Selling back-office innovation

The back office, though crucial to the maintenance and success of businesses, can also represent a significant cost that potentially distracts from a company’s core mission—especially when structured using inefficient technologies and processes.

According to research by The Insight Partners, the back-office workforce management market is currently worth $3.6 billion, and is expected to grow to $6.71 billion by 2028. Though fintechs and other tech-oriented sectors are intervening and jumping on this opporutnity, back office-oriented sales present a unique set of challenges.

Scope creep

A major temptation for fintechs serving the back office is to be “all things for all people,” serving out a whole suite of back-office functions beyond the initial defined scope. This was an initial concern to Shelby Austin, CEO and Co-Founder of Arteria AI. 

“I will say in the early days, we jumped at anything that looked and quacked like a duck, but we have gotten more seasoned in the way we think about the world,” Austin said. 

But Arteria’s banking customers have invited the startup to stay focused on its initial domain of expertise, Austin elaborated, with the idea of deepening AI-powered solutions within that domain. Saying “no” to one-off customizations may dismay customers occasionally, but helps make for a more coherent and reliable brand and product. 

Layoffs and restructuring

Introducing tech to an operations-intensive outfit can raise concerns about layoffs, with automation replacing manual tasks conducted by humans. Effective sales pitches address those concerns, while also explaining how automation can let overworked back-office teams do more with the same amount of resources, dedicating attention to more complex tasks.

To Austin, the current wave of tech layoffs also presents a challenge to back-office leaders. “My heart breaks with all the layoffs everywhere, but that means those jobs still have to get done,” she said. “Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost: How do we get that same effectiveness from our processes? We're going to need technology to do that.” 

Personas

Selling to back-office teams can involve a wide range of personas and points of contact. To Waseem Daher, CEO and Co-Founder of Pilot, the size of the company being served makes for wildly different levels of back-office expertise. Smaller companies may lack a back office-specific leader, and the point person (e.g. a founder) may lack back office-specific knowledge.

Slightly larger startups, meanwhile, may have a VP of Finance. Such a persona can be “quite sophisticated and have specific views about what they want and how they want it done,” Daher said. 

Sales pitches can emphasize automation or customization according to the persona, letting the versatility of back-office fintech solutions shine through.