And, with things like DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, which is demanding that firms have better control and oversight of their supply chain, maybe having an investment in your supplier isn't a bad thing, because it bankrolls them further. You're able to then continue making that symbiotic-value relationship work, you maybe have development teams working together, product teams working together. But, again, going back to this digital sandbox: it's a fundamental piece of kit that you can all work collaboratively on, in a safe environment. And that wouldn't have taken that bank 18 months to fulfil that POC, they could have done it in 18 weeks, tops. So there is an enablement, an accelerated environment.

First, people that are curious. People that are working within a framework they trust and understand, which is simple but effective. People that ask lots of open questions. "What does good look like? What's important for you? What do you think I need out of this relationship? What's our common ground here? Where do we both succeed together?" And when I was a sales guy, I used to go into my clients and say, "Do you know what your buying process looks like?" And quite often they'd say, "No, what are you talking about? You're here to sell me stuff." So I'd actually get up, in the good old days of a whiteboard, and I'd go and write P-R-I-N-C-E, "PRINCE." "These are the six key stages of your buying cycle that you're involved in." And I had one guy, senior guy, COO at Barclays, literally nearly fell off his chair, went, "I've never seen that process before, but I get it, I understand what we're doing now. I know where I fit, I've got people feeding me information that I need to act upon, that trigger me in that process, and I'm then feeding people downstream from that process. But I can now see why this has taken so long."

Yeah, good question. I was talking to a sales leader just recently who, funny enough, we did a podcast, and we're now talking about how I can help her sales team. She's got 10 sales team members, and her comment was, "Well, 60% of them are demotivated, de-energised, banging their head against the window. 40% have come in, and they're young, they're enthusiastic, but I feel that we're not able to give them the right level of support they need to be successful." This is a payments service provider, cross-border PSP, quite a difficult industry, quite a commoditising industry. If you look at the technology life cycle, the innovation curve, from Geoffrey Moore, which is a big book that I've really used as my guiding light, technology innovation starts on a bell curve and ends on a bell curve. It goes through innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and then the laggards, that commoditise the technology, because that's just the nature of how technology evolves. So she wants support and help to re-energise and re-motivate her sales team. And when I talk to her about what's missing, methodology, framework, support. The CRM is over-complicated, over-engineered. Sales meetings tend to be conversations, not facts. "I don't have confidence that what I'm being told is forecastable, is forecastable." So, take the principles of what I've written about, what I advocate, what I consult and advise around: give people something they can look at, give people something where they can understand what I need to do next, to help me be successful, to get the best out of me. But, also, people are people, and they need support. So coaching, advising, get people in from the outside, going back to Be The Business, the analysis that UK firms don't get external advisers in. Get people in that know how this works, that can give a different view, a separate view, that can look at the deals you're working on and see the wood from the trees, because quite often you get so emotionally involved. And I've been in there, I've been in the weeds, you get lost. Get someone to look at the bigger picture: "Have you thought about that? Why don't you do this? Have you found this? Have you wondered what that means? Have you validated that?" Get facts on the table, remove the fiction, get the best out of people by supporting them, personally, professionally, and from a process perspective.

100%. It's my kids' fault, who are no longer kids, they're adults. We sat in the back of a car, we had a long journey for a sad reason, my mother had passed away, and we sat in the back of a car, driving up from the south coast, and, to positively distract my children from the sadness in the family, I said, "Right, guys, I'm ready to launch my own business. This is what I want to do, these are the things I want it to be known for, this is my kind of blueprint." And my two children, who were probably about six and eight then, were strapped into their car seats, they're now 23 and 21, just about, and they're both entrepreneurs running their own businesses. So one of them said, "It sounds to me like what you're trying to do is help your clients jump across lily pads. There are different lily pads that they're jumping across, and we're trying to help make the leap happen more easily and more quickly." It was their imagination. And if you've got a big problem, ask a six-year-old. So one of them came up with that, and I was like, "Okay, sounds pretty good." Then the other one came up with, "Well, it sounds like what frogs do, frogs make the sound of a ribbit." And I said, "Well, you've got to kiss lots of frogs, haven't you, to find the prince? Let's play around with that for a bit, let's just spend the next hour thinking about what that can mean." I was mentally diagnosing my business blueprint, and it kind of stuck.

My pleasure.

Yeah, it's on Amazon, and also on my website, you can get it from Amazon, or download a digital PDF. As I said to you before, I'm really, really passionate about helping people go through less pain, have more success, get the best out of themselves and their companies, and to help bridge that gap between the buyer and the seller, because I think that gap has to be bridged. We've seen the numbers, we've heard the numbers here, which are tragic, not a sign of success, and one that needs to be addressed very quickly and urgently. So the next book, hopefully, is out in June.

Happy to talk to you about what the principles are, happy to include any examples you've got that could be relevant and worth talking about. And, you know, my company logo is "make the leap happen." Let's make the leap happen together.